Dominant social-science concepts shape discourse on arts and crafts in India today while often limiting how practitioners and communities are understood. Emerging critiques from digital platforms, legal arenas, NGOs, and social media challenge these conceptual frameworks. 

NGO-led research and revival efforts must respond to on-ground realities, requiring reflexive methods. This entails prioritising existing knowledge, its network of relationships and community aspirations over inherited social science definitions, while clearly recognising our outsider positions. This talk outlines how our organisation engages with these tensions, documenting the limits of established concepts and articulating alternative approaches to understanding memory, performance, and anchored innovation within living craft and performance traditions.

Dr Sushruti Santhanam is a historian, researcher and practitioner whose work bridges academic inquiry, community engagement, and Carnatic music. With training in Sociology, Journalism, Cultural Anthropology, and a PhD in History, she has over two decades of ethnographic experience with artist and artisan communities across 5 states in India. Her research reshapes an understanding of tradition in contemporary arts and crafts.

She has published, and presented her work internationally and has been a visiting faculty at the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, SPPU Pune and a cohort at the Design Thinking and Innovation course at IIT Delhi. As founder-director of Dakshina Dvaraka Foundation, she leads initiatives in archiving, craft revival, and practitioner–scholar dialogue. She currently guides a cultural-memory and craft revitalisation project with the Bugun community in western Arunachal Pradesh.

Talk is Mandatory for SOCL 201/POLT 201 and  ARTS 201/SOCL 223