The story of a fabric from Kerala’s Malabar region that made inroads into the industrial West but is fading into obscurity in modern times.
An unbleached fabric made from cotton sourced from the hot and dry areas of Tamil Nadu made its way to the weaving villages of Kerala and created history there. Calico, which made its appearance in pre-colonial and colonial India (although there have been mentions of it in writings dating as far back as the twelfth century), soon became synonymous with Kerala’s rich textile trade.
Today, calico—a name rooted in the port city of Calicut, now called Kozhikode—has nearly vanished from the region's collective memory. Once a cornerstone of India’s global cotton trade, the fabric was woven by generations of artisans from the Chaliya community (also called Saliya or Saliyars in other southern Indian states), known for its inter-generational tradition of handloom weaving. Then sought after in markets from Asia to Europe, calico today exists mostly as a historical reference.
Even among the weavers and textile experts Object spoke to, there was a lingering uncertainty: does true calico, as it was once known, still exist? In its extensive search for the fabric, Object could not find any solid proof of this coarse-textured cloth having any presence today.
The history of calico offers a window into the evolution of human civilisation, with each thread carrying memories of tradition, craft, and technological advancements. Its journey reflects the global shifts in trade, industry, and culture as well as the impact on the communities—particularly the marginalisation of the Chaliyas—whose livelihoods depended on the craft. Today, while calico is no longer woven in Kerala, its legacy remains deeply ingrained in the region’s fading weaving traditions.
As global markets shifted and colonial powers imposed their own textiles, Kerala’s famed calico gradually fell out of favour and was replaced by cheaper mass-produced fabrics from foreign mills.
However, centuries later, in the 1970s and 1980s, another fabric remarkably similar in texture and shape to calico travelled from Kerala’s shores to the industrial West. Kora, a simpler, unbleached cotton fabric woven by the same skilled hands of the Chaliya community, began to emerge as the successor to calico.
Sukumaran Nair, a handloom expert and a retired professor from the Indian Institute of Handloom Technology (IIHT), Salem, argued that calico was a fine, high-textured fabric whereas kora in the olden days referred to any plain, unbleached cotton fabric. “Kora was always the natural colour of raw cotton and was used to produce various types of fabric, ranging from cloth for garments to curtain material whereas calico was a plain grey fabric with a finer, smoother texture than kora,” he said.
While calico had carried Kerala’s reputation to Europe and the Middle East, kora became the last vestige of this tradition, a fabric that was in high demand with expert buyers. As the trade in kora grew, Chaliya weavers carried the weight of this new fabric—one bound by the same heritage, yet woven into a future that felt increasingly uncertain.
In the Chaliya village of Keezhariyur in Kerala’s Koyilandy Taluk, we uncovered the story of seventy-year-old Chathukutty MK, a skilled Chaliya weaver, through his brother, Dr M Narayanan, a Sanskrit professor at Brennan College, Thalassery.
Dr Narayanan explained that Chathukutty quit weaving a few years ago. Throughout the seventies and eighties, Chathukutty, his parents, and his siblings (a brother, an elder and a younger sister) worked in their family’s three weaving units, producing kora fabric. While the whole family contributed, it was Chathukutty who took the woven fabric to Kannur, Kerala’s bustling textile hub, often referred to as the ‘Manchester of Kerala’, for its thriving handloom and power loom industries.
“Kerala saw a ‘kora boom’ between 1970 and 1977,” said Dr Narayanan. “The Chaliya weavers in the village received steady orders from textile dealers in Kannur, who supplied the thread and paid wages when the fabric was delivered. The demand for kora was so high that everyone in the family took turns weaving to keep up.”
In this burgeoning economy in the summer of 1978, a then-twenty-four-year-old Chathukutty and his family’s home-based handloom unit, located on the banks of the Muthambi river, provided their livelihood. This river, winding through their village, flowed into the Arabian Sea, connecting them to the coastal trading city of Calicut.
Even before the village roosters crowed, Chathukutty loaded heavy bundles of kora onto his head and walked towards the river. A small canoe took him across the Muthambi, after which a further three-kilometre-long walk brought him to Koyilandy railway station. From there, he caught the 5 am train to Kannur.
