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Fashion designer Uma Prajapati was sifting via emails at her workplace desk one solar-streaked afternoon in 2005, when a specific notice caught her eye. It was from a younger lady in Mumbai, India, who described her struggles with melancholy. At her lowest, she’d determined to commit suicide. The letter author defined that as she was leaving her workplace for the final time, her eyes fell on a small scrap of a doll hooked up to a noticeboard. She paused to learn the tag that accompanied it. The doll, it stated, had been handmade by ladies from fishing communities who had been rebuilding their lives after having misplaced the whole lot in the course of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In her letter, the girl defined that she was so struck by the sorrow and struggling that these ladies had endured that it helped put her personal worries in perspective. “My life belongs to this little doll,” she wrote.
Prajapati was immensely touched by the notice, however she wasn’t shocked. The diminutive doll often known as Tsunamika, along with her ponytailed hair and brightly coloured frock, had been objective constructed as an antidote to despair. By then, the initiative to create and distribute Tsunamikas had unexpectedly swelled from one thing Prajapati had devised on the spur of the second to assist ladies fight grief to one thing of a social motion.
It all started on a morning ridden with tragedy. The tsunami, one of many deadliest in historical past, had been triggered by a big underwater earthquake at 7:59 a.m. on December 26 and struck India quickly after, destroying or severely damaging round 65,000 properties within the state of Tamil Nadu alone. Nearly 228,000 individuals had been ultimately reported lifeless or lacking throughout greater than a dozen nations, together with 1000's from India’s southern coast.
At the time of the tsunami, Prajapati, then 35, was having breakfast along with her godmother in Auroville, a city that straddles Puducherry, a union territory ruled instantly by the federal authorities, and the state of Tamil Nadu. She felt uneasy as she appeared up on the overcast sky, questioning why so many plane had been hovering over the horizon. She didn’t know concerning the devastation lower than 10 kilometers away, or that the Indian Navy and Indian Air Force had been instantly deployed for search and rescue operations, till she started to obtain calls from pals and family members.
India was laborious hit by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which flattened coastal communities and claimed an estimated 228,000 lives throughout greater than a dozen nations. Photo by Arko Datta/Reuters/Alamy Stock Photo
By 11:00 a.m., a fast emergency rescue mission had been organized alongside the badly hit areas; 412 camps in Tamil Nadu and one other 48 camps alongside the coastal belt of Puducherry popped as much as shelter greater than 350,000 individuals. It took Prajapati 15 minutes by bike to succeed in one of many camps, at Auroville Beach. Under a sprawling tent by the highway, full chaos reigned.
“Everyone was on the streets; disoriented, scared, and anxious,” she says. Most of the individuals affected had been from fishing villages close to Auroville, and so they had been moist and exhausted. In a matter of minutes, the whole lot they’d owned had been snatched from them. Many had misplaced their properties. Others needed to take care of a extra irreparable loss as our bodies washed up on shore, or they waited, usually in useless, for lacking family members to seem. The cries of wailing youngsters hire the air. Prajapati joined the volunteers who had been trying to consolation and collect the survivors.
Later within the day, on makeshift stoves within the nook of the tent, volunteers had been making an attempt to prepare dinner a meal for the survivors. “It was so chaotic that no one was able to focus,” says Prajapati. One of the organizers requested her to calm the kids. “I had to think fast,” she says. Around her had been 50 youngsters starting from ages 5 to 10 years. “Would you like to make dolls?” she requested a gaggle of them. Prajapati’s design studio, Upasana, was one of many earliest labels in India to champion sustainable trend for ladies, specializing in clothes made out of natural cottons and handloom weaves. A few years earlier than, an intern at Upasana named Prema Viswanathan was researching an upcycling undertaking as a part of her diploma in trend design. She was taking part in round with leftover fabric and had deftly designed just a few little dolls. This exercise, Prajapati thought, could be a good way to maintain the youthful youngsters busy. She made a frantic name to her workplace: “Send bright colors, plenty of needles, and scissors,” she instructed. When the supplies arrived, Prajapati recruited the closest volunteers and assigned six children to every of them. Soon, a doll-making workshop based mostly on one in all Viswanathan’s prototypes was underway, and silence descended on the camp. It was exceptional how the kids targeted on their process, says Prajapati. It introduced a lot-wanted calm to a panic-stricken day.
