Helena Perheentupa and the Labor of Crafts at Jawaja, India

The Jawaja Rural University Project began in the mid-1970s as an experimental program to encourage economic development and cooperative formation in a rural western Indian region called Jawaja, located in the state of Rajasthan. The project, still in operation today, was helmed by officials from two foremost educational institutions based in urban Ahmedabad: the National Institute of Design (NID) and Indian Institute of Management (IIM). Among other things, villagers at Jawaja were taught how to manufacture and market textiles and leather goods for domestic and foreign consumption. In this paper, I focus on Helena Perheentupa (1929–2019), a Finnish textile designer hired as a faculty member at NID in 1968, and on her work at Jawaja as a teacher of handloom weaving. I propose that Helena’s Jawaja rug and carpet designs resonated with mid-twentieth-century Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, while also drawing vitality from her emotional and psychological position as a working woman on foreign soil. Helena's labor at Jawaja not only invokes formal overlaps between the past and the present through the design of handloom textiles, but also illuminates the tensions involved in being both an insider and outsider amidst rural craftspeople and urban professionals. Recognizing that design intervention projects, particularly in Third World and postcolonial contexts, are often characterized by power asymmetries between designers/artists and craftspeople/producers, I stress instead that the physical and emotional labor of agents such as Helena, in their roles as designers, managers, and mediators, ultimately suggests how interpretations of design interventions stand enhanced through individuated narratives.