Chathukutty’s journey ended when he handed his fabric to a dealer in Kannur, where his kora fabric earned wages up to three times the average daily labourer’s pay—eight to ten rupees a day, compared to the two rupees that were paid for manual labour in the seventies, according to the weavers Object interviewed. “This kora crafted by Chathukutty and other Chaliya weavers travelled across India and the Arabian Sea,” said Dr Narayanan.
Over the years, Chathukutty’s body grew weaker and the physical toll of weaving increased. Soon, he decided to quit the craft. But the physical strain was not the only influential factor in his decision—the demand for kora had also declined.
Dr Narayanan attributed this to the arrival of power looms and mills in centres like Erode in Tamil Nadu. “Gradually, dealers in Kannur stopped supplying thread, marking the end of the kora boom,” he remarked. As demand for traditional fabrics declined due to increased competition from mechanised production and changing consumer preferences, the handloom industry faced significant challenges. “Many weavers started shifting to other professions,” he added.
Dr Narayanan himself personified this shift. He had been a weaver himself before deciding to quit the profession to pursue greater financial stability. “We saw the potential in government jobs and education to provide long-term security,” he said. In his case, he qualified for the UGC-NET in 2001 and moved to teaching, leaving his life as a weaver behind for good.
According to the weavers Object interviewed in Keezhariyur, the arrival of auto rickshaws marked a turning point, with drivers earning 300 to 400 rupees in 1985, compared to the 100 to 150 rupees they used to receive for weaving. In addition to auto rickshaw driving, many took up construction and toddy-tapping jobs. By the 1990s, contact with people from different professions encouraged many weavers to seek government jobs for better security. The Gulf oil boom also led many to go abroad, as the demand for labour increased.
This shift reflected the broader trend in the Chaliya community, with many seeking a more stable future beyond traditional handloom weaving.
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 2024, we entered Keezhariyur, one of the few villages in northern Kerala where the Chaliya weaving community lives. A red arch welcomed us to what is known as the ‘Chaliya theruvu’ (street) or the segregated part of Keezhariyur where the Chaliya community has lived for several generations. The Kerala state government categorised the Chaliya community as Other Backward Caste (OBC).
Object spoke to Thahseem S E, a PhD scholar researching the sartorial history of modern Kerala between the years 1800 and 2000 AD at Farook College in Calicut. He said, “The Chaliya community migrated to Kerala, particularly to the Malabar region, from neighbouring states and enjoyed the patronage of local rulers. It had a long lineage of generations dedicated to handloom weaving, especially calico.
Historically, marginalised communities in Indian villages—like the Chaliyas—have faced spatial segregation in Indian villages and towns. A concept note titled Economic Lives and Dalit Colonies in Kerala by the K R Narayanan Chair for Human Rights and Social Justice in 2017 stated that the establishment of Dalit colonies in Kerala began in 1938 when the Travancore government created a model colony for scheduled castes in Kurichi, Kottayam, following the 1936 Temple Entry Proclamation. Today, around 60 per cent of Kerala's Dalit population still resides in an estimated 24,000 colonies, with limited social and economic capital.
Currently, sixty-two weaving families live in Keezhariyur’s Chaliya theruvu. Dr Narayanan told us that in the seventies, all sixty-two houses had a handloom unit per home. “Now, barely three families continue to weave, and even they work at the weavers’ cooperatives in Kozhikode,” he said. “It’s no longer a family occupation.”
Object interviewed five families in Keezhariyur. Some of them still relied on weaving as their primary livelihood, while others had shifted to different professions after years of weaving like many others in the village. They told us that they were all well-versed in the intricacies of weaving kora. But none of them had woven calico in the present day or seemed to know its history. Most of them did not even recognise the term ‘calico’. The closest recognition of calico came from some older weavers who mentioned in passing that their forefathers might have woven the cloth.
When Object met Sunithan C, a sixty-year-old weaver belonging to the Chaliya community and living in the Chaliya theruvu, he was taking his afternoon break from his job at a weaving cooperative society in Keezhariyur.
Sunithan explained that he had only heard about calico and was not familiar with its history or past. “I have only woven kora during the kora boom in the seventies,” he said. “I started weaving when I was nineteen years old.” But like many other Chaliya weavers, Sunithan left the trade in search of better financial stability. In 1988, he started driving an auto rickshaw, then joined the Kerala government service in 2001, and in 2020 worked as a computer assistant. But in 2021, he returned to weaving thanks to the Kerala government’s initiative to revive handloom weaving for school uniforms.
