Weaving diversity

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his  book The Black Swan describes how human beings are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories-tend to squeeze unrelated facts and events into cause-and-effect equations and then convert them into easily understandable narratives.

These stories, Taleb writes, shield humanity from the true randomness of the world, the chaos of human experience, and, to some extent, the unnerving element of luck that plays into all successes and failures. Perhaps nature by design loves variety, diversity and nurtures unique characteristics in living and non-living beings across geographies and time zones. 

Nature therefore prefers to ask  "kitne prakaar ke aadmi the" (variety of people who were there) to "Kitne aadmi the" (how many people were there) -a famous dialogue of Gabbar Singh in movie Sholey

Handlooms in India are true epitome of this variety, this diversity, this uniqueness which every weaving cluster represents through its weaving vocabulary. In our attempt to simplify we club weavers as one category of artisans but doing this would perhaps be like taking a sip through fire hose.

I recently visited two blocks in Nagaland which practice weaving. One in mountains- Chizami block (3 hours drive from Kohima) and One in plain land- Dhansiripar block (45 minutes from Dimapur railway station) 

In contrast to weaving clusters of Varanasi, Bhagalpur, Bhuj, Maheshwar, Mangalgiri and so and so forth, WOMEN Weave in Nagaland and get due credit. 

(Women also weave in other weaving clusters of India, its a different matter that they dont get credit for doing so.)

Weaving in Nagaland is on a loin loom which is narrower in width and is omnipresent in every rural household. 

Traditionally, as it was the case in all other weaving clusters, weaving was done in natural fibers and in natural dyes extracted from nature. Despite the undulated mountainous terrain and small land holding, cotton was grown, hand ginned, hand carded and hand spun for weaving shawls. 

Much to my dismay, in contrast to other weaving clusters of India, dilution of natural fibers has happened at much faster pace in Nagaland (if these two blocks can be considered representative sample of Nagaland). Local merchants prefer acrylic yarns and provide/coordinate supply of pre-dyed acrylic yarns to the women weavers. Majority of the weavers have shifted to artificial fibers and earn about Rs. 2000-2500 per month for a 4-6 hour weaving in a day.

Villages in Nagaland are very sparsely populated and this definitely is reflected in density of weavers in a given location. 

In my quest and strong belief that there would still be someone in these clusters who still doesnt believe in use of artificial fibers in handloom, I found one women Vesaolu in Sakraba village who cultivates her own cotton, does hand ginning and hand carding. Since she has never used pesticides/ chemical fertilizers, her cotton is organic too

It was very interesting to see the hand ginning by Vesaolu and I recorded it for benefit of handloom textile lovers.

We will come back to the original question on viability of handloom textiles in future posts.

Its easy to talk to those who agree with you- I am trying to disagree with myself in this journey and will therefore go slow to make sure we dont commit Narrative Fallacy which I shared from Taleb's  book when I began this post

Leaving the readers with some serene pictures from the Sakarba village.

Handloom, Sampling and Beyond

"Babu Moshai Jindagi Badi Honi Chahiye Lambi Nahin" , this famous dialogue from movie anand connects so strongly with the fact that handloom textiles are at their best when unique designs (badi jindagi) are woven in shorter warp lengths (lambi nahin).

Continuing from my last post , where we examined in great detail that handloom textiles from India had a glorious past; now we will try to analyze what can be done to make sure that handloom weavers start earning respectful and remunerative income.

We have understood clearly that it is cost intensive for powerlooms and mills to weave new designs in shorter runs. Normally, mills and power-looms look for orders in same design for atleast 500 meters or more

Therefore it is clear that 1-500 meters is the clear playground for Handloom textiles. 

Last few days I had many rounds of discussion with young weavers from different weaving clusters in India. Some of them have understood this 'playing field of handlooms' and are doing sampling for buyers extensively. 

They shared that normally buyers, particularly designers, approach them for developing new samples. The weavers earn a premium on these 'sampling orders' not because of sympathetic reasons but because it is cost-ineffective for these buyers to get their sampling done on powerlooom and mills.

This evokes a feeling of good. Weaver's are experimenting more and re-skilling themselves in this process.

Contrary to their hopes and desires, Weavers reckoned that they are facing a new challenge while traversing this journey of weaving unique products in shorter runs. 

Majority of these buyers who get their sampling done on handlooms (for cost-effectiveness reasons), place bulk orders on these samples to powerloom and mills (again for cost-effectiveness reasons).

This is causing a double whammy to weavers.

Paromita Banerjee also highlights this in her Mint article

"I often see a rash of fashion entrepreneurs who call themselves designers arrive at weaver clusters, assign a few months’ worth of work, then disappear. It lets weavers down, it renders them cyclically grasping for livelihoods, and gives them false hope."