The immense loss and sense of purposelessness dressmaker Uma Prajapati famous amongst villagers who had been impacted by the tsunami impressed her to launch a doll-making initiative. Photo courtesy of Upasana, Auroville
When she returned the following morning, the kids had completed breakfast and had been ready for her. They wished to make extra dolls, they stated. This time, their moms joined them. Food was supplied on the camps, and the ladies, the wives of fishers, felt purposeless. They started studying find out how to make the little dolls, as properly.
The doll Prajapati confirmed them was significantly easy to craft and didn’t require any specialised needlework. With no arms or legs, the determine, simply two to a few centimeters lengthy, is dominated by the stable colours of a tunic—a sheath of brilliant fabric—hooked up on to the rounded face. Her eyes, two darkish slashes, are framed by a full head of hair. A slash of thread represents the nostril and mouth, and the doll appears like she’s deep in slumber.
The work consumed the doll makers’ time and minds, whereas linking them to a worldwide custom. People have been crafting dolls for 1000's of years, first for non secular and religious significance and ultimately as toys. Today, many artwork therapists acknowledge dolls and doll making as highly effective therapeutic instruments. In a weblog submit, artwork therapist Ceara Genovesi wrote of dolls being “symbolic vessels and transitional objects. Dolls create a holding space for an individual’s emotions.” Wrapping and stitching are acknowledged by therapists and crafters as calming and meditative practices, offering area for self-reflection.
Months after that first doll-making workshop, Prajapati’s enterprise associate, Manoj Pavitran, would title the doll Tsunamika—the daughter of the tsunami, born from the tragic churning of the ocean. The title got here to him in meditation. “It felt like we’d received the name like a gift,” says Prajapati.
On the third day after the tsunami, fisherfolk tried to quell their worry of aftershocks and returned to their villages to start cleansing, repairing, and rebuilding. Prajapati would go to often after work and see ladies staring vacantly into the gap, overcome with shock and grief.
She requested ladies she’d met on the reduction camp in the event that they want to resume making dolls. They and plenty of others from a number of villages embraced the chance, and shortly the variety of doll makers swelled to 600, ultimately peaking at over 1,000. One of them was Mahalakshmi Natarajan, then 25 and dwelling within the village of Bommayapalayam along with her husband and two younger sons. Most of her belongings had washed away, she says, however the lack of private possessions was the least upsetting influence of the tsunami. “People had sounded the warning about the ocean looking strange that day. I rushed out of my home to see what they were talking about. When I saw the giant waves, I just grabbed my children and fled.” She didn’t have an opportunity to salvage something or to assist anybody else. Six individuals died in her village, together with a 16-year-outdated lady she had been talking with solely moments earlier than the tragedy. The lady had walked away after the dialog, and Natarajan had appeared again simply because the wave overtook her within the distance. “She was washed away, right in front of my eyes,” she says.
Villagers choose via the rubble of their residence in Cuddalore, throughout the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, after the 2004 tsunami. Photo by Arko Datta/Reuters/Alamy Stock Photo
After the tragedy, individuals in her village had been paralyzed with worry; many had been reluctant to exit to fish. The doll-making workshop appeared like a godsend, says Natarajan.
In the early days, workers from Upasana would come to every of six villages badly affected by the tsunami to show a doll-making workshop that spanned half a day. Eventually the villagers took over educating each other. Each village elected two coordinators liable for overseeing the standard of the work and for reporting to 1 one other and to Upasana on their village’s progress.
The dolls had been by no means made for industrial acquire, says Prajapati: the precedence “was always the emotional value, the healing from grief and trauma that it brought.” The doll undertaking is a part of an idea often known as the reward economic system—Tsunamikas are shared freely, and people who obtain them aren't obligated to assist the initiative, although many do. Yet, Prajapati wished to compensate the ladies for his or her labor, time, and ability. Early on within the effort, she managed to rearrange funding via a program referred to as the Auroville Tsunami Relief and Rehabilitation Project and from Concern India Foundation, a charitable belief that helps deprived individuals turn out to be self-reliant. She promised that in return, the villagers may make a million dolls.
