The early 2000s were an in-between time. On one hand, the last vestiges of pre-modern India were still alive, and on the other, we were rapidly hurtling towards a globalised, modernised 21st-century India. Everything was changing — from how people spoke to what they wore and how they lived.

I remember going to my Mama-bari — my mother's ancestral home in rural Bengal — in the early 2000s, and being surprised by how different everything was from Kolkata, where I grew up. My grandfather's home in Maidhara, an agricultural village in the Bankura district, still looked like the 'gram-bangla' or pastoral Bengal I'd read about in my Bengali textbooks in school, in the poems of Rabindranath Tagore and Jasimuddin. The streets were still narrow and unpaved, older women still wore sarees in the old-fashioned way — without a blouse or a chemise — and everywhere I looked, there were jhurri, or bamboo baskets lying about.

Bamboo craft, or the tradition of making utilitarian everyday-use objects out of bamboo is an ancient handcraft tradition of rural Bengal. Bamboo grows abundantly across much of India, and the tribes and tribal communities use it to make everything from bows and arrows for hunting small birds and animals for food, to making woven containers to keep, carry, and store food and goods. Even in the early 2000s, bamboo baskets, containers, and furniture were as ubiquitous as salt in Bengali households.

In his latest collaborative edit, Kolkata-based creative director Prasenjit Das Rishabh turns his lens on Bengal's bamboo craft tradition rooted in the region's tribal culture and traditions. The work was inspired by his grandmother's childhood memories — how she used to use eco-friendly and sustainable bamboo products as recently as the 1990s, and how she has had to depend on mostly plastic products since the 2000s.

Like Das points out in his statement, bamboo craft has a huge commercial potential as an eco-friendly, sustainable, lightweight and relatively cheap alternative to plastic products as we enter an age of increasing environmental precarity. Despite this huge potential, abundance of both raw bamboo and skilled craftspersons in Bengal and the North-East, however, the demand for bamboo products in the national and international markets is quite low.

At a time when the world is grappling with the harsh realities of forever chemicals and micro-plastic pollution in everything from water to food, Bengal's dwindling bamboo craft tradition should be preserved and promoted as a viable alternative to plastic, and as climate-conscious consumers, we must lead the way.

Follow Prasenjit Das Rishabh here.

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