HAND weaving exists as a complex mesh of inter-relationships between people, communities, and nature. It is, like ecology, a study in dynamics. The assertion that handcrafted, human-powered production not only exists, but can flourish and even meet the future needs of communities sustainably is the basis of this paper. What we argue against is the dominant rhetoric of Indian handloom weavers’ practice that is labelled either as aesthetic cultural goods, authentic heritage and exclusive hobby craft, or as outdated production, inefficient work and unskilled labour. The handloom weaver constantly encounters this rhetoric in society (the market and in policy spheres) presented as a series of dualities that she is forced to choose between, in ways that systematically diminish her reality.

What do we mean by binaries in craft? In this paper, we examine three of the more common ones: artist or artisan, authentic or fake, and work or leisure. Some others of significance are: profession or caste, text or orality, tacit or explicit, fine or coarse, knowledge or skill. We find that, without exception, they originate in essentialist ideas of knowledge, identity and craft.

Any selection among these binaries imposes constraints on the weaver’s way of knowing and being, and her ability to sustain her practice. The political and market categories that emerge from these binaries – schemes, certifications, awards, labels, and tags – are in active denial of the complexity of the weaver’s ecology. Some of these labels perpetrate violence on the community by only allowing them to define their work in terms of what it’s not. Given that the weaver’s practice is centred on her body, how then can she negotiate with society in other ways? Particularly, what kind of epistemology would support her reality? We recognize that in theories of embodied knowledge there already exists a body of work that rejects principles of Cartesian dualism. In this exploratory essay, drawing on lessons from queer ecology, we study other ways of engaging with bodies and nature that constantly question these constructed binaries, and offer exciting new possibilities that can help subvert them.

 

Binary narratives of craft, even when based on contemporary critiques of modernity, begin to serve as a vector for masculine memes such as a restoration of the authentic, and fetishizing the natural aesthetic – a quest to project the crafts as pure, organic and unblemished. It is these binaries that we must assert as obsolete and harmful. We argue that not only do they harm the weaver but that they create new forms of inferiority in the material world. We begin by examining three of these binaries, and their attendant consequences.

The Aesthetic question – Artist/Artisan: Aziz Khatri, an expert Bandhani (tie-and-dye) cratftsperson in Kutch, uses traditional skills to accomplish his creative vision. In his practice of the craft, he uses closely spaced knots and fine tie-threads to create textiles that are considered museum-worthy. He would like to be recognized as an artist rather than merely an artisan. This however leads to his products being confined to certain market niches, and the ability to only work with specialized workers in his practice. The market also forces him to execute ever more complex designs in the same specialized vein to continue justifying the label of an ‘artist’. Since the market defines artistry in narrow terms of yarn count, and fineness, it simultaneously robs the artisan of their creative freedom, and their ability to occupy multiple market niches. To essentialize artistry in these terms, of design complexity, or fineness of yarn or the number of man-hours needed, takes away from other creative possibilities that exist for the artisan. What the tie thread is to Bandhani, yarn count is to handloom weaving. Finer yarn counts do offer more ‘resolution’ (for executing more complex patterns), but the intense focus on this as the sole form of artistry, places an unfair burden on the weaver.

Both detractors and supporters of handloom weaving tirelessly recommend that the weaver’s only path to survival is to constantly refine and narrow their practice, to make only those textiles that cannot be reproduced by the machines of the day. Weavers were advised to use ‘exotic’ fibers, multiple yarns in the same fabric, extra weft techniques, ‘complex’ designs, slubbed yarns or yarns of multiple counts, and of course, ever finer yarn counts (from 80s to 120s and beyond). This idea of skilled practice implicitly cedes the weavers’ right to use ordinary, coarse cotton yarn to produce basic everyday cloth, since that is seen as the preserve of the efficient machine. Pushing handloom fabric as it does to a niche, it limits the access of handloom fabric to only the elite 1% of the market. It neatly dovetails with capitalist ideas of reserving hand crafted products as elite goods, while the lion’s share of the market is dominated by energy intensive mills run with a cheap and easily replaceable workforce.

 

This binary says that weavers who have the right to exist in this age are those highly specialized ones whose work cannot be reproduced by the machines of the day (as yet). The consequent reduction in diversity that weavers rely on, and that support connected occupations, is invisible to this argument: cotton seed varieties, the possibility of participation for non-caste or elderly/young weavers and so on. Finally, it erases the creative possibilities that weavers are capable of, at either end of the scale, in producing coarse or fine fabric. Placing the weaver’s future always in relation to the machine’s present capability, this approach to evaluating the weaver introduces new inferiorities: it privileges certain techniques as complex and evolved, even as it condemns others as simple and unsophisticated. In essence it creates a tyrannical new aesthetic derived from underlying biases about the role of the weaver in the age of mechanical reproduction. In asking the weaver to conform to this binary, it oppresses her by taking away her freedom to be both an artist and an artisan-producer, and even when choosing the ‘better’ option of being an artist, alienates her practice from the vast majority of her own community.