Sunithan is employed as one of the weavers of the Keezhariyur Weavers Cooperative Society. According to a report in The Hindu, this project was launched in 2016 in a bid to revive Kerala’s handloom industry. In 2022, the government allocated 25 crore rupees for the scheme, under which free handloom uniforms were to be supplied to students from Class I to VII in government schools and Classes I to IV in government-aided schools.
However, the initiative has hit several roadblocks. According to a May 2024 Mathrubhumi report, the scheme allocates 50 lakh metres of fabric for handloom uniforms, all of which were successfully distributed this year. However, 7,500 handloom weavers have not been paid their wages amounting to a total of thirty crore rupees due to delays in government allocation.
Sunithan said that although he was glad to be weaving again, “the payment delays are a big concern for us (the existing minority of weavers)”.
BOTH KORA AND calico share similar histories spread across different periods.
The story of calico and kora weaving reflects the broader history of India’s traditional cotton textile trade and its decline under industrialisation and colonial influence. India was once a dominant force in the global textile market, benefiting from an ample labour force, high-quality raw materials, and advanced handloom technology. By the seventeenth century, Indian fabrics like calico were exported in vast quantities, with Europe importing around eighty million yards annually, according to researcher Yidi Zhao in Colonialism and the Decline of the Cotton Industry in British India.
Dr Nair explained that calico—thick, durable, and often printed with intricate lotus motifs—was exported in large quantities from Kerala, becoming a major trading commodity between India and Britain by the seventeenth century. Made from cotton grown in Tamil Nadu and woven by Chaliya weavers in Kerala, calico’s journey began long before colonial traders arrived in the fifteenth century.
In the article Calicut, The International Emporium Of Maritime Trade And The Portuguese During The Sixteenth Century for the journal Proceedings of the Indian History Congress published in 2006-2007, historian K. S. Mathew wrote that since Calicut was a vital port in India's western port, the region played a crucial role in colonial trade.
The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama first anchored at Kerala’s Kappad Beach in 1498, marking the beginning of European colonial rule and trade in the Indian subcontinent. By the seventeenth century, the British, French, and Danes had all established trading posts in Calicut. Mathew noted in the above-mentioned journal article that with the arrival of Vasco da Gama in 1498, Calicut became a focal point of European trade, forever altering India’s textile history.
This influx of European traders brought global attention to Calicut’s prized textiles, especially calico.
The appeal of calico stemmed from its high quality and vibrant prints. British priest John Ovington wrote in his book A Voyage to Surat in the Year 1689 that Indian calico prints outshone anything produced in Europe. He wrote, ‘In some things, the artists of India out-do all the ingenuity of Europe, viz the painting of chants or calicoes, which in Europe cannot be paralleled, either in their brightness and life of colour or in their countenance upon the cloth.’
Although the cloth was manufactured in Kerala, a report in the Indian Journal of History of Science attributes its colourful floral prints—distinct for their time—to their production in western India, particularly in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, during the Mughal period at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
In her book The Fabric of Civilisation, American political writer Virginia Postrel explored how textiles had shaped human history, influencing trade, technology, and culture.
Postrel wrote that western fabrics underwent a significant transformation in the seventeenth century. She explained that until around 1600 AD, Europeans and early American settlers mostly wore plain wool or silk garments with only minimal patterns or lines. “If you were wealthy, you could embroider them with silk threads,” she wrote, adding that any kind of printmaking was laborious and expensive.
This changed in the seventeenth century when merchants began importing cotton prints from India—the fabric that would later be known as calico. Postrel highlighted the fabric’s advantages, noting that it was soft, made of finely spun threads, cool for summer wear, and easy to wash and dry. “Calico made great underwear, much better than linen,” she added, and unlike European dyes, “the colours didn’t fade in the wash”.
The vibrant hues and intricate patterns quickly became popular, transforming into ladies’ dresses, gentlemen’s lounging robes, baby clothes, curtains, and tablecloths. “Europeans went mad for calico,” Postrel summarised.