Where does this lead to? Will Handloom weavers earn better income only in sampling? Will they not receive larger orders on the samples which they or their fellows weavers weave? If they dont receive bulk orders on their samples, how will the sector survive; the sector which provides employment to more than 3 times the number of employees which Indian Railway has (largest organized sector employer of India)?

Vertiginous distance to be traveled ! More questions than answers ! We need to delve more deeply.

What we know clearly is that shorter runs (less than 500 meters) is handlooms core strength playground. We now need to find and rejuvenate (if required) ground conditions of this 500 meters playground to win the right match.

Without being mawkish, As Circuit in movie "Munnabhai" says "Bhai tension nahin lene ka"  

We will find the answers and I again I am saying it  more fervently that Handloom weavers are

 not in a state of problem, they are in a state of possibility. 

Handloom textile & Luxury

"Bhai, tension nahin lene ka bhai" we have heard 'Circuit' saying very fondly to "Munnabhai" in the movie "Munnabhai MBBS". (Brother-there is no need to be tensed)

As I said in my last post , Handwoven textiles have the potential to be fabric of future - in shorter runs and as bespoke products. Powerlooms and Mills don't stand a chance in this space. So, "Bhai, tension nahin lene ka bhai."

In this post, I will talk about one of the questions raised in last post "Was Indian craftsmanship always bad?"

India's love affair in experimenting different versions of clothing is as old as civilization itself. Not only luxurious fabric was handwoven but there were strict policies for weaving defect free. Weavers earned good remuneration and PAID taxes.

In the annals of history of India the travel accounts of Fasiyan, Huan Tsang, Warthima, Bernier, Garriri, Tavernier, General Ormi and Marcopolo spelt out the glory of the handloom industry in the by-gone days.

Wilson (1979) writes

The Greeks with Alexander the Great wrote of the fine flowered muslins and robes embroidered in gold they had seen in India.The Arthasastra gave the penalties for fraudulent practices and listed the taxes to be paid by weavers.

Writers proclaimed on the sheerness of Dacca muslins, called evening dew, running water, or sweet-like-sherbert. Seventy-three yards, a yard wide, weighed only one pound. By comparison, the finest Swiss cottons ever made were at best sixteen or seventeen yards to the pound.

The fineness of the hand woven fabrics were such that poets of the Mughal durbar likened muslins to baft hawa (woven air), abe rawan (running water) and shabnam (morning dew).

Shashi Tharoor, in his book Era of Darkness writes "Her textile goods-the fine products of her looms, in cotton, wool, linen and silk-were famous over the civilized world"

According to historian Nick Robinson, Indian textiles made up the bulk of the Company’s trade by the 1680s. In 1684, for example, they comprised 83% of the Company’s total trade amounting to some 17 lakh million pieces of cloth, which came from as far afield as the Coromandel Coast, Bengal and Gujarat.

 Daniel Defoe who described how "everything that used to be made of wool or silk, relating to either the dress of women or the furniture of houses, was supplied by the India trade".

And it is not just handwoven textile but other handcrafts also which were admired.

Referring to one of the India made craft jewellery, the anklets used by peasant women at Bundi in Rajasthan state of India, during a lecture in 1901, Sir T. Wardle wrote: “I bought for a few annas a bronze chain anklet, but all cast in one mould together, quite a common thing, but so wonderfully made that one of our best foundry owners told me he did not think anyone could do it in Europe”

These examples definitely illustrate that Indian Craftsmanship was not just good but exemplary.

What has gone wrong?

We all understand that ways of doing business have transformed many folds. Technology, particularly, internet has revolutionized the methods of business communication. Businesses which responded and worked in sync with these changes have flourished.

For Artisans, we never had a specialized business or a design school. Knowledge has always been passed on verbally and through on-loom practice from one generation to other. With changing business environment, ability of artisans and their market interfaces have remained limited.

While there is no denial that entire craft sector is reeling under pressure from cheap goods made by machines, it’s equally true that misgivings attribute to the way artisans and their market interfaces have responded to the changing circumstances.

Broadly speaking, three market interfaces have worked of the weavers

1.     Master Weavers: Despite all the criticism, master weavers have played a very important role in providing market linkages and credit support to weavers. However with changing business environment and rapid entry of powerlooms, they are not equipped to fulfill the role with same rigor and attention as they did in past.

a.     For instance, in an attempt to compete with products made by power-looms and mills master weavers have started pushing artificial fibers like nylon and polyester to handloom weavers , even in places like Varanasi which are considered to be Mecca of Handlooms.

b.    With artificial fibers making inroads, entire ecosystem of handloom weavers which include pre-loom and post-loom service providers has started vanishing into cities as security guards and migrant laborers.

c.    Adding further blow, master weavers in all major weaving clusters have started using napthol based dyes to give their sarees machine like finish and shine.

d.    Ramifications of these actions have been far and wide. Weaving wages have gone down further. In order to earn a daily living from the decreasing wages, weavers, as a result, minimized experimenting with new designs and have started looking for large orders in one similar design.

e.    In this price war, weavers have forgotten that machines can very easily copy simple designs and weave volumes at fraction of the cost. As a result, weavers, particularly younger ones no longer find association with the pride of past and income of the present.  It doesn’t require chip on the shoulder to imagine the situation when younger generation hasn’t learnt from elderly and in next two decades elderly masters will not be around.

