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A new creation myth

Chirala, a small town in Andhra Pradesh, was once a great trading town, where weavers and buyers from all over the South of India congregated in a permanent market place peopled with rows and rows of handloom stalls. It was a traditional weaving centre once known for the Real Madras Handkerchief exported to far-off Africa. It has no saree of its own today but possesses a mindset open to all weaves and all variants, with innovative weavers shrewd enough to read and lead the market. Even today, 20,000 weavers live in its penumbra – master weavers, cooperatives, weavers unions alike, thrive. Like every old town, it is part nostalgia, part reality, a four-hundred-year-old existence wavering between dream and possibility.

The Chirala meeting of handloom weavers, activists, experts and scholars in November 2018 started as an experiment with weavers to craft a gathering place, a Kumbh for craftsman on weaving, a site that performs like a commons. When four hundred men and women expert weavers from across the country come to a 20,000-weaver cluster to meet, to talk, to gossip, to listen to each other, one realizes that the struggle of the hand loom cannot be an act of mourning. It has to be an act of invention, of celebration. It was a celebration that a hundred more people, activists, designers, scholars, policy makers, musicians joined in; visitors flowing in and out during the ebb and flow of the ten day event.

True struggle, or what we dub the effort to survive as a community, as a mentality, cannot become a habit. If you meet out of habit, recite your pieces out of habit, tiredness itself makes the conversation a litany of defeats. It becomes then a panchayat that generates a mere complaint box. But once in a while a miracle happens and one calls it serendipity, and receives it as God’s little extra for those who keep trying. This was the momentous encounter that slowly evolved into a being called Chirala.

As the conversation flowed, like a village meeting, one discovered a new sense of togetherness. We realized in a moment of insight that language was ironically a bar between us at the meeting. But it was not just English. We discovered that languages and conversations have their own cultures. When you put people on a podium, they watch from a distance and sight abandons the listener. The ritual is alienating when speakers sit next to you, a different conversation and community is born. Body language has an intimate dialect of its own. When you put a loom in a museum, it is relegated to the past. When you place a loom next to a working craftsman, language acquires embeddedness, vitality as the loom illustrates language, and the weaver’s body speaks.

As we journeyed together through the ten days, we realized that we did not want to be captive to a discourse, merely reactive to a grid of definitions where craft was always defeated or obsolescent history, where the language of univocal policy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We first wondered if it was the language of English, the flat lethal politeness of English that debilitates the conversation between the weavers and others. However, English created not just barriers to communication, but a cage of categories. Its discourse, its policy, already determined thought. In the company of weavers, we unconsciously switched to the vernacular, the languages of livelihood. A new effervescence was released and a moment of epiphany was born.

We call it the Chirala moment, when illumination comes to all. It was a moment of being which became an act of becoming; a moment when craft struggles realized that struggle itself is a craft that needs a new theory, a new script, a new creation myth. We confronted the fact that our old words were necrophilic as a narrative. We realized that livelihood had to surge towards life. As different languages, like rivulets of narratives on weaving, flowed into a mix of translation, lakes of experience and memory merged into an ocean of understanding, a churning that brought illumination. A manthan. The storyteller and the theorist became simultaneously alive in us as laymen and experts abandoned their dualisms to listen to each other. An experience in epiphany of understanding each other was born.

We realized our common idiocy, we were too apologetic about craft as being, treating it as a defeated knowledge, a stigma called ‘sunset industry’, something people shrug off as ‘a marginal way of life.’ We discovered at that moment, a margin could be a ‘border’, flowing along, holding in the body and framing it in jewel like colour.

Fifteen million weavers constitute a universe of their own. Craft is not a lesser form of knowledge but a different form of living, being, theorizing and remembering; that craft as grammar, myth, ritual needed to be spelt out, that craft was knowledge, but a knowledge that one felt obscene to patent; that craft needed a different kind of theorizing because its time summoned a different form of being. A craft is not a set of dry techniques, mimicking paradigms of modernity doomed to obsolescence. A craft is embodied knowledge, a living sensorium, speaking its own vernacular, a performative art, an epic of technology, which required a different kind of storytelling, where technology, cosmology, epistemology, memory and time spoke a whole language that was not fragmented. A craft is a summons to memory, to the performative of orality, to the time of cycles, where the cosmos recreates itself in every act of crafting.

Where perfection is a reminder of creation, where the idea of classic invokes the memory of the original act,

where reproduction is also a renewal of text and myth embodied in materiality,

where craft speaks not the impoverishment of linearity but the epic of cycles,

where repetition is renewal, where orality as a performance is reborn, not as mechanical repetition but as a ritual of creativity.

We realized that if language and life went together then the language of the loom must come to life, which is what happened when a hundred looms went to work speaking a different weave of body languages. We discovered the magic in diversity, and grasped that policy is a univocal language that needs to hear the dialects of survival, suffering and sharing.

Chirala became a moment where a struggling community voiced a new manifesto. Dreams, like lives, need to be renewed beyond a language of secondariness, when craft was a metaphysics of practice, no longer relegated to technique, a moment where cosmology, commons and everydayness went hand in hand. Chirala announced a moment when craft was no longer apologetic about itself.

We realized we were always a world of possibilities, a horizon of alternatives

Where our theory functioned

As hermeneutics

As holism of parts and wholes, not broken fragments

As a weave of heuristics

A bundle of hypothesis to be tried out every day

An invitation to a learning ritual

Where every performance is an experiment, a demonstration, a renewal of the self.

Magically, the tiredness and doubt of decades disappeared as craftsmen refused the categories that museumized them. One realized that craft is a world where technology and community are invented together, where music, weaving, cooking, the myriad vernaculars share a common source, where crafts in their search for cognitive justice realize that they are the alternative that makes a different future possible. A therapeutic for a modern world which life needs and the body requires, which myth feeds on, where diversity enacts itself through colour, skill, memory and texture. Chirala is a moment where craft merges with the Anthropocene in the abandonment of the Promethean myth. A recognition that craft can be a way of living for the future.

Years ago, Ananda Coomaraswamy called the Indian future, ‘a post-industrial society’ of crafts, a world where crafts are reborn epistemically as a creation myth for the future; Chirala is a manifesto for that moment of waiting, where orality is reborn again, where epics become alive, where the sacred becomes a practiced weave of aesthetics, ethics and technology, where a moment of exploration became a moment of liberation, where we realized that democracy itself is a weave that needs new textures, a loom of imaginaries, where in weaving livelihood we craft new forms of hope and belonging.

Once, we went to a meeting of weavers and we called it Chirala.

Shiv Visvanathan