What India’s handlooms taught Laila Tyabji about craft and community

The moist humid Bengal air is essential for fine long staple cotton that can be woven into airy 400 count jamdani muslins, while women in more arid climes spin a thick tough thread that produces tightly woven resilient fabrics that take on rich lustrous colours. Linen, jute, nettle and banana fibre add texture and variety. Silk, and its cousin sisters tussar, muga and eri, have so many marvellous variations that it is crazy that we still import horrid shiny Chinese yarn instead of cultivating more silkworms. Sheep and goats thrive too, some, in Ladakh, produce the fine long underbelly hairs that make pashmina, others, in Kutch and Rajasthan, a short coarser wool suitable for rugs and rough shawls.

Wandering around rural India, one of my greatest pleasures is discovering what the deft hands of local weavers conjure with the yarns at their disposal. Just as each region had its own distinctive yarn so each district has its own unique weave, colour palette and motif directory. Exploring and working with these — some already world famous such as Banaras, Patan and Kanjeeveram — others like Bhujodi, Kunbi and Kotpad waiting to be discovered and developed — is a joy that has never diminished. Forty five years on, I still remember the dirty tattered little scrap and the bent white-haired old lady who proffered it, that led to the revival of the stunning Bomkai saris of Orissa.

Jamdani weaving (Wikimedia Commons)

When Karnataka didn’t want to re-colour saris, until…

One of my early Dastkar encounters in the 1980s was with two Brahmin weavers in Uppinbetageri, in north Karnataka. Once a traditional centre for Irikil handloom weaving, government incentives had converted the whole village to powerloom, something they were now regretting: Electricity was sporadic, the bedsheets they produced didn’t sell and the huge machines were both expensive and unwieldy. My two weavers had held out and were still making the classic Irikil weaves of their forefathers. My objective was two-fold: to re-colour the saris from their traditional maroon, brown, blue and green, and change the red borders and pallavs (end piece of a sari) to other colours too, while keeping the original weave structure. I also wanted them to make dupattas and yardage.

This was a struggle. The weavers, one small and round, the other tall and lugubrious, were sweet but resistant to change. Every day, we sat and chatted, munching the peanuts they grew on their fields; every day I flashed my new colourways enticingly, and showed them images of Delhi-ites wearing dupattas with their kurtas. Every day, they shook their heads (one cheerfully, one sadly), and said they would have to change the width of their looms, get new yarn dyed in these outlandish colours. Then, when I came to say goodbye, they suddenly whipped out a fabulous golden-yellow dupatta with a forest-green border and ends. They said that while I was gone (I’d been working with Kasuti embroiderers in the neighbourhood) they felt bad, and decided, “Why not try it?”They remained a successful part of Dastkar bazaars all through the 1980s and ’90s and, at one point, everyone in Delhi was wearing their saris and dupattas. When Babri Masjid fell in 1992 and there were fears of violence and communal riots, they wrote us a letter, helped by an English-speaking village scribe: “God is all where’s” it said, ending, “Do not weary, we are praying…”

Kala cotton weaver from Kutch, Gujarat (Reva Thakkar)

Bihar’s gobar collection

In Dastkar’s 45 years, we worked with countless weaver communities. In the process, we saw a revival and flourishing of many almost lost traditions — Mangalagiri, Begumpuri, Bomkai, Tangalia; the thick goats wool shawls of Kutch and the Thar desert transformed into dramatic best-selling cotton garments and furnishings; the revival of Karvati saris of Maharashtra; Kani weaving in Kashmir; Uppada Jamdanis; the Kotpad madder tribal lugdis that becoming stunning saris; Bodo and Naga weaves adapted for urban wearers; hill communities in Ladakh, Uttarakhand, Assam, and Himachal thriving and Ikat going viral worldwide.

But probably the most memorable, because its happy ending started from such sad beginnings, was our Berozgar Mahila Kalyan Samiti, a project in Bihar. In the early 1990s, a young man walked into our Dastkar office. Working in a Gandhi ashram in Bhagalpur, he had discovered a group of over 500 women, who had been in bonded labour for over 20 years, spinning tussar yarn for local traders. They were in debt, taking loans of Rs 500-1000, unable to pay the money back. They had been spinning 10-hour days without pay ever since. Plus paying 25 per cent interest on the original loan. The young man, Nirranjan Poddar, asked for our help.

Loin loom weaver from Assam (Reva Thakkar)

Driving to dinner that night I wondered what we could do. At the dinner, serendipitously, I met my friend, the writer Gita Mehta. I told her the story. Gita, always practical, wanted to know what the total debt amounted to. After a quick calculation she said, “Ok, I”ll give you the royalties from my next book.” The book was River Sutra (1993) and a cheque from her New York publishers duly arrived. After paying off the women’s debts, we taught the group to weave and found a young National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) student designer to work with them. Romi Chopra, aesthete and Delhi man-about-town, teasingly called the resulting range of saris, stoles and dupattas, with their beiges, fawns and creams and contrasting black, brown and taupe borders, “Laila’s gobar collection” but they were an immediate hit — everyone from Sonia Gandhi to Shabana Azmi was wearing them. The group soon had a turnover of crores, selling goods worth Rs 20 to 30 lakh at every bazaar. Bhagalpur silks are now famous, having added stripes and checks and vibrant jewelled colours to their range.

The story is a paradigm, of how in the handloom sector, a small investment can result in big returns, given that weavers don’t need expensive equipment or infrastructure. It also illustrates that any intervention has to be holistic: incorporating all aspects of the development cycle —credit, skills training, raw material procurement, design and product development, market information. The actual marketing is only one part of the process. Another are the deep friendships one develops.

A weaver working on a Banarasi sari (Reva Thakkar)

Holding on to rituals

A last story: Five decades ago, I was a brash young merchandiser-designer. Working with Gangarappa, a master weaver in Pochampalli (Telangana). It drove me crazy that he would never work on my samples till he had groomed, fed and garlanded the family bullocks, sprinkled his hearth with water, bathed, decorated his loom with fresh flowers, and completed an elaborate puja. He would then weave a ritual few inches on the oldest ancestral loom, centuries old, passed down from his forefathers, before he agreed to begin on something new. By then, it would be well past 11.30 am and I would be hopping up and down, impatiently. I did not grasp then that these disciplined age-old rituals were integral to his creative mastery. He told me later that when he wove those first inches on the family loom, he communed with the spirits of his grandfather and great grandfather and received their blessing. Something I heard again later, from Vankar weavers in Kutch. It is those traditions, going beyond hand skills or market demands, that we have to understand and preserve, while taking India’s extraordinary handlooms into global markets.

Laila Tyabji is former chairperson, Dastkar