For lots of the doll makers, the compensation they obtained was their first impartial revenue, and it got here throughout essentially the most determined monetary crunch of their lives. They obtained a small fee, someplace between US $13 and $57 a month—a median minimal wage on the time—and it was welcome, says Natarajan.
A gaggle of girls who embraced the doll-making undertaking in its early days pose with just a few of their Tsunamikas. Photo courtesy of Upasana, Auroville
Prema Shankar, a 72-year-outdated Tsunamika crew chief, who lives in a village west of Auroville, says her household didn’t endure a lot loss within the tsunami and he or she didn’t really want the additional revenue as a result of her husband’s job at a hostel was safe, however she noticed how the dolls helped others in the neighborhood. She was expert in embroidery and will train the opposite ladies, supervising their stitching. “Every year, we celebrate the anniversary of the Tsunamika, because the doll wasn’t just an alternative means of livelihood. It helped many of us find a sense of purpose and a way out of tragedy,” she says. Staying targeted on a goal in these early months helped. “As a team leader, I’d wake up thinking we’d need to craft 200 dolls today.”
In the months after the tsunami, every of the six villages made round 150,000 dolls each month, she estimates. “On days that I can’t sleep, I’ve crafted the Tsunamika in the middle of the night, while listening to old songs,” Shankar says.
The doll makers continued to make use of scraps donated by Upasana and different textile producers from round Auroville, and infrequently they purchased waste from native tailors. “We never ran out of fabric,” says Prajapati. “Once, when we couldn’t find white material for the head, we used colored fabrics and called the colored faces of the doll the ‘Holi edition’” (referring to a spring pageant in India the place brightly coloured powders are smeared on faces and garments).
Looking again, Prajapati realizes that committing the doll makers to creating a million dolls was a relatively wild concept, particularly since she was working with ladies who had been studying find out how to sew for the primary time of their lives—but, she believed they may do it. They fulfilled the promise. “And yet, no one wanted to stop,” says Prajapati. “The project had grown into a movement, bigger than I’d ever imagined.”
The dolls got away to NGOs and native enterprise organizations and distributed at occasions held in purchasing malls, public parks, and faculties. As extra individuals shared the dolls, the story of the hardships confronted by the fishing communities after the tsunami unfold. By then, worldwide assist organizations had donated cash to rebuild flattened boats and houses, however the Tsunamika undertaking helped individuals perceive and empathize with the lengthy-time period emotional trauma skilled by the coastal villagers. “I’ve seen people who’ve received the Tsunamika change; she touched lives far beyond the borders of the fishing villages in which she was birthed,” says Prajapati.
Doll makers use scraps of no matter cloth is on the market to trend their diminutive Tsunamikas. Photo courtesy of Upasana, Auroville
This was evident when, within the winter of 2007, Prajapati visited Bilbao, Spain, to talk at an occasion organized by Lur Gozoa, one in all many NGOs that donated to the Tsunamika undertaking over time after the preliminary funding ran out. Lur Guzoa raised funds domestically and in return obtained dolls to distribute in its neighborhood.
After the occasion was over, throughout dinner, Prajapati met a bartender who requested her an uncommon query. “Are you Tsunamika’s mother?” he requested.
His polo-necked shirt was peeking out of his woolen sweater, and hooked up to the collar was a Tsunamika. He had heard concerning the effort via Lur Gozoa and had dolls obtainable at his bar for donations, which he collected in an empty beer pitcher. “He’d just contributed 600 euros [US $725] to the cause,” says Prajapati. “He said he’d run out of his stock of dolls already and that I’d need to send him more. I was very touched.”
The incident introduced residence to her how cultural variations could possibly be overcome when individuals got here collectively to take care of adversity.
In 2011, when a tsunami swept via mainland Japan, killing practically 20,000 individuals, Upasana reached out to Peace Boat, an NGO based mostly in Japan that makes use of worldwide voyages by ship to advertise peace, human rights, and sustainability. Prajapati and her workers hoped the NGO may assist them ship Tsunamikas to the affected communities in Japan.
