Rebranding “Made in India” through Cultural Sustainability : Exploring and Expanding Indian Perspectives

This exploratory study is a first attempt to translate the Indian cultural context from a socio-cultural, and legal perspective by identifying the values attributed to Indian textile craftsmanship by Indian textile and fashion stakeholders, and how their perspective is influenced by the global recognition and perception of Indian textile crafts and connotation of “Made in India”. At the same time the study investigates the meaning of “sustainability” in the Indian cultural context, in relation to textile craftsmanship, and how this relates to the Western concept of “sustainability”. Through field research in conjunction with a series of in-depth unstructured interviews, this study reveals that Cultural Sustainability is the dominating narrative in the Indian cultural context due to the prevalence of culturally embedded sustainability practices and the role of textile craftsmanship in sustaining livelihood, being a unique exercise of positioning Indian textile craftsmanship within a framework of cultural heritage as a valuable source of knowledge for sustainable practices in the fashion and textile industry. Unique about this study are the India-centric approach combined with the ethnicity of the subjects interviewed - who are, without exception, Indian nationals, whose work, voice and reputation are shaping India's contemporary textile craft -sustainability narrative (being referred to as the “Indian textiles and fashion elite”) and the framing of traditional craftsmanship from a legal perspective, introducing the notion of legal protection of traditional textile knowledge and traditional cultural expressions