How Ply split braiding became an endangered craft

As one shifts to study the more recent history of ply split braiding and tangs, it is impossible to overlook the decline and growing sparcity of the craft. Peter Collingwood talks about two main reasons for its limited distribution. One being its late arrival in the academic landscape, and the second being its limited practicality. The technique and material of ply split braiding usually produce thick, narrow, heavy fabrics, unsuitable for fine uses. Additionally, its slow process makes it unideal for bigger items like rugs and unsustainable in the commercial sense of the word. 

Building on to this, a number of other factors can be speculated to have contributed to its decline. With time, as urban migration for employment was on the rise, one can see the loss of pastoral economy. As the younger generations abandoned these techniques, micro techniques were lost with the deaths of the braiders. The rapid industrialisation also led to the displacement of emotion and meaning from the tang, resulting in it being replaced by pre-made fabric belts. As a domino effect, with the rising use of machines in all aspects of life, there was a reallocation of importance from the camel itself. Slowly, due to all of these occurrences, the craftspeople saw social dislocation, loss of status and meaning since handwork didnt hold the same significance anymore. 

The story of ply-split braiding and its near disappearance in India cannot be told without attending to the colonial histories that restructured how material culture, labor, and artistry were seen, categorized, and valued. The colonial treatment is what turned living practices and crafts into “objects of knowledge.” What had once been a vibrant, adaptive, and deeply situated craft, practiced by pastoral communities who braided their camels’ adornments from locally sourced fibers, was reclassified through the colonial gaze as “folk art,” “tribal handiwork,” or “ethnographic specimen.” Both craft and animal became spectacles of otherness. The camel, once an intimate partner in mobility, migration, and livelihood, was reframed as a symbol of the exotic Orient, a postcard creature of Rajasthan’s deserts, fit for exhibition rather than companionship. Likewise the tang was demoted from a thing, to a mere object. 

This process of museumification, as scholars like Tony Bennett have noted, was not neutral. It constituted a form of creative control, removing craft from its lifeworld and recontextualizing it within the Western ideas of beauty, value, and history. Once in catalogues, the camel tang ceased to be a thing of relation and became an object of study. Its maker disappeared, its use became irrelevant, and its meaning was translated into the language of anthropology and aesthetics.

Beyond these discussions, ply-split braiding occupies a distinctive space in the spectrum of intangible cultural heritage, as it resists easy categorization. It is both a textile technique and a language of belonging, an embodied practice that binds together identity, memory, and landscape. UNESCO defines intangible cultural heritage with 3 key characteristics:

• Community-based knowledge and skill transmission

• Collective recognition as cultural identity

• Continuity and meaning within a social context

  
  

Ply-split braiding, when seen as part of material culture, is not just a textile technique. It is a connection between humans and animals, labor and land, as well as the past and the present. The camel tang, in particular, holds stories of migration, kinship, and devotion that shape desert life. Studying it helps one understand that meaning lies not only in objects but also in the worlds they connect. 

Today, as industrialization and displacement threaten the survival of such crafts, ply-split braiding reminds us of the deep knowledge found in handwork. It fosters a dialogue between the maker, the material, and the environment.