The Authentic Question – Authentic/Fake: Ghanshyam Sarode reintroduced Jamdani weaving in Uppada, East Godavari district, using ‘authenticity’ as a brand. Many weavers have copied that brand and use the technique in the marketplace. Initially, his was an effort at revival of the traditional Jamdani technique, rather than of the traditional Uppada saree. Sarode travelled to Uppada, where he knew there were experimental and skilled weavers and set up the first looms, in the mid-1980s. At the time, it was a speciality product with a niche market which saw this as revival of the traditional technique of Jamdani. During the yarn crisis twenty-five years later, in 2012, weavers outside Uppada took it up, and more designers started ordering sarees directly from weavers rather than through Sarode. This gave the saree visibility in newer and more fashionable and trendy markets as the ‘Uppada Jamdani’ saree named after the village. A whole history was made up for it, the Uppada Jamdani sari, as the Hindu reports, ‘was once woven exclusively for the royal houses of Pitapuram, Venkatagiri and Bobbili.’ The irony is not lost on Sarode; he had a huge role to play in creating this identity, drawing from cultural memory in the market place. Uppada Jamdani was now an invented tradition, neither innovation, nor completely authentic.

 

This binary is enforced through the pressure that every single handloom weaver is haunted by, to be ‘authentic’. Whether it is the fiber, the loom, the dye, the location of their practice, the design or motifs used and finally their own identity, the framing of this question completely ignores the reality of the weaver’s practice. Ideas, looms, materials, designs and people have historically evaded all attempts to be neatly boxed, and repeatedly travelled through spaces and times to be at the service of diverse weaving communities when needed. Yet, in the face of unprotected copying by power looms of the creative products of the handloom, the weaver carries the heavy burden of proving that her material and practice is authentic, in almost every interaction with the market or the government. The only place she escapes this question is in her local market, when she produces cloth for daily use, but tragically, this is precisely the space that she is asked to vacate by the artist/artisan binary.

The Production Question – Work/Leisure: In large parts of Northeastern India, weaving as practiced almost exclusively by women, and largely on bamboo loinlooms, is integral to the family and the community. Production factors such as the structure of the loom, yarn counts, selection of patterns, width of the textile, garment design – all combine to make this an activity that can be done in the comfort of one’s home, and at a pace that is suitable to the weaver. Frequently, women will spin on drop spindles while at church or hanging out with friends and neighbours. In the words of the late designer-activist Sonnie Kath, ‘Weaving forms a part of our daily life, not only as a productive economic activity, but also as a craft that is enjoyed and valued for multiple reasons.’

 

Handloom weaving is a craft that compels us to explore a non-essentialist idea of work. The economic acts of weaving are enmeshed in the life of the community, and occur along with periods of leisure, play, care giving and socializing. Feminist economists have advanced critiques of the separation of work and leisure, pointing out that gendered forms of labour – such as child-care – are often made invisible because they appear to occur during women’s ‘free time’. In reducing weaving to a livelihood question, this binary forces the weaver to define themselves only as wage labour that can then be legislated into existence in economic terms. It eliminates the immense complexity of her home, street and village. The fact that children learn how to weave by playing at the loom, that there exists a diversity of patterns and yarns that can be woven by the young and the old, that a weaver herself may garden, cook, farm, dye, size, card, gin and spin – at various times of the day or the year – are possibilities that don’t exist in the work/leisure binary. It strips the weaver of all these possibilities and imprisons her on the loom. When presenting handloom weaving purely as a full-time occupation, with defined hours and specialized roles, this framework ignores the social fabric that has been historically crafted, of how weaving communities still exist owing to this immense flexibility of structuring work and leisure.

Having seen the oppression of the above binaries, how does one challenge them? Here, we are inspired by Timothy Morton’s formulation in his foundational paper on queer ecology. Queer textual form offers ‘an open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and resonances’ as opposed to idealized nature-derived metaphors based on spider webs or rhizomes which tend to deal with binaries through erasing contradictions. Queering gives us a distinctive method that breaks down essentialist views and dichotomies, and in its rejection of strict categories and rigid identities, can help the weaver subvert the underlying logic of the binaries she faces.