2.     Collectives and Apex Federations: In the larger policy dialogue, producer collectives are ‘assumed’ to be the solution for all primary producers. Logically speaking, economies of scale and scope have yielded bargaining power to the primary producers and coupled by value addition and professional marketing, dairy and sugarcane cooperatives have done what private sector couldn’t do.

a.    However unlike dairy and sugarcane collectives, where milk or sugar is a commodity and with value addition and professional management, viable producer-marketing collectives have been formed, crafts are, verily, quite varied and distinct.

b.    Each craft and each cluster for a particular craft requires different intervention. This is the key reasons why apex collectives in crafts, barring exceptions, couldn’t reach a commercial viability, despite years of dedicated efforts by government and civil society.

3.     Not-for-profit Organizations: Excellent organizations like Dastkar Andhra, Rehwa Society, WomenWeave, Khamir, RangaSutra and so on and so forth have worked with weavers ‘collectively’ on the aforementioned problems and have created commercially viable, equitable and fair handloom textile businesses.

a.    However if we look at the number of artisans, requirement is humungous.  And if we ice it with the fact that young generation is drifting away from the handloom sector, problem becomes terrifying.

b.     It will be unfair to assume and expect that these not-for-profit organizations should engage and work with all weaver collectives or act as umbrella collective for weavers everywhere and anywhere. Also it is nearly impossible to create replicas of these organizations as each organization has a different context and a different group of passionate individuals who took this activity as their life mission.

We are standing at a critical juncture. Having acknowledged that going forward master weavers will have limited role, producer collectives will have limited bandwidth and we cannot have likes of DA and WW at all locations, we need to experiment an alternative model.

Actions taken up now will decide whether after two decades we will continue to witness the sound of shuttle being thrown left and right on the handlooms in India. Arresting this drift of artisans, particularly younger ones, essentially calls for a paradigm shift in making craft based livelihoods not just remunerative but also a respectable vocation. Easier said than done, this requires comprehensive approach cognizant to geographical and craft specific needs. The approach should ideally establish the connect between pride of the past with income of the present

Disquieting implications indeed, visible to all the hoi-polloi, but with no quick solutions!

But as I said in the beginning - "Bhai, tension nahin lene ka bhai" . 

Handloom has some core strengths and it high time to play the game with those core strengths to make it Fabric of the Future.

Handwoven - Fabric of the Future ?

Handloom weavers are not in a state of a problem, they are in a state of possibility.

As a part of my travel to different weaving clusters, I recently visited two districts in Assam and my belief on above quote got emboldened further.

If you talk to anyone on the street, they will say that fabric woven on powerloom and mill would be much cheaper than the fabric which is woven on handloom. Therefore, in their understanding, for all commercial reasons powerloom and mill fabric will gain market acceptance.

Agreed but with a caveat. Machines can and will always do tasks at a cheaper rate which are monotonous and repetitive. Perhaps this is the key reason why we travel by automotive bikes or cars and not on bullock cart anymore.

However, votaries of this machine vs. hand logic, fail to understand that powerloom and mill fabric is cheaper only when it is woven at certain MOQ (minimum order quantity) in the same design. This MOQ runs into 1000's of meters in one design and mostly as a blend of man-made fibers like polyester and acrylic.

So, if someday you go to a powerloom or mill owner and tell him that you need 5 meters of a specially designed unique fabric in finer counts of cotton and silk, the larger possibility is that owner will laugh at you or will ask for an exorbitant price for weaving this 5 meter fabric for you. This is where handwoven fabric comes into the picture.

In Handlooms due to manual nature of the operation, several permutations & combinations are possible for developing intricate designs which will not just change the design aesthetic but also functional properties like texture, drape, strength, dominant stability, wrinkle control, fall and hand feel AND in a very cost effective manner compared to powerloom and mills.

All these can be ingeniously manipulated by simply changing treadling order or changing the combination of tying treadle with the frame. And if you decide to make changes in yarn, count,  drafting, extra weft and post loom processes you can literally create magic in every 2-3 meters of fabric.

To cut the long story short, this essentially means that one can get a very unique piece of fabric in a very cost effective way only on handloom! Isn't that a luxury? Can this luxury be commercially exploited for providing respectable and remunerative livelihood to artisans?

With very few exceptions, European luxury continues to tell and sell this story of its hand crafted, French and Italian artisanship in a big away. Can Indian artisanship be presented and sold this way?