As the demand for calico grew in Europe, it began to threaten local textile industries—particularly those based on silk, wool, and hemp. Postrel wrote that to protect their domestic markets from the popularity of calico, Britain passed the Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721, banning the use of printed calico for apparel and domestic purposes. France went even further, outlawing all cotton imports to preserve its own silk industry. After these bans, the smuggling of calico became rampant. According to Postrel, the fabric was too popular to disappear from European households, leading to harsh penalties for traders caught trafficking it. She wrote, “Traffickers could be sentenced to years of pulling oars in the navy's galleys. The worst offenders were put to death.”
Calico production in India declined as European mills, particularly in Manchester, began producing cheaper machine-made alternatives.
But by the 1730s, European attitudes shifted with the growing promise of controlling colonial markets, leading to exemptions for the import of unbleached calico cloth.
However, with the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and Britain’s consolidation in India, this dominance shifted, says Zhao in Colonialism and the Decline of the Cotton Industry in British India. Colonial policies favoured British textiles, leading to a steep decline in Indian exports. By 1835, India’s cloth exports to Britain had dropped from 1.26 million yards to 300,000 yards, transforming India from an exporter of finished textiles to a supplier of raw cotton for British mills.
By 1774, the Calico Acts were repealed and British textile mills were fully mechanised, producing printed cotton on a mass scale. This had dire consequences for Indian weavers, who became increasingly marginalised.
An article on calico in MAP Academy stated that the British East India Company, with its dominance over India’s cotton-weaving industry, compelled marginalised-caste weavers—like the Chaliyas—to produce plain fabric at low rates for export.
What had once been a thriving handloom export industry now struggled to compete with the sheer volume and lower costs of industrial production.
CENTURIES LATER, KORA experienced a similar rise and fall in the twentieth century. The demand for the fabric surged during the 1970s, with Chaliya families receiving steady orders from textile dealers in Kannur.
Dr Narayanan explained that kora, which sold for 1.50 rupees per metre between 1970 and 1977, provided a steady income for Chathukutty’s family and other Chaliya weavers, who earned around 600 rupees per month from weaving kora during the ‘boom’ years. This income was the result of the combined efforts of Chathukutty and his two sisters.
“With weavers earning nearly ten rupees per day—significantly more than the two-rupee daily wage of manual labourers—kora orders remained high and continuous for seven to eight years, sustaining the family,” said Dr Narayanan. “But it faced a sharp decline after 1977. As power loom-made fabrics took over, monthly orders dropped sharply, marking the end of the kora boom and pushing many traditional weavers to abandon the craft.”
Like calico, kora-weaving ultimately could not survive the shift to industrial production. The spread of decentralised power looms in India contributed further to the decline, as cheaper alternatives flooded the market, explained Dr Nair. “Many traditional Indian textiles became disconnected from their places of origin once industrial production took over,” he said. “For instance, crepe fabric, once exclusively produced in Kerala’s Kannur, later became synonymous with the mills of Erode in Tamil Nadu, which produced it in bulk.”
Dr Narayanan asserted that gradually dealers in Kannur stopped providing thread, signalling the end of the kora boom. Without orders, many Chaliya weavers were forced to abandon their craft, unable to compete with industrial textile production.
These similar histories of calico and kora illustrate India’s once-thriving textile industry, sustained for centuries by skilled artisans but diminished by the forces of colonialism and industrialisation.
IN OUR SEARCH for calico in the present day, Object found that the cloth—nowhere to be found in textile mills—had echoes of use in Kerala's bookbinding industry.
Outside Keezhariyur, the sources Object interviewed associated calico exclusively with bookbinding, having never encountered it as a fabric for clothing. The variance around its use points to the different ways in which the fabric was employed over time and geography.
In Kerala’s publishing history too, calico binding underwent several phases.
Jose Paul, a seventy-year-old artist from Kochi said he had undertaken a few calico-based bookbinding projects in his decades-long career. He emphasised the textural difference between the two fabrics as well: kora, he explained, had a uniform felt-like cloth on both sides while calico was rough to the touch because of its thread-like texture on one side, while its other side was smooth. “You could easily identify calico by its rough, durable texture,” he said.
According to Paul, the earliest bookbinding materials were made from jute. “When calico entered the binding market, it was pasted on the front, back, and spine of books,” he said. “The fabric was applied separately to both hard book covers and the spine, unlike the current method that uses a single sheet for both sides.”
Paul recalled encountering the calico-binding technique in books from his childhood, such as old Bibles and hard-bound bulky dictionaries, but noted that it was difficult to find today.
