The hand, the heart and the head

RTA KAPUR CHISHTI

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UNTIL the mid-19th century, every fabric ranging from cart linings to bed clothing, draped garments to home furnishings, including floor coverings, were handspun and handwoven. It was in this context that the British administration in India began to import and supply mill spun yarns from Lancashire and later, plain mill made fabrics for multiple uses. Therefore, with this onslaught, patterned fabrics survived much longer, and the now well known J. Forbes Watson Volumes published in 1860 with actual fabric swatches with borders of saris, dhotis and angavastrams, was revealing.

The introduction to the 18 volumes stated that this was to educate British manufacturers about the needs and requirements of the market they had to dominate. Over three to five days, five hundred sets that were published, sold out at 750 pounds per set. The avid manufacturer, hungry for business, was keen to equip himself for this most daunting enterprise.

Mahatma Gandhi understood this process of takeover and in his endeavour to bring together and involve vast numbers of people from across all backgrounds, communities and regions at fairly low cost, reintroduced the charkha for hand spinning. It was an exercise to bring together the head, the heart and the hand in the pursuit of liberation and to create an army of citizens imbued with profound introspection, using an inner strength to walk the path of non-violence. This coincided with his appeal to the upper classes to burn all their imported fabrics. The visible impact of both these acts of defiance was unprecedented and actively brought all sections of society into the freedom movement, standing as one unified ‘wall’ of denial and provocation.

 

By the time of Independence, there was a vast Gandhian network of people who believed in the need for widespread employment, and were knowledgeable about the multiple qualities of natural raw materials in cotton, wool and silk. They were able to create a task force at minimal wage levels, who could disperse the raw materials for spinning, check the yarn that was handspun for count and quality, and coordinate with weavers the pre and post loom making of fabrics, saris, bed linen and home products for a vast network of retail outlets. The more coarse varieties such as cart linings were made for local use and consumed at the village level. It was this infrastructure, when formalized, that came under the umbrella of the KVIC (Khadi and Village Industries Commission).

This organization flourished till the 1970s, but its visible decline was evident with the endorsement of the hand turned semi-mechanized ‘ambar charkha’ of which a two-spindle version had been shown to Gandhiji in 1942 as a means of enhancing production. His tacit approval seemed to have given a free hand to KVIC to encourage this mechanism, which was based on the suction process of mill spinning machines.

Soon the number of spindles increased from two to eight to sixteen and even twenty, as it is today. With this increase of spindles, it became difficult for women to hand turn the spinning lever. By the 1980s, small motors of 100 hp were being attached to the device and today we find the distance between the mill spun yarn and the ambar charkha yarn of equivalent count, less distinguishable from one another. This also led to powerloom weaving of such plain fabrics with a percentage of terrycot introduced to enhance the strength of the yarn at the spinning stage.

Powerlooms were mill machinery being sold to hand weaving areas that had access to electricity, while mill machinery was being upgraded. This move towards greater mechanization cut at the very root of textured, low twist khadi, breathable and absorbent in the summer and warm due its fibrous density in the winter, traditionally spun in various counts from fine to coarse.

 

With greater encouragement to the semi-mechanized ambar charkha, a certain standardization of counts began to take place and practical volume production considerations became increasingly dominant. This coincided with the depleting numbers of Gandhians who had originally run the organization and the task force. The new entrants who had come to the organization as employees in similar government supported institutions, sidelined many of them. They did not necessarily share the Gandhian vision or understand the special qualities of khadi and its benefits.

By this time, the KVIC was supporting itself largely through rebate enticements, usually given around Gandhiji’s birthday on October 2, when large volumes of khadi were purchased for state-run organizations such as the railways and other government institutions.

This greater emphasis on mechanization also coincided with the setting up of six sliver making plants in different parts of the country, which in effect destroyed the unique features of up to eighty varieties of cotton that were indigenous to India. By this time many hybrid varieties of cotton were being cultivated and by the 1990s, genetically modified cottons were introduced as well. Except for some special varieties such as suvin, which was exclusively cultivated for fine count ambar charkha spinning, the large range of cottons produced was mixed in the sliver making plants to be cleaned, combed, carded therein and turned onto cones for standard lower or medium counts.

