Poludas Nagendra Satish is best described as an anomaly. Our worlds have collided thrice in the last six months and each encounter with Satish has left a staggering impact. In the capsule world of handloom in India, where people from diverse fields converge – textile designers, artists, Crafts Council members, avid consumers, researchers, weavers, farmers, academicians, enthusiasts and activists – we are all vaguely familiar with each other. Satish defies a singular bracket yet encompasses several.

At the Anchoring Innovation in Handloom Weaving Conference conducted in Chirala, Andhra Pradesh in November 2018, the atmosphere is charged with an electric energy. Our small team at the Registry of Sarees and our curator, Mayank Mansingh Kaul, has been invited to present ‘Meanings, Metaphor – Handspun and Handwoven in the 21st Century’. Our objective over three iterations is to fuel new definitions for khadi. For the first time ever in Indian history – over 400 weaver and craftsmen – delegates are congregating to discuss handloom technologies, skill techniques and to share and exchange ideas. Few people are familiar with the commonly spoken languages of Hindi and English.

As the language of the loom is carefully navigated it becomes clear that khadi is at the centre of the most radical and contentious debate. There is a section of people ‘from the field’, who firmly believe that khadi, once meant spinning with the hand, no longer has the same connotations as almost nobody spins solely by hand. In furthering the analogy, the dilution of the word khadi in today’s context in India also implies a dilution of those same values that were the bedrock of our freedom struggle. People agree in unison as someone shouts about the lack of self-reliance, ‘satyagraha’ and ‘swadeshi’.

The air is heavy as we consider Gandhian values and how ideologically they are associated with khadi. Someone else interjects and there is banter about a kisan charkha and ambar charkha. The debate continues about how the use of charkas has changed the meaning of hand spinning and therefore the meaning of khadi. In reality the use of charkas has influenced cotton cultivation in the country as pre-spinning processes and technology decide the type of cotton to be used (the ambar charkha has encouraged American cotton – both BT as well as organic cotton).

Satish stands up and takes control of the argument. It is clear that he has the respect of his peers. Using his hands he carefully demonstrates a simple idea: hand spinning is a carefully honed and finely tuned skill, developed where yarn is created without the use of aids. When a charka or aid is used to enhance the output of the skill by mechanically turning a wheel, it then becomes creating yarn by labour. My argument is not that we have to do it only by hand, or not against tools producing things faster. I rather say that we should use technology which offers flexibility for the spinner who does spinning.

For example, when one works on a kisan charkha, if the spinner decides to spin different counts or vary twists, it is effortless and that is the strength of hand spinning. But when it comes to the ambar charkha, a technician has to understand what variation to set up to implement and the spinner merely continues producing the programmed yarn, which is very much like a mill worker handling less spindles. The argument of skill and labour is between the manual hand charkha and the ambar charkha.

 

The other core objective of khadi is production of value added products by using locally grown material, developing local skills and setting up of decentralized, least ‘capital-energy’ requiring systems that would create sustainable livelihood to hundreds of people.

For both an expert and a layman the simplicity of the explanation kills the debate. We all instantly recognize that the definition of hand spinning or khadi has changed over these last 70 years of independence. The conversation takes a turn: was the Mahatma more astute than we give him credit for? Sustainability, economic stability, employment, environmental reclamation and the family as a unit of work, meditation, mindfulness and minimalism are several issues that are then discussed around the business of hand spinning yarn in today’s India. Perhaps Gandhiji was truly a man ahead of his times. My curiosity has been piqued.

 

Satish is widely regarded as a man with a story of phenomenal success in the area of hand spinning. Therefore people lean in – as if to gather some specific brand of wisdom – when he speaks about khadi. Through his organization Kora, in collaboration with Srijani Foundation and the youth club of Bejjipuram, and the efforts of a committed team, in three years he has introduced hand spinning and hand weaving as a pioneering skill to women in 19 villages in Siwan district, five villages in Samastipur district, Bihar and six villages in Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh. No small task if you consider that both hand spinning and hand weaving were alien pursuits that were perhaps never practiced in the region. In three years, over three hundred women have been armed with cotton, charkas and an intentional skill set. Their success is Kora’s success and in turn a small feather in Satish’s cap as well.

It has not been an easy journey. Unlike other stories that we are celebrating in the handloom sector, this is one that is remarkable because it is devoid of words and phrases such as ‘revival’, ‘traditional’ and ‘save the loom’. Instead it is marked with an uncanny dose of ingenuity, courage and perseverance – all nuances of the first wave of the khadi movement for freedom.

