When Narratives Belong to Others: Craft Evolution and the Question of Authorship

This paper examines how narrative authority shapes craft evolution by analyzing two Indian craft development initiatives: the Golden Eye exhibition (1985) and the Jawaja project (1970s–1990s). Drawing on narrative theory and design research, I argue that the capacity to author one’s own story from lived experience is fundamentally generative—creating conditions for autonomous evolution. While designers routinely claim narrative authority as a basis for innovation, craftspeople are positioned as subjects within frameworks others establish. Through an analysis of these cases and my embedded relationship to them, I propose five dimensions of narrative authority—source authority, generative capacity, framework control, ambiguity privilege, and validation—that reveal how structural positioning rather than capability determines whose stories count as legitimate bases for evolution. The paper demonstrates that even well-intentioned interventions cannot create genuine self-reliance without addressing the epistemic conditions that make craftspeople’s narratives recognizable as authoritative knowledge.