 

Biologists now recognize that important distinctions such as man/woman, host/parasite, life/non-life, natural/synthetic, organism/environment, sexual/asexual, human/non-human, are not settled questions and resist binary classification. For example, many organisms switch between sexual and asexual methods of reproduction depending on environmental factors. In another example, it has been found that up to 8% of the human genome has its origins in infections from retroviruses. Some of these genes perform crucial functions such as suppressing maternal immunity towards the foetus, so that the mother’s body does not reject the foetus as alien. Genes coded by endogenous retroviruses perform important functions during pregnancy due to which reproduction is made possible. This raises questions of essentializing categories and strikes at the very heart of the binary formulation of what it means to be authentically human.

Therefore, we propose that narratives of craft have much to learn from queer theory and activism, which explicitly involve rejecting binaries both epistemically and materially. Epistemically, binaries set up mutually exclusive ways of knowing the world, and materially these binaries result in violence both to those categorized by them, and to those who refuse to be categorized by them. Learning to reject those binaries, then, requires us to first understand how they arise.

 

Perhaps the first lesson from the tradition of scientific epistemics is this – from smaller things do larger things arise. From electrons and protons we find atoms, from molecules are built cells, and bodies are in fact organs connected in specific and deliberate ways. To understand how something behaves, it seems, we must necessarily find out the singular matter out of which they are made.

This view of knowledge informs more than just science. Methodological individualism, the key philosophical underpinning of mainstream economics, is founded on the idea that to understand a market or an economy, we must investigate individual decisions. From this framework economists obtain micro-founded macroeconomics, in which they understand the production of an entire country through the lens of a single agent. Borrowing this approach from natural science is no accident, either – rather it is the consequence of a desire by economists to make the field an objective science.

The epistemology from which such approaches arise causes harm in diverse, seemingly unconnected domains. The drive to reduce phenomena into their constituent parts destroys the context in which those phenomena arise and replaces it with a lens that calls itself objective while carefully papering over any evidence that can be seen only through understanding difference, rather than sameness.

We already know that such reductive approaches fail. Simply because cloth is a collection of threads does not mean that a saree’s temple border – ‘Kuppadam’ in Telugu – can be identified in any single filament. Neither is a melody merely a series of notes, each of which stands on its own. Knowing cloth, or music, is about seeing the sum of their parts. To reduce them is to diminish them.

In biological investigations of sex and gender, hormones often become the site in which reductionist, binary division is discovered. Cordelia Fine calls the reduction of men’s behaviour to the impact of ‘male’ hormones the myth of ‘Testosterone Rex’. This is set up as a foil to explanations of women’s behaviour that are attributed to ‘female’ hormones, such as oestrogen.

 

We see this framework everywhere, perhaps most recently in the case of South African runner Caster Semenya. Semenya lost an appeal in the Swiss Supreme Court against regulations that required her to artificially lower the levels of testosterone in her body, in order to ensure a ‘level’ playing field. Such a decision is necessarily founded on the idea that Semenya’s hormonal levels somehow disqualify or impede her from being a woman. Womanhood, therefore, becomes about the physical qualities of one’s body, to be discovered and judged by science. Of course, such a decision was no doubt also based on her race and nationality – nobody suggests that Michael Phelps, whose body does not produce as much lactic acid as most others, should be required to inject that acid into his veins in order to level the playing field for every other Olympic swimmer.

Instead of starting from this epistemic objectivity that then purports to discover the attributes that men and women have through scientific investigation, trans activists the world over have asserted a contrary view – that people who say they are men are men, and people who say they are women are women. In this frame, hormones or genitals or hair or any other characteristic do not determine sex or gender. Rather, scientists discover the kinds of bodies people of different genders have, after epistemically establishing that the key determinant of gender is self-expression, not ‘biological’ characteristics of the body.

Such an approach is not, of course, unique or uncontested. Queer and trans people are not a monolith and neither are their lived experiences or understandings of their realities. Many queer people believe that there is a biological, deterministic reason from which queerness springs, and seek to discover those reasons using the same epistemology that seeks to discover the reasons for heterosexuality and/or straightness. Indeed, much of this resistance has been motivated by a culture that insists that queerness is a ‘choice’ that people can choose not to make. This kind of argument in popular culture, especially in the western scientific tradition, has caused pushback asserting instead that queer people are – to borrow from Lady Gaga – ‘born this way’.