In Bihar, when the project first took root, Satish and the design team representing Srijani Foundation, had already spent time scouring five different districts around Patna, Samastipur, Madhubani, Siwan and Muzzafarpur. These are all regions where weaving and craft have existing unique identities. The Kora team found that those with long established mastery in handloom weaving no longer wished for their families and children to continue in these traditions. They were seeking higher paid jobs like that of stone cutters, masons or drivers in towns even if it meant taking up jobs with a lower skill set. Rather than waste time wooing existing weavers, the team instead focused on people without any employment. In the villages of Siwan these were women who tended home and cattle without remuneration.

 

The challenge lay first in approaching them, as they would not come out of their homes to engage with strangers. So Satish, initially committed to spending six days a month, found himself spending 20 to 25 days on the project. He is grateful to an early team member, Veena Upadhyay, Director, Srijani Foundation, who broke the ice with the village women and initiated a conversation. After they had made a few initial forays, Ram Villasji from the Gandhi Ashram joined the team. An octogenarian spinner, he readily accompanied the team from village to village just to demonstrate the art and grace of hand spinning. No conversation or cajoling was required once people saw him sit under the central village tree and quietly turn cotton into yarn. People gathered and the women volunteered to learn hand spinning.

Where once the ‘saas’ domineered the social fabric of the village, the ‘bahu’ found a way to emerge from the shadows. These were all villages where electricity is scarce and therefore even television has not invaded homes. Instead of spending evenings bickering with each other or caving into inertia or boredom, both mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law congregate to spin yarn today. Each cluster has developed slight variations either by emulating a leader or by imitating a certain deftness of finger. Soon a signature will emerge in the thread – this is something to look forward to.

Satish’s eyes light up when he speaks about how ‘the hand sees’ in magically creating thread out of a fluff of cotton. An assured income of three thousand rupees a month, for a few hours of spinning per day, has very cleverly broken the hierarchy of an otherwise patriarchal society. These are women who for the first time in any generation are contributing towards the education of their children, to food, health care, water and even housing. For the first time, dignity of labour within their homes is appreciated and nurtured by husbands and brothers. So much so that finally, families are encouraging women to travel to collect their cotton.

 

Slowly and quite organically, complimentary skill sets have begun to emerge to support this growing wave of hand spinning and weaving. Men have taken up the task of specialized carpentry to make looms and charkas for the small khadi economy. People are trying their hands at bead making and pottery for adornment of yarn and fabric. And most radical of all, farmers have begun to grow varieties of short staple indigenous ‘desi’ cotton – all this is being done in Srikakulam, which is completely our initiative.

The situation, created as a result of introducing hand spinning as a form of recreation and community building, is that of simple content and peace – simple measures of true happiness. Two things stand out: first, we are witnessing history. A small experiment in interior rural Bihar has retraced cultural and economical steps in reverse. For the first time since the creation of the Lancashire mills in Britain fed by specifically cultivated long staple cotton crop grown in India, we are now specifically growing short staple cotton crop to hand spin yarn. And secondly: it is women at the helm of this enterprise. Another revolution, riding the waves of handspun khadi, has indeed begun again.

 

Having established our common pursuit, to see where our experiments with this truth lead, Satish readily agrees to participate in the second iteration of ‘Meanings, Metaphor’ in Coimbatore in January 2019. The team, curator Mayank and Satish are not quite certain of the various challenges that face us. We are no longer equals among our own handloom coterie. Instead, we find ourselves in an ocean of people who really know their cotton and everything about it.

Satish has offered to conduct some workshops over a few days on the art of hand spinning. He has specified that these workshops are most effective when the group size is restricted and limited to an intimate twenty people. At his events we find that the average group size is three hundred people. There is no bandwidth to share the Kora story with the women of Siwan, and now in few villages of Srikakulam, and the audience must urgently be engaged to prevent chaos descending. Again Satish stands up and takes control.