 

This turn towards quantitative spinning put the desi charkha spinning on the back-burner as the short pooni or sliver was less readily available. During my visit to central Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in 2003, the traditional charkhas were lying idle and did not receive raw material or employment from KVIC. The living conditions were abysmal and there were no alter-native employment opportunities especially for women who did not want to migrate to urban areas.

It is under these conditions that NREGA or MGNREGA as it is now known, was conceived as a rural employment guarantee scheme for at least 100 days a year. This, however, further adversely affected skill levels by drawing people of higher skilled professions into road construction or whatever was offered in the vicinity of their village. Often, such schemes were putting people on a dole system who went to work for an hour or two, marked their attendance and took a wage lower than the stipulated amount. As a result, they were vulnerable and at the contractors’ mercy and judgment. This was also a time when migration from rural to urban areas increased as rural employment fell from previous levels. This process has accelerated over the last five to eight years.

 

We have taken for granted, as it were, that greater urbanization is the only path to greater productivity and progress. We are trying to replicate in a matter of seventy years the industrialization model that the western world took two hundred and fifty years to complete, at a very steep social and human cost. Most migrants to the cities and towns are visible and living in the vast slum belts that surround the high-rise structures they built working as labour, but who do not have access to the promised better life that they had aspired to through migration. This model of industrialization has already been questioned in the West, but we in India are not prepared to confront the questions that are being raised. It is primarily regarding the promotion of high consumption levels not only of basic needs, but also of energy and raw materials that make it unsustainable in the long run.

It is in this context that Martand Singh (Mapu) having worked for approximately ten years as the youngest director of the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad, through the 1970s till the early 1980s, focused on a reinvention of this sector. Seven exhibitions were commissioned under the broad title of ‘Vishwakarma’ (including the 1981 Vishwakarma: Master Weavers; 1983 Vishwakarma: Pudupavu; 1984 Vishwakarma: Rasa; 1984 Vishwakarma: Dhaari; 1985 Vishwakarma: Jaali; 1986 Vishwakarma: Ksetra; and 1990 Vishwakarma: Birds and Animals), which began the revival. These were the visible skill sets that were showcased at the Festivals of India held in the UK, USA, France, Russia, Japan and several other countries before they travelled to many cities in India.

Spearheaded by a formidable and knowledgeable aesthete, Pupul Jayakar, who was adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for seventeen years, appointed Mapu to lead the project. He was universally recognized as mentor, master curator to a generation, if not more, of craftspeople, textile scholars and designers. Outstanding catalogues that became collectors’ volumes along with the Jayakar Volumes which contained fabric swatches of handloom fabrics from the finest counts and weaves to their coarsest counterparts, accompanied the exhibitions he curated. Handcrafted Indian Textiles, a selection of hundred and forty textiles from the various Vishwakarma exhibitions, was published in 2000.

 

The ‘Saris of India’ project emerged from the first Vishwakarma exhibition because Mapu believed the sari would remain a primary mode of dress for the foreseeable future. However, to his dismay, we saw them disappear before our eyes, as blue jeans and western wear took over. Recently, over the last ten years we have been pleasantly intrigued by the resurgence of interest in the sari. The three Saris of India volumes were published between 1989 and 2010. The last was a compendium volume on saris from fifteen states titled Saris – Tradition and Beyond.

The Volkart Foundation, Switzerland, who had imported cotton and coffee from India for nearly two hundred years, and had wound up their business in the 1950s-60s to set up a foundation that would support ecologically viable industries, asked Mapu to suggest what he would like to celebrate from India’s rich tradition of textiles. This was in circa 2000. He proposed ‘Khadi – the Fabric of Freedom’. After having dedicated nearly thirty years to exploring pigment painted, dye painted, yarn and fabric resist, printed and woven textiles of excellence with their complexity of technique and aesthetic, Mapu was now returning to the most basic and pure quality of handspun yarn and handwoven fabric which was the primary distinguishing feature of khadi.

