People Tree 1990 to 2021
What started as a lark became a lifetime’s journey
In New Delhi’s old and famous Connaught Circle, during the early summer of 1990, a small group of designers, artists and friends managed, with the help of a few fortunate coincidences, to set up a studio-shop which was remarkably free from the impositions and demands of (heartless) markets and (artless) clients. The ideas and experimentations that followed were the seed that grew to become People Tree, an evolving collective of artists, designers and artisans. We took pride in our reputation as a small independent business which combined a sense of social purpose and ecological responsibility with the spirit of collective creativity. This vision guided all aspects of our work as an art, design, production and retail space.
Ours was a beautiful sheltering tree, and it attracted many kinds of colourful creatures: Painter monkeys, Bejewelled tree snakes, Colourful social butterflies, Marxist squirrels, Queen bees, Customer bats, Worker ants, Tailor birds, Intellectual chameleons and Common babblers. Some ate the fruit, others contributed their droppings. At the end of the day, it always worked out, the cash box neither overflowed nor remained empty, and the tree flourished. Its fragrance spread, and more creatures were drawn to it…
Delhi and Goa
Parallel lines that were always meant to converge in our hearts
Selling Hand-painted Tee-shirts at the flea markets in Goa was a way of funding our holidays. We would take a slow train from Delhi, eventually boarding a bus at Vasco and after a couple of bus and ferry rides make it to the village of Arambol. Landing there, we would rent a cleanroom, drop our bags and head off straightaway for a swim! There were little home-run shacks and restaurants serving breakfasts ofbhaji-paos and pancakes. Lunches were invariably fish thalis. Or fish that we got from the fishermen’s nets, and then brought home to fry on a kerosene stove. We learnt the technique of drawing water up from wells without soiling the rope, and mastered the art of using pig toilets!
Everyday we painted Tee-shirts. Every week, we would pack up our wares and head to the Wednesday flea market to sell.
Through those years of extended Goa trips, we fell deeply in love with the Goa way of life. A life of abundance wrapped in simplicity and honest work. We discovered not just the beaches but also Goa’s villages, towns and cities: the Mapusa market, the inland backwaters and mangrove lined khazans of Aldona… One could also wax eloquent about the many very special people we met and befriended, but that’s another story.
Love in the time of Structural Adjustment
Love in the time of Structural Adjustment
Meanwhile, as People Tree grew, more and more freelance artists began to market their painted Tee-Shirts through our space. Students and young people were attracted to these, but could not always afford to buy hand-painted originals. Artists at our in-house studio started to look at small-scale production methods that were neither mass-produced nor one-offs. We began experimenting first with stencil prints and screen prints. Delhi, a hub of textile export, has several informal markets where one can access export surplus and grey market goods. We started scouring them to source smaller quantities of raw materials and connect with local printers. Our enduring love affair with a variety of batch production methods had begun!
Studio Thanda Garam
Blowing hot and cold in our own production house
In 1997 we decided to rent a space for a People Tree store on Baga Road. At that time there were not many stores selling unique T-shirts and hand-crafted products in Goa, outside some of the interesting things available at the flea markets.
Encouraged by friends like Claude and Norma Alvares of Goa Foundation & Other India Bookstore in Mapusa, we started to stock books (covers of some of which were designed by us) at People Tree stores both in Delhi and Goa.
By now we had a home in Corjuem, and soon found ourselves in the midst of the diverse and somewhat challenging ecosystem of an isolated old Goan village house in the monsoons. The house was (aptly) named ‘Blessings’, and we are still counting them 30 years later. With a little re-furbishing, the outhouse became a sampling and production space, and Studio Thanda Garam was born.
Here we produced our own screens, stencils, cold (thanda) and hot (garam) dyes for batik and tie-dye fabrics. We were also excited by our ability to combine these techniques, since everything was happening under one roof. Having our own studio in Goa also meant that we could produce designs that were inspired by local themes and motifs exclusively for our Baga outlet.
Outside the (paint) Box I
A world of flowers, mud resists and roots
There is a studio in a village called Kaladera in Rajasthan’s Jaipur district. Kaladera is surrounded by scrubland and desert. Acacia and Neem trees, Mesquite and Jujube Ber bushes,old stone havelis and modern marble houses make up this oasis in the desert. Monkeys, parakeets and peacocks abound. Camels are used to transport bales of cloth in this place inhabited primarily by Chhipas, a community of traditional block-printers.
“Studio Chaubundi is a place where one can translate into reality all one’s dreams about patterns and colours” said its owner and dyeing maestro Raghunath Nama to us. “An ancient art is practiced here. Wood blocks are our brushes, and minerals and plants make our colours.”
A spark of creativity was lit when three entities: People Tree, Studio Chaubundi and Bindaas Unlimited united to experiment with small editions of unique natural dyed, block printed Tee shirts for the first time in the year 1993. The idea was to reinvent this traditional art with a contemporary voice. The first batch came out so well, and we got along so well with each other, that it kickstarted a mini design revolution in hand-block printing with natural dyes.
Raghunathji was our guru, and Bindaas Unlimited our design and production partners. We continued working together for twenty years till Raghunath the great experimenter himself passed on, and later People Tree also came to an end. Yet, the flag continues to fly, with the next generation taking on the mantle.
Outside the (paint) Box II
The radical new pattern of Kaladera
The artisans of Kaladera are noted for their expertise with a unique form of mud-resist called Dabu. Applying two rounds of Dabu with two rounds of dyeing produces a brilliant water colour like effect. We created a series of new Dabu blocks specifically to exploit this effect.
Traditional block designs and patterns, mostly derived from nature, have been honed and perfected over years. Smoothly interlocking patterns that could be printed over long yardages of fabric was the main objective of these designs.
We asked why not innovate beyond these restrictions in light of the fact that the advent of commercial screen printing, (which can reproduce continuous patterns faster and cheaper) had already put skilled hand-block printers out of business.
We asked why not use hand-blocks in ways that screen printing could not match—such as deliberately spacing individual blocks in free layouts, somewhat like the frames of a comic book page to create stories rather than patterns on Tee-shirts. This was initially seen as somewhat blasphemous by the printers.
But Raghunath said “Why not?”, and came up with many ideas for new block designs that would be better suited to this way of working. Once the printers began to see and relate to the stories that emerged, it began to make sense, and it made for many exciting collaborative designs.