The audience, largely comprising of schoolboys, are all handed tufts of cotton. A quick demonstration of hand spinning is followed by splitting the audience into small community pockets of five or six to a group. Suddenly the hall is packed with groups of small boys egging each other on to spin longer threads without breaking the continuity. There is a sense of purpose and gaiety – other trademarks of happiness in getting a seemingly easy task going. As boys falter, another member of the group reaches out to take over – hand spinning, you realize, is physically taxing. Satish lets this happen a few times – team spirits are high. Then he plays his trump card and shows them the real peculiarity behind hand spinning. Stillness spreads across the audience. They are all meditating. It takes a moment to appreciate the severity of the act. Quiet your mind to master your energy.

Within minutes, untrained schoolboys are soon spinning thread as long as five meters. Several people comment on how life altering this experience can be. I am immediately taken back to a reference made in Chirala – that ‘the hands see’ while spinning. In essence, to spin yarn one must be in a calm, content and peaceful frame of mind otherwise simply put, the thread breaks. The action of spinning ensures this state of being. A simple experiment that lasted no longer than ten minutes on a bunch of unruly schoolboys – another experiment in a type of happiness.

 

Several more altruistic gestures emerge from our Coimbatore experience with Satish. Textile engineering colleges have reached out asking for help to frame a syllabus in hand spinning that can be taught as a regular course. Satish generously has left the children cotton to spin – in a few weeks a small bundle reaches us in Bangalore with a request to convert this yarn to fabric. It makes us acutely aware that rural India is no longer the only citadel of hand spinning and hand weaving. The skill set has come knocking on urban India’s door and we must prepare ourselves to make a home for it here. After all, hand spinning remains a niche skill set, globally, but practiced solely on the Indian subcontinent.

We meet a third time at the Bangalore show of ‘Meanings, Metaphor’ in April 2019. The setting is very pedagogical. Satish is with us to conduct a spinning workshop. We are all seated in a room filled with historical sarees made of unbleached erapatti or red desi cotton sarees. With him this time are different types of cotton and cotton seeds. He is addressing issues that are closer to a pollution ridden city dwellers heart. We have restricted the audience to a mere 50 people this time. They are an odd mix: industrialists, designers, housewives, artists, other khadi field workers and professional architects. I wonder what they could possibly have in common.

 

Within minutes of the session beginning, the conversation veers towards ‘scaling’ the prospects of hand spinning. Will this work in a highly industrial region like Gujarat? The room fills with scepticism – industrial workers have a higher salary and different lifestyle expectations. Satish answers from experience. Kora’s lessons in Andhra Pradesh, where now they also handspun cotton, is very different from Bihar. The key is to grow so slowly that the organization can course correct to accommodate culture and lifestyles. ‘It has to be more human centric, not module centric,’ says Satish. ‘We need to learn about the people in every village. In Bihar they lacked recreation. And that’s what we responded to. Perhaps another area lacks spirituality – and that’s what hand spinning must respond to.’

How will this ever be a product available for everyone if the output is so small and the demand so high? We are given a small lesson in khadi’s history – it has always been a precious product. Precious for its finesse of quality when made for emperors and precious to the common man when his own hands have twisted yarn to make a fabric that he wears himself. Precious yesterday, precious today and precious tomorrow. That is the nature of handspun yarn and so it is with the nature of happiness.

Perhaps the biggest revelation comes in acknowledging that the future of hand spinning and subsequently of hand weaving in India really lies with farmers and not with weavers, spinners, cotton connoisseurs, consumers or the government.

Satish truly believes that skill enhancement – and at the end of the day hand spinning and khadi are just another skill set – lies on the foundation of what raw materials and crops a nation cultivates. Short staple cotton lends itself to hand spinning, not vice a versa. I feel like we have the answer staring at us – all we have to do is pick it up and run with it.

 

By the end of the session, I begin to panic – no actual demonstration of hand spinning has taken place. I’m the only person in the room who notices this – everyone else has been too busy discussing the nature of handspun, various textures, weights and counts of cotton, the health benefits of hand spinning, wellness in this context and how to regenerate seeds and grow cotton in different ways within small spaces in the city. Satish takes control one more time – the group is not ready to break for lunch and settles back in to twist yarn between their fingers. Using Kora as an example, he explains that in his experience it’s best to find one’s own path to hand spinning and that khadi is a way of life.

In reality it cannot be taught but only learnt. Therefore the spirit of keeping hand spinning alive and well in India stems from the fact that there is no singular model to replicate – not from weaving cluster to weaving cluster, nor from one workshop in a city to another. Yet, the marvel of it all is that everyone who crosses his path does indeed learn to spin cotton with bare hands. A small but delightful measure of happiness.