Following the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan, Peace Boat volunteers current survivors within the metropolis of Ishinomaki with Tsunamika dolls and playing cards explaining the undertaking. Photo courtesy of Peace Boat
“We transported 100,000 of the dolls from Kochi [where Peace Boat was docked in India] to Japan,” says Meri Joyce, a Peace Boat coordinator. The majority had been distributed to neighborhood members in Ishinomaki, one of many cities laborious hit by the catastrophe and the place Peace Boat’s reduction actions had been centered. Peace Boat employees handed out the dolls to individuals who got here to obtain meals at soup kitchens or who had been dwelling in evacuation shelters and momentary housing. “They were received extremely warmly,” says Joyce. “Coming as a gift from someone else who understood the severity of the impact and the pain of the sorrow following the disaster meant a great deal.”
During her visits to the fishing villages over time, Prajapati turned keenly conscious of different points that had been affecting them. The doll had rapidly grown into a strong image of hope, and he or she questioned how she may make use of it to additionally elevate consciousness about ocean conservation. In 2008, Upasana produced two e-books that includes Tsunamika because the central character. Tsunamika Meets Friends tells the doll’s origin story, whereas Tsunamika: Ocean, my Home addresses marine air pollution. An endorsement of the Tsunamika undertaking by UNESCO that 12 months helped the e-books acquire a wider viewers, and so they had been ultimately translated from English into German, Russian, Danish, French, and Tamil.
A diffusion from Tsunamika: Ocean, my Home, one in all two e-books produced by Prajapati’s firm, Upasana, concerning the character Tsunamika. Illustration courtesy of Upasana
On Tsunamika’s 10th birthday in January 2014, Upasana deliberate a number of occasions within the fishing communities to rejoice. A small visiting Finnish theater group carried out what artwork director Liisa Isotalo calls “a lyrical lament.” It confirmed Tsunamika grief stricken on the harm people have inflicted on the oceans, and was carried out for a whole lot of kids in and round Auroville, in addition to at faculties and festivals in Finland.
Over the years, native NGOs have used the Tsunamika as a method to ship their very own messages about defending the atmosphere. “Every day, we grapple with how human actions impact the environment,” says Sunaina Mandeen, cofounder of Pondy Citizen’s Action Network (PondyCAN), a nonprofit in Puducherry addressing giant-scale erosion of native seashores resulting from improvement. In Tsunamika, the group noticed a strong image that might assist individuals higher perceive conservation messages. PondyCAN visited native faculties with a 3-meter-tall Tsunamika. “We told children how she was concerned about the health and well-being of the sea and of all the creatures that inhabit it,” Mandeen says.
The emotional attraction the doll had within the fishing communities lent a deeper influence to those messages. After all, the Tsunamika had been a continuing presence in villagers’ lives.
This is one instance of a Karuna doll, created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Karuna is analogous in design to Tsunamika, however varies considerably between artists. Photo courtesy of Upasana, Auroville
The variety of dolls the villagers make has ebbed and flowed over time, however there have at all times been ladies engaged on the undertaking, says Prajapati. Today, round 60 ladies are concerned, together with Shankar and Natarajan, who nonetheless benefit from the work 17 years later, although they produce fewer than they as soon as did. Now, along with Tsunamika, they're crafting her “sister”—Karuna, whose title means compassion. The motion was launched in 2020 by Creative Dignity, a volunteer-pushed collective powered by designers and craft councils throughout India to assist artisans. Prajapati is a key volunteer and helped launch the marketing campaign. Women from quite a few states throughout India are actually making the Karuna doll to offer a way of energy and hope in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s potential that Karuna could sometime eclipse Tsunamika, although in the meanwhile, she’s not as well-known.
In her village, Shankar is trying to contain a youthful technology in crafting, although she admits it’s an uphill process. “I try because it instills a sense of teamwork,” she says. “I tell the kids, I’ll make her face and you do the dress—we’ll work on her together. But this generation has no memory of the tsunami, and they don’t immediately understand the symbolic nature of the Tsunamika—how she came at a time when conquering adversity and moving on meant survival.”