 

The link between matters being subjective to them being a ‘choice’ is also one that leads from a view about objectivity that is instilled in western science. Things that we know objectively – like the strength of gravity or the molecular makeup of water – are not subject to debate. To deny that water is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen is to deny reality itself. On the other hand, if queerness is subjective, then it must be the case that it can be questioned until we reach an objective answer. No wonder many queer people have, in the face of such an attack, sought to show that queerness is objective fact, and that science can show the existence of that fact in the same way as it can show that a cell has a nucleus.

To be clear, the reason this debate matters is that the long-held view that straight bodies and straight people are the norm underpins the structural denial of dignity to queer people, and to trans people most of all. An epistemology that assumes bodies can be known through their essentialized constituent parts is one that functions to ensure that all people with bodies that do not fit the norm are erased, and if they are unwilling to be erased, they are denied.

 

The clarion call to reject this epistemology outright has a long history in queer movements. The existence and validity of trans bodies need not be explained in specific biological variation – it must be asserted as true. Here, Caster Semenya’s womanhood is not contingent on her hormone levels, it is the product of the simple fact that she says she is a woman. The scientific process should not interrogate whether queer people ‘really’ exist – rather it should begin from queer existence as fact. It is this approach that is taken by trans activists. It is important to note that though it has become more visible in recent years, trans people have existed visibly and invisibly throughout history. Rather than compromising with a scientific process that assumes that straight bodies are the norm but might be willing to accommodate queerness, they have rejected it wholesale.

‘I have looked leaving my body in the eye and I have said, in the end, hell no.’

– Rev. Elena Rose Vera, Writer and Trans activist.

We propose that just as gender and sexuality should be determined by self assertion, so also theorizing her craft practice is best determined and informed by a weaver’s self declaration. Between objective reality, and a choice between binaries, self-assertion offers a way that does not set these two as opposites, but sees them as they are, two sides of an epistemic framing that only perpetuates itself.

There is evidence to show that this can be an effective strategy. Until 2012, as per the Handloom Reservation Act, 1985, the handloom was defined ‘as any loom other than powerloom’. In 2012, the government of India decided to change the definition of what ‘handloom’ was, in order to ‘improve productivity and manual labour’, based on a framing of the weaver’s work in terms of manual labour rather than knowledge. They suggested that handloom could be any loom, where at least one process of weaving included manual interven tion or human energy for production. The stated intention was to remove the ‘drudgery’ in handloom work and it sought to remove the distinction between handloom and powerloom. Following strident opposition from weavers, the government was forced to roll back its handloom definition.

To be forced to define oneself only in terms of what one is not, by legislative order, is a singularly degrading experience, and one that has been faced and challenged by queer communities worldwide. The handloom cannot be defined as ‘not a power-loom’; equally it cannot be conflated with the powerloom.

Just as queer theorists cite biology to show us there is no such thing as an authentic life-form we argue that there is no such thing as a singular and authentic craft practice. Rather, to better participate in a craft practice we need to not just consume craft products but engage with questions such as the violence of epistemic arguments on lived realities, the performance of creativity, ideas of work and leisure, and what constitutes knowledge in and of bodies.

 

In sum, essentializing binaries constrain our understanding of the weaver’s practice. Even as they try to comprehend the immense complexity of her work, they reduce and diminish it. This is because the process of knowledge building is itself profoundly violent; it labels, tags, classifies and binarizes with ruthless speed. It creates false dichotomies of oppositional categories that divides people who weave and sets up seemingly unsolvable contradictions.

Inspired by Morton’s formulation, we find that combining insights from biology with the power of the queer textual form gives us the ability to formulate an entirely new understanding of diversity and difference, free from the coercive nature of binary classifications. In a sense such an understanding derived from nature’s complexity has immense liberatory capacity for the crafts. It has the potential to help society understand the weaver’s place in the modern world, and to ‘suppose a multiplication of differences at as many levels and on as many scales as possible.’

 

What then can an axiomatic assertion offer handloom weaving and craft communities? Queer theory presents a non-essentialist view of gender and sexuality: theorizing the loom requires us to have exactly such a non-essentialist view of knowledge and work. Queer communities have long been at the forefront of rejecting such epistemic oppression, and helping society find creative and compassionate ways to understand complexity and diversity. Hence we feel that attempts to build such solidarities and knowledge partnerships can help us preserve and multiply these diversities of practice and form, and can help inspire a whole new dialogue with the crafts. This in turn can lead to the creation of modern forms (institutions, structures, frameworks, labels) for production, marketing and research that can take into account the diversity of weaving practices, and lend themselves suitably to the weavers world.

 

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