If we have to celebrate hand loom day in the true sense of the term, it is time to right the historical wrongs that were continued in Independent India.
B. Syama Sundari
The Prime Minister’s call for declaring August 7th as World Handloom Day in 2015 came at a critical time in the sector. The sector is troubled by fundamental problems like difficulty in access to inputs and a lack of proper recognition of its contribution to the society and economy. For the past two decades, after the economy opened up to international markets, handloom has been fighting for cotton yarn and competing with Western markets even for this basic raw material input. The spiralling yarn prices and non-availability of the required counts and quantities of yarn when needed has resulted in a total wiping out of handloom clusters across the country.
Syama Sundari did Ph.D in Philosophy from Hyderabad Central University and worked on a critique of the current paradigm of development. Her tryst is to find out how theory translates into real life and he quest brought all her energies to see the sector where there is an interesting co-existence of the traditional and the modern. She started her innings in Dastkar Andhra as a Policy researcher and now she is Trustee of the organization.
Dastkar Andhra believes that supporting handlooms is critical to reduce migration to the cities and improve standard of living in the villages. The organization work through the markets to create awareness in the modern consumer about the relevance and importance of handlooms for our collective better future. email : shyama_b@rediffmail.com
While there is adequate demand for handlooms it is also important to recognize the fact that today the incomes from weaving do not match aspirations of the present times. Usually, weavers wanting to earn more are migrating to other professions. In a nutshell, this is the story of handloom weaving today. In this backdrop when the State decides to celebrate handlooms by declaring a particular day to be a handloom day, the feeling is one of betrayal and cynicism, not of relief that handloom is going to get its due.
The situation did not improve in the next two decades and the current crisis in the handloom sector can be traced back to the transformation of the economy and the society ushered in by liberalisation.
The shift in economic discourse prominently seen post liberalisation saw less emphasis on the earlier ideological precepts of employment generation, equality, social justice and socialism. Instead, the concepts of modernisation, efficiency, productivity and market-governed competition dominate our policy making. The radical change was clearly visible in the new textile policy introduced in 1985. This policy perfectly complemented the macro-economic reforms initiated in 1991. They paved the way for the liberalisation of the textile industry, boosting the export of yarn and dyes. The immediate impact on the handlooms was seen in increased prices of yarn and dyes pushing up the price of handlooms and bringing down demand. The situation did not improve in the next two decades and the current crisis in the handloom sector can be traced back to the transformation of the economy and the society ushered in by liberalisation.
The new textile policy in 2020 also emphasized technological upgradation, improving productivity, quality consciousness, product diversification, and increase in exports, through enriching skill sets with the help of IT institutions. This implied moving of weavers from their handlooms to mechanical production where standardisation of the product to match global demands is a possibility. There is a clear indication to replace traditional occupations which require more human agency, labelling them as imperfect, slow, drudge, lacking in the capacity to scale up and financially unrewarding, etc. The question that naturally crops up in this backdrop is, if we do away with traditional occupations, what do want to replace them with?
Take the current popular slogan “make in India” and how we instantly resonate with it. If this connect is only in so far as we believe it would make us nationalistic and promoter of domestic industries, it will remain only an empty slogan.
It is important to remember at this point that a staggering 93% of Indian jobs are in the informal sector, and an increasing number of these are carried out in exploitative conditions. For the poor, it means either no employment at all, or insecure, exploitative and unsafe jobs at construction sites, mines, industries, dhabas, and other places that can hardly be called less drudgery. In this rhetoric a person weaving cloth by hand is tagged as “unskilled” and is pushed to take up the job for example, of a security guard or other such work which do not present any scope to enhance the skill they possess or teach them a new skill.
Take the current popular slogan “make in India” and how we instantly resonate with it. If this connect is only in so far as we believe it would make us nationalistic and promoter of domestic industries, it will remain only an empty slogan. Unless we gear up to make big changes in the way we live and interact, ‘make in India’ or ‘swadeshi’ remain meaningless.
After 75 years of journeying into development through promotion of heavy industries, centralization and mechanization on a large scale, we are hard put to recognize the processes involved in producing anything; small or big, simple or complex. We have become good at aggregation and assembling; we gave up our skills in manufacturing.
The only reason handloom survived in India was the inability of the machine to produce designs made on handloom.
Unfortunately, the current State approach seems to mimic the colonial attitudes to the sector. The flooding of machine-made cloth from Britain threw thousands of weavers and poor women spinners out of work by 1830s. The only reason handloom survived in India was the inability of the machine to produce designs made on handloom. Handloom weaving received a boost in the nineteenth century when Gandhi made charkha, the spinning wheel, a symbol of the freedom struggle and urged everyone to spin yarn.
It is not an exaggeration to say that in many villages across the country only the old and disabled are left behind.
However, the villages today are sucked out of their resources both economic and moral and are dependent on the city for survival. It is not an exaggeration to say that in many villages across the country only the old and disabled are left behind. All able-bodied men and women migrate to cities for work. Even in places where there is significant amount of agriculture, the markets are not local and hence the produce requires large storage spaces to keep while the farmers check the market for best prices. In some places agriculture lands are being converted to brick manufacturing units that again service the ever-growing real estate in the cities.
There are some villages which still have a good number of handloom weavers but they too produce cloth which caters to distant markets. Except for the loom in the house, none of the production processes are in the hand of the local community. Yarn is produced by mills located hundreds of miles away and dye stuff is also manufactured in chemical factories located only in certain States. The primary input of yarn is not in the hands of the producer. Cotton can be grown locally but it has to be baled and transported across borders before it can be spun into yarn and then again transported back to the village. The final product coming from the loom again has to change many hands, travel many borders before it reaches the customer. In this long value chain, there is no independence for the producer and no viable argument for the sustainability of the environment.
There is a need for an independent Ministry for Handlooms which takes into cognizance the specific requirements of the handloom sector beginning from the basic input of yarn.
If we have to celebrate handloom day in the true sense of the term, it is time to right the historical wrongs that were continued in Independent India. There is a need for an independent Ministry for Handlooms which takes into cognizance the specific requirements of the handloom sector beginning from the basic input of yarn. And every scheme that is devised should not be a proxy to the ultimate move to transition into powerloom (the mechanical loom). An honest recognition of the special character of the production process which is specific to handlooms like the community nature of the activity and the dignity of the independent producer, not at the mercy of the market or the State; all these qualities need to be cherished for handlooms to revive and flourish. Let us not forget that our country contributes to 90% of handloom production in the world – this is a heritage that does not need protection, but the right kind of nurturing!