Thread by @ShefVaidya

#thread My children helped in the making of the #9Days9Weaves videos. While shooting the clips, my daughter asked, ‘there are many people in India who deserve and need help, why have you chosen weavers?’ Her question had me thinking.

Handloom textiles are our original #makeinindia craft. Our ancestors had mastered the art is cultivating cotton and flax, spinning yarn, colouring yarn using vegetable n mineral colours using mordants to fix the dye and the craft of weaving on a loom.

Weaving has survived in India despite so many foreign invasions, brutal colonial rules and economic suppression. Under Hindu rulers, weavers enjoyed the status of an artist. They had their own guilds or श्रेणी and even the King had to treat weavers guilds with due respect.

Islamic invasions destroyed the autonomy of the guilds. Weavers were reduced to be mere serfs in a feudal set-up under the जजमानी system. But the craft itself was not affected much as the Muslim rulers appreciated good clothing.

It is the British rule that broke the back of the handloom industry in India. Britain imported cotton from India at cheap rates and dumped machine made clothing from the mills of Manchester in India, forcing hundreds of thousands of handloom weavers to die of penury.

‘The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of india’, said William Bentick, the Governor General of India, in 1834 to highlight the plight of cotton weavers in India caused by the British policy towards tradtitional urban Indian handicrafts.

And yet, the craft survived organically, the knowledge being passed from father to son, mother to daughter. Today, the handloom sector employs the second largest number of people in India after agriculture, more than 70% of whom are women based in rural areas.

Handlooms weavers don’t need charity. They need dignity, fair wages, and prestige that they once enjoyed in ancient India. Handloom weaving is an exquisite craft, and is essential for the future of this planet. We talk of slow fashion, what is handloom weaving but slow fashion?

Each time you buy a hand woven saree, Dhoti, towel, bed sheet, yardage or other apparel, you support the rural economy of India, you help women to become financially independent and you help preserve an important part of your heritage.

Handloom weaving has survived for 1000s of years in India, despite so many political upheavals, despite so many attempts to destroy it. Let it not die now, just because of our craze for mass produced, machine made fashion that makes us look like replicas of each other.

I support weavers because it is a cause that means a lot to me. When I gaze at the checkerboard Ikat pattern on the कटीवस्त्र of Padmapani Buddha at caves of Ajantha painted 2000 years ago, I marvel at the realisation that the same weave is being woven in Odisha even today!

Handloom weaving is that one tradition that has stayed with India through the transitions of time, from the earliest remnants of the Sindhu Saraswati Civilization to the digital generation of 2020. We owe it to ourselves to not let it die.