Traditional Indian Crafts and Intellectual Property Rights

21 Sep 2026

Tags: Indian Heritage & Culture   Art Forms   Visual arts

Source: The Indian Express

Context: The alleged use of Indian traditional craft aesthetics by international luxury brands has renewed debate over cultural appropriation, intellectual property (IP) protection and benefit-sharing.

• Following the controversy over Kolhapuri chappals and Prada, similar concerns have emerged around Ralph Lauren’s use of aari embroidery associated with Gujarat and Fendi’s mirror-work Baguette bag, resembling traditional mirrored purses sold at Indian craft fairs.
• Ralph Lauren reportedly described the embroidery as “hand-applied embellishments” without identifying its Indian cultural provenance.
• The Fendi bag, reportedly priced at around ₹8 lakh, has intensified concerns about the disparity between the commercial value generated by luxury brands and the economic benefits reaching traditional artisan communities.

Why Traditional Crafts Are Difficult to Protect

• The fundamental challenge is that IP rights are generally territorial and legally defined, whereas cultural traditions evolve across communities and geographical boundaries.
• Traditional crafts may have developed over centuries through collective knowledge transmitted across generations, without a clearly identifiable individual creator or legal owner.
• Conventional copyright and design laws are primarily designed to protect identifiable creators, works or designs, making collective cultural expressions difficult to fit into existing categories.
• This creates a gap where commercial users can potentially draw upon traditional aesthetics without adequately recognising the community that preserved and transmitted them.

Limits of Conventional IP Protection

• A particular craft may involve a technique, motif, design, artistic expression, geographical identity or traditional knowledge, but these elements do not necessarily qualify for identical forms of legal protection.
• Copyright generally protects original creative expression rather than an underlying traditional technique or cultural style.
• Design protection may protect specific registered designs but may not automatically cover every traditional motif or visual element associated with a community.
• Geographical Indication (GI) protection can protect the name, origin and reputation of qualifying products but does not necessarily protect every motif, stitch or aesthetic associated with the craft.

Role of Geographical Indications

• A Geographical Indication (GI) identifies goods as originating from a particular geographical territory where a given quality, reputation or other characteristic is essentially attributable to that origin.
• Registration can strengthen the position of legitimate producers by providing a basis for enforcement against misuse of the protected GI name.
• Under India's GI framework, registered proprietors and authorised users can seek remedies including injunctions, damages and accounts of profits.
• However, GI protection does not automatically create a monopoly over the entire visual language or aesthetic associated with a traditional craft.

Community Custodianship

• A major proposal is to recognise the community as custodian where a continuing relationship exists between a cultural expression and the community that has preserved, practised and transmitted it.
• Historical records, regional practices, oral testimony and community knowledge can help establish the provenance of traditional cultural expressions.
• Protection should ensure that artisans and cultural custodians have a meaningful role in decisions concerning commercial use of their traditions.
• Community representation is particularly important because transferring ownership to an individual may exclude the wider community that historically sustained the craft.

Documentation and Digital Registries

• A carefully maintained digital registry could document traditional motifs, techniques, names, geographical regions and custodial communities.
• Such documentation could establish provenance and make it more difficult for commercial entities to falsely present traditional Indian expressions as newly created designs.
• Documentation, however, must not itself transfer control over traditional knowledge to external institutions.
• Some traditional knowledge may be sacred, restricted or community-specific, requiring safeguards against disclosure and subsequent misuse.
• A registry would establish evidence of provenance but would not automatically confer ownership over every visually similar design.

Institutional Capacity and Collective Enforcement

• Individual artisans often lack the financial and institutional resources required to monitor global markets and pursue infringement proceedings.
• Producer organisations, cooperatives and representative community bodies can help organise authorised users, document provenance, negotiate with commercial entities and pursue enforcement collectively.
• This addresses the problem of a “right without resources”, where legal recognition exists but communities lack the capacity to practically enforce it.
• Cross-border litigation can be particularly expensive and resource-intensive, creating an additional disadvantage for artisan communities.

Attribution and Benefit-Sharing

• Protection should extend beyond ownership to mechanisms ensuring attribution, representation and fair economic participation.
• Commercial users drawing upon traditional crafts could be encouraged or required, depending on the legal framework, to acknowledge the geographical and cultural origin of the craft.
• Mechanisms for benefit-sharing could enable communities to participate in the economic value generated from commercial use of their traditional cultural expressions.
• The objective is not necessarily to prevent every external adaptation but to ensure that commercial innovation does not erase the cultural provenance and contribution of artisan communities.

Need for a Specialised Legal Framework

• Existing copyright, patent and design laws may not adequately address collective ownership, cultural provenance, attribution and benefit-sharing associated with traditional cultural expressions.
• A specialised framework could recognise community interests while avoiding an absolute monopoly over every future use of a traditional technique.
• Protection should not make a living craft static or commercially unusable; traditional communities should retain the ability to innovate and evolve their practices.

International Dimension: WIPO

• The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is working towards international rules concerning traditional cultural expressions, traditional knowledge and related IP issues.
• Proposed international frameworks address concerns such as misappropriation, attribution, community rights and benefit-sharing.
• WIPO's 2024 Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge represents an important development in recognising certain traditional-knowledge concerns within international IP law.
• However, broader international rules concerning traditional cultural expressions remain an evolving area, making international harmonisation important for cross-border protection.

Relevant International IP Frameworks

• The Berne Convention establishes international protection for literary and artistic works and provides legal avenues against unauthorised use where the relevant work and applicable law fall within its scope.
• The TRIPS Agreement provides minimum standards for intellectual property protection among World Trade Organization (WTO) members.
• These conventional frameworks, however, were largely designed around individual or identifiable intellectual creations, creating challenges when applied to collectively developed traditional cultural expressions.

India’s Policy Challenge

• India must balance protection of cultural heritage with continued innovation and commercial adaptation of traditional crafts.
• An effective framework should combine GI protection, documentation, community custodianship, collective organisations, attribution and benefit-sharing.
• Legal recognition alone is insufficient unless artisan communities have the institutional and financial capacity to monitor markets and enforce their rights.
• International negotiations are particularly important because luxury brands and commercial markets operate across national borders, while many existing IP rights remain territorial.

Way Forward

• Develop a specialised framework for traditional cultural expressions covering community rights, attribution, provenance and benefit-sharing.
• Strengthen GI registration and authorised-user systems for eligible traditional products.
• Support artisan cooperatives and producer organisations with legal, financial and enforcement capacity.
• Establish secure documentation systems while protecting sacred and confidential traditional knowledge.
• Promote voluntary or legally mandated attribution and fair benefit-sharing when commercial entities use identifiable traditional cultural expressions.
• Ensure that protection encourages living traditions and community-led innovation, rather than freezing traditional crafts into museum pieces.