Department of Patents, Designs and Trademarks (DPDT) under the Industries Ministry will provide the registration for Jamdani
Jamdani, the country’s one of the finest textiles, is going to get registration by this month as Bangladesh’s first Geographical Indication (GI) product, reports UNB.
Senior Secretary of the Industries Ministry M Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan made the disclosure while addressing the 56th annual meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva on Tuesday, according to a message on Thursday.
Department of Patents, Designs and Trademarks (DPDT) under the Industries Ministry will provide the registration for Jamdani, popularly known as Dhakai Jamdani or Dhakai.
The historic production of Jamdani was patronised by imperial warrants of the Mughal emperors. The term Jamdani is Persian deriving from ‘Jam’, meaning flower, and ‘Dani’, a vase or a container, named after decorative floral patterns found on Dhakai textile.
The secretary said the government attaches highest importance to preserving intellectual property for ensuring knowledge-based industrialisation. “The government has already formulated laws and rules to provide registration for GI products,” he said.
Mosharraf, who led a two-member Bangladeshi delegation to the WIPO meeting, said Bangladesh in association with the WIPO has already implemented the Industrial Property Rights project with a view to preserving, developing and registering intellectual property.
Source: Dhaka Tribune
Excellent news if the registration happens, its one more step towards being recognised. However, the registration should have been as Jamdani, not Dhakai Jamdani. While Dhakai Jamdani is the popular name, it is an inaccurate descriptor of our craft and connection with this legendary cloth. By popularising and instituting the term Dhakai Jamdani instead of Jamdani, we create space for mis-interpretion; that other forms of Jamdani are also being practiced and are on par with Bangladesh’s Jamdani. This is exactly what India wants, that we should register Dhakai Jamdani, while they will probably do other forms (they have applied for Jamdani registration in 2009) that they claim are also Jamdani, such as West Bengal’s Jamdani manufactured in their villages such as Hatsimla, Dhatigram and Nasratpur.
These manufacturing centres emerged after the migration of skills and artisans from East Bengal (today Bangladesh). It has been a bone of contention amongst the crafts people of Bangladesh that we should claim our rightful historical legacy over Jamdani rather than over one form of it, i.e. Dhakai Jamdani. UNESCO had in Application No. 00879 taken ‘note that Bangladesh has nominated Traditional art of Jamdani weaving for inscription on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’ and granted it for Jamdani, not for Dhakai Jamdani-why is the Ministry moving away? While the present application is a step in the right direction it is also another political concession to Indian claims.