Not sure. When it comes to Indian artisanship the image which we start visualizing is of defective, badly woven and color bleeding fabric.

Was Indian craftsmanship always bad? I am sure it wasn't.

 What has happened? Can something be done? What is required to be done? Who will do it & When? 

Organizations like Dastkar Andhra, WomenWeave, Khamir, KGU etc. in the not for profit space and Good Earth, Anokhi, Fab India, Jaypore.com in the for profit space are trying their best. But need is humungous 'pilots' can be good sedative in the moments of utter despair but they need to scale up to become solution.  

In next two decades, we are about to the lose the heritage of thousands of years to museums. 

I have more questions than answers. 

But,

If it can be done then that would be a golden period not just for weavers for but for India as a whole as 90 % of worlds handwoven fabric is produced by India. 

And,

If it's not done the government would never to be able to provide alternative skilled employment to such a large work force.

Intelligent people do what they love, genius will do what is needed. 

Where are geniuses??

मान लिया

मान लिया;

नहीं गा सकोगे राग नहीं बना सकोगे ताल
कम से कम भाव भरी मुस्कान तो लाओगे
एक गीत तो गाओगे।

मान लिया;

नहीं बन सकोगे सूरज न बन सकोगे दीपक
कम  से कम आईना बनकर उजाला तो फ़ैलाओगे
एक गीत तो गाओगे

मान लिया;

नहीं बाँध सकोगे समुद्र को न बांध सकोगे नदी को
कम से कम प्यासे को एक कटोरी पानी तो पिला पाओगे
एक गीत तो गाओगे

मान लिया ;

नहीं कर सकोगे इनमे से कुछ भी
कम से कम जो करने की कोशिश  कर रहे हैं उनका हौसला तो बढ़ाओगे
कोई  गीत न गा सके तो यह गीत तो गाओगे

Rs. 10 to convert powerloom fabric to handwoven !

By virtue of their provenance, handloom fabric are known to have the reputation of carrying weaving defects. For the uninitiated, some defects are intrinsic to the science of hand weaving while some owe their origin to improper and sometimes careless pre-loom or weaving processes. 

First category of defects I call as 'effects of handwoven fabric'-lack of certitude and celebration of greyness. Isn't it !

Prahladji teaching weaving defect at THS
Photcredit: WomenWeave

During my earlier association with young weavers, our team tried to inculcate best practices to overcome the latter category of defects. The young weavers, from the vantage point of their sagacious elderly weavers, often used to narrate 

'Sir, its handwoven and therefore it has defects' 

&

I had this witty reply ready to reckon, which one Japanese client condescendingly told to one of my colleagues

 'I agree its handmade but whose hand it is, human or a monkey?' 

This argument beckoned  young weavers and they tried their best to set the systems right for precluding 'avoidable' weaving defects.

However for hoi-polloi, handloom fabric still has immutable and impermeable identity as having weaving (d)effects which powerloom or mill based fabric cannot create.  

Abhas (intution) and andaaz (estimate) still are the key elements which a craft lover looks for and weavers fondly explain so, despite the degree of textile engineering which runs behind the handloom weaving intuitively.

Why am I talking about defects?

Powerloom community and other related doohickeys have made strong inroads in the handloom weaving villages. Known to few and unraveled by experts for all, powerlooms make blatantly cheap imitations of handloom fabric. 

It is tough to discern a handwoven fabric from its mill counterpart, save apart the unmistakable evidence of the d(Effects) which handwoven fabric carry. Such attempts to imitate are innocuous but the recent story  which I 'heard', if true, will be a big blow to handlooms.

During my recent visit to Andhra Pradesh/Telangana, I got to know about another expedient action of  the powerloom community  to get the benefits reserved for the handloom sector and sell as handwoven fabric.

I was informed that sarees made on powerloom, are being given to children to 'artificially' create defects by paying them Rs. 10 per Saree. This artificial 'defect imitation' makes it difficult even for handloom experts to differentiate between a hand woven and machine woven fabric. These are interesting times indeed !

I was intrigued by this human ingenuity to challenge the very idea of handmade which will further denigrate handloom weavers. 

To make such a speculation will be criminal but I am sure that its ramifications will be far and wide. Intent is not to tarnish all for the sins of few but the real question is how will handloom weavers save themselves from depredations and tricks played by the preposterous powerloom community? 

As much sincerely one can muster, Handcrafts, afterall, are not just about financial numbers but more about cultural legacy which they represent. This desire to imitate d(Effects) by powerloom will be a double whammy for the handloom weavers.

Someone rightly said 

"​ We either accept the problem or live in denial, either ways we are right- it shall pass away"

1st May, Labor day is a good day to reflect how we can help artisans transcend from being mazdoor to karigar to kalakar