 

As in all his previous exhibitions and research projects, a small core team was brought together with Rakesh Thakore as designer, Rahul Jain as textile scholar and myself to develop the project and catalogue it with fabric swatches, in a limited edition of a hundred sets. This exhibition, ‘Khadi – the Fabric of Freedom’, travelled to four cities in India through 2002-03 and is now being taken beyond by the Registry of Saris, Bengaluru. The exposition has been to Chirala, Coimbatore, and has been shown in Bengaluru. Plans to take it to other cities and towns to commemorate the hundred and fiftieth birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi are underway.

The exhibit comprises of one hundred and eight fabrics in the natural shades of cotton whites to brown and a hundred and eight saris in shades of whites and natural dyes from West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, using the three shuttle and jamdani inlay weaving techniques. All exhibits up to 100s count are handspun on the desi charkha and only those above 120s count (the average count of mill spun yarn) in a range up to 450s count have been spun on the semi-mechanized ambar charkha. There is a conscious attempt to make them exclusive and non-competitive with mill made products.

At the end of the first round of Khadi – the Fabric of Freedom exhibition in 2002-03, travelling through various cities in India, Mapu suggested to the Volkart Foundation that I be given the responsibility of taking the khadi production story further. With my team of associates, we began to explore possibilities with the same production organizations that had worked on the prime exhibits for the original exhibition.

 

There were two major realizations: the first being the procuring of raw material of the same quality that had previously been used, was not guaranteed unless one included the cultivators in the discourse. This would assure us of the necessary raw material. The great advantage was that we were working with desi local cottons requiring no fertilizer, pesticide or irrigation other than available rainwater in the area. This in the context of the fact that we have already lost most of our eighty varieties of desi cottons to hybrid and genetically modified cottons that require high levels of fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation, and are far more susceptible to disease and weather fluctuations.

Second, that hand spinners must be given their due both in terms of compensation and assured continuity with annual enhancements, as they are also responsible for the cleaning, combing and carding ahead of hand spinning. Weavers who are willing to handle these low twist handspun yarns in three shuttle or jamdani inlay patterned weaves are also on the decline and must be further supported and enlarged. As in many instances, a mill warp or even silk has been substituted to cut short the weaving effort with a more fragile handspun yarn.

We started with a small push start grant from the Volkart Foundation working with four looms, four or five cultivators, six to eight spinners per loom and a dyeing facility that was two hundred kilometers away. The son of a weaver who was willing to give up a courier agency job in the city to return to his village on an equivalent salary looked after the entire operation. Today he is not only computer literate but also dyeing trained and the entire effort is more self-contained. Though the khadi handspun saris, stoles and fabrics were found to be surprisingly expensive by most people who came to the exhibitions, at least for the first three years, the market eventually did accept that they were far superior to khadi being produced elsewhere. This first experiment in Andhra Pradesh was enhanced with additional looms and led to a similar exercise in Vidarbha, Maharashtra, and a home furnishing project of a coarse count range in Uttar Pradesh.

 

We are now at a stage where we have found that to complete this entire cycle from raw material to end product sustainable, we need to enlarge the scale at every stage of the process from cultivation to spinning and weaving, without compromising on quality. Sustained financial backing by investors who believe in this kind of sustainable development is essential in the long-term. This is not only a financial challenge but also a delicate matter of building, ground up, a viable livelihood for hundreds, thousands and lakhs of people who could benefit by participating in such a venture.

At a time when large numbers of people are losing their traditional skill sets to join the mass exodus towards menial labour in the urban areas, this experiment could be a window of opportunity for a low-tech high skill option for development, unique to India, the last bastion on planet earth with fine living skill sets. There is a large market within India and abroad that could show the way for the ‘slow’ to grow with the ‘fast’.

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