Abstract Scholarship on development in Nehru's India, and US participation in these projects, has focused largely on agriculture and the emergence of the Green Revolution, population control, or on various schemes for village uplift. Nehruvian-era interest in “traditional” handicrafts has been largely ignored, positioned as, either a concession to Gandhian cottage industry, or as an effort to delineate the ancient roots of the new nation. Yet, handicrafts were also an important realm of employment and were seen as valuable export for India in the 1950s and early 1960s. Unlike agriculture, handicraft development offered a realm where women actors could carve out significant roles. This essay focuses on the Indo-American alliances that built the Central Cottage Industries Emporium in New Delhi, in a centre of a global handicraft trade.

Keywords: development, handicraft, India, Kamaladevi, Rockefeller, women

In the first decade after independence, the Government of India issued two postage stamps depicting subjects, which, though separated geographically by merely 75 miles in West Bengal, seemed at first look to embody alternative visions of postcolonial India. The first stamp, featuring the first fertilizer factory built by the Indian government at Sindri, stood clearly as a tribute to industrialization and the Nehruvian state's commitment to rapid economic development. The second celebrated the “Bankura horse,” a terracotta sculpture produced by potters of Panchmura village of West Bengal’s, Bankura district for over 300 hundred years (see Figure 10.1). In the early 1950s, renowned independence activist, feminist, social reformer, and handicrafts advocate Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay “discovered” the Bankura horses while researching crafts and publicized it as an embodiment of India's ancient and enduring tradition of artistry and craftsmanship. Yet, even though the horse entered the new National Craft Museum in New Delhi, versions of it—sometimes recreated in brass instead of clay—appeared for sale at the Central Cottage Industries Emporium in the heart of New Delhi's premier shopping district. In the early 1950s, Kamaladevi's organization, the Indian Cooperative Union (ICU), reinvented the government-owned handicrafts and textiles emporium on Connaught Place as India's largest department store, a central site for Indo-American cultural exchanges, and a critical depot for the export of Indian handicrafts to foreign markets, especially the United States. Wildly popular with customers, the Bankura horse became the store's official logo, instantly recognizable and legible to thousands of elite Indians and international tourists.