On Handloom Day, observed every year on August 7, let us fill our ears with the beautiful, rhythmic sounds of handlooms clicking away under deft fingers that arrange rainbow threads into textures, motifs and patterns to clothe and please us all.
India is truly blessed for having the largest variety of living handloom traditions in the world. It shows the skills and the power of resilience ofits handloom weavers of all religions, cultural and regional backgrounds throughout history, even through eras when they were sought to be wilfully destroyed. On this day of celebrating our Handlooms, we must honour their makers and their wearers, not through tokenism but through practical and sincere commitment to keep alive our great multi-cultural woven heritageand, more important, sustain the livelihoods of the entire chain of people from cotton, silk and woolproducers, spinners dyers, weavers, to the marketplace to bring it to the wearer. The customer/wearer then makes the ultimate choice that decides whether a heritage and a livelihood lives or dies.
In a brief mention of our organisation which has dedicated itself for 34 years to those two important goals, the Dastkari Haat Samiti, it has focussed its services not towards those who are strong and already established in the minds of their customers, but to enable the lower rungs of not only handloom weavers but multiple craftspeople and traditional artists to improve their skills, designs, market outreach and gain the confidence to negotiate the much larger world outside their tiny rooms with single looms. With this in mind, we have, in more than three decades, created artistic crafts maps of all states of India, to point people to the locations of makers, imagined the concept of Dilli Haat, and worked hard for it to be established with the help of the Ministry of Textiles in 1994. It is a now very popular marketplace in the capital that enables handloom weavers to bring their textiles directly to the customer without a middleperson and sustained thousands of livelihoods. The Samiti then created a major program called Akshara, where Indian scripts were crafted in multiple skills, including handloom weaving. This revived ancient traditions of sacred words or blessings on textiles, and made literacy meaningful to unlettered weavers. It has also produced many books on Crafts and Handloom Textiles, including Woven Textiles of Varanasi, apart from children’s stories.
Our example of focussing on weavers at the lowest rung of the ladder was our project with women gamchha weavers in Bengal. Gamchhas survive because they are used by a wide array of menfolk of the working classes. Rickshaw pullers, vegetable vendors, manual labourers, fishermen, farmers – all use this small length of colourfully checked cloth for multiple purposes. We see them but never notice them. To weave low cost but beautiful, vibrant saris for urban women, and by offering a gamchha ‘style’ of scarf, bandana, head band and now as a mask as a defence across one’s face against the Corona virus, we have brought better incomes to women who barely earned Rs 200 a day. We must not kill simple Indian textile accessories like gamchhas by allowing Chinese machine-made towels flood our pavements. Let us honour the humblest weavers, and especially women across India, including in the North-East, who do not pass a day without sitting at their looms.While focussing on women, let us imagine the woman spinning on the front porches of their homes in Andhra Pradesh and the Kashmiri woman spinning pashmina yarn in her garden, and acknowledge that women are often at the crucial base of the great handloom chain.
Finally, the Dastkari Haat Samiti’s latest contribution towards the glory of Indian weaving across the world, offers its Crafted in India project created in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture on its renowned digital platform ( G.co/craftedinindia ). It provides intricate stories and insights with high quality images, of many of the best handloom weaving traditions of India.
Our tribute to handlooms must now, in the time of a pandemic and the clarion call for an Atmanirbhar Bharat, make our new approachInnovate-Create-Elevate for Handlooms. Attention should be paid to ensuring local markets and products like the gamchha. It is the synthetic and mechanised replacements that have destroyed local markets for handlooms. Old administrative systems with a top down approach must be replaced by dynamic, flexible, less rigid ideas and integrated programs than link in many more ways with every other discipline to make the handloom weavers life recognised, dignified, sustainable, desirable and viable.
Our dedication this year need not be not just to wear a handloom sari, kurta or scarf on 7th August, but to make handlooms India’s new Fabrics of Freedom.
(Founder President, Dastkari Haat Samiti)