Nuapada: If you are an art and craft enthusiast and cannot help visiting art villages, Khudapej village in this district should rank high in your bucket list of things. It will offer you a splendid opportunity to see womenfolk making attractive and colourful artworks using unpeeled rice grains.
This village can be reached by road after travelling seven kilometers from Khariar on Boden road. As one enters this sleepy and nondescript village, farming lands interspersed with scarecrows can be seen welcoming the guests.
The population of this village is about two thousand or so. While the males engage themselves in cultivation, womenfolk run the houses.
Another striking feature of most of these women is that they make best use of leisure time, whatever they get from their daily chores. Making crafts using unpeeled rice grains is their favourite pass time which sometimes proves grist to their mills.
The villagers have a beautiful tradition. Out of the total harvested paddy, a specific amount of paddy is kept as seeds, a portion is stored to be used as food, a portion is earmarked to be sold away and another small part is kept aside for giving shape to their imagination.
They first separate the best kind of grains best for making crafts. Then they colour them differently — red, green and pink — to be precise. Then their tender hands go on making beautiful artifacts, including different idols from Hindu pantheon, flowers and articles used at home.
When these articles are taken to markets or fairs, they immediately catch the fancy of visitors who buy them to decorate their homes.
However, all is not well. These artisans are not happy.
According to them, their articles these days do not fetch the money they should, especially when compared to the man-hours employed to make them.
“There is no proper market facility for our products. Hence we are forced to take our products to local markets where we hardly get people who can value art,” some women rue while adding, “This is the reason our products are selling at a far lower price.”
“In past years, we used to have ‘Maraguda Utsav’. Our products would get us thousands there. But that festival has been stopped due to reasons best known to the organisers. But it is none else than us who are bearing the brunt of it. Our income, even though once in a year, is gone,” they say.
They go on to highlight the administrative apathy and say, “We have not received any training to add value to our products. The district administration is yet to come to us with any programme as its counterparts in other states do to train their craftsmen survive in this competitive market.”
“If the administration takes steps for our training and to create a market base for our products, that time will not be far when our art would be the identity of the district,” said some women in a voice reflecting their confidence in their craft.
The male counterparts of these women expressed unwavering support for their women and pointed how they have managed to keep their art going despite several odds.
They also requested for administrative intervention while pointing out that these women are not trained on their craft. A bit of government push can surely change things for better – for the art, the artisans, the trade and the tourism sector of the state.