As more advanced and machine-aided binding techniques emerged, calico was eventually phased out and replaced by a newer version that is machine-made, has a better finish and is less thick than the original calico. The current version wraps the book in a single sheet, simplifying the process. “It does not feel like a cloth like the original calico did,” said Paul. “It feels thin and smooth—too artificial.”
S Sabu, the owner of a bookbinding and photocopy store in Kochi continues to try to source calico bookbinding material from the city’s Broadway wholesale market, a bustling trade hub located in the heart of the city, adjacent to Marine Drive. This market, once the centre of commerce, thrived due to its connection to the Arabian Sea via a canal, allowing local traders to easily collect goods for their businesses.
“The calico I try to source from Broadway doesn’t come from Kerala anymore,” said Sabu. “It comes from Mumbai. The thread textures on it appear to be machine-made, much finer than handwoven calico.”
WHILE CALICO ENJOYED international fame, Nair explained that its relevance in modern textiles had diminished since it was not a widely used fabric anymore, becoming a historical reference in theory classes simply as a fabric that was made, traded and exported from India.
A 2019 article by A. S. Jayanth in The Hindu traced the industrialisation of calico in Kerala to the missionaries of the Basel Mission, who started the Commonwealth Handloom Weaving Factory (also known as Comtrust) near Mananchira Tank in the heart of Kozhikode in 1844. According to the article, ‘They dabbled both in tile and textile business, apparently to give jobs to neo-converts from ‘lower castes’ to Christianity. They introduced European frame looms that could weave broad clothes. Dyeing was based on chemical processes, and the yarn was mercerised.’
Mohan, a veteran tour guide who has been helping visitors sightsee Kozhikode for over thirty years, estimated that the factory once employed nearly 1,000 workers who operated around 400 looms equipped with extensive dyeing facilities. “It was the epicentre of handloom weaving in Malabar; many believed it produced most of the region's calico and kora fabrics,” he said. “More than local tourists, many foreign nationals I work with have approached me, asking about handloom spots that wove calico. Whenever I got such a request, I would take them to the Comtrust factory.”
Like the fabrics it once wove, the factory itself went through a tragic history. Its ownership passed from British to Indian management, but by 2009, losses, competition from power looms, and business setbacks led to the factory’s closure on 2 February 2009. In 2020, journalist Haritha John reported for The News Minute that this closure led to 107 skilled weavers and staffers becoming jobless, four of whom died a few years later. The workers protested against this closure outside the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation office in Kozhikode for 131 days. They demanded the reopening of the factory, jobs for all labourers, and payment of pending wages.
The report further stated that in 2010, the Kerala government passed an ordinance to take over the company and its properties, but did not receive central approval for this. In 2012, the Kerala legislative assembly passed the Commonwealth Trust, Kozhikode (Acquisition and Transfer of Undertaking) Bill, bringing a sense of relief for the workers initially.
However, beyond allocating 5,000 rupees as monthly compensation for the workers, no significant progress was made. Although the Bill received presidential approval in 2018, the factory remained closed, and valuable weaving equipment was ruined. “In 2014, the Archaeological Department issued a notice to the District Administration, pointing out that the buildings and the equipment of the factory need to be protected immediately,” said The News Minute report.
But Sukumaran M, the factory’s watchman, who worked there for 30 years, said it remains in disrepair. “It saddens us to see the place in ruins because of government apathy,” he said.
Inside, the once-bustling looms sit idle, gathering cobwebs, a dusty reminder of a bygone era.
DESPITE A CHALLENGING history and the decline of the handloom industry in the present day, there are budding efforts to revive both kora and calico.
Anjali, a young designer, returned home from Bengaluru to Kerala in 2015 to revive calico. Anjali’s family comes from the Chaliya village of Thiruvangoor in Kozhikode. She opened a designer studio called ‘Impresa’ in Kozhikode, where she tries to showcase Kerala’s handloom fabrics.
“It was a craze for me,” she said, recalling how desperately she wanted to bring back a fabric that once put her homeland on the world map. Yet, sourcing proved difficult, and after years of struggle, she abandoned her mission. The only calico she found came from the USA, sent by friends who discovered it at a textile expo.
In Vadakara, a coastal city north of Kozhikode, another designer, Latha Muraleedharan, found success in selling kora cotton. Her studio, ‘Yours’, located at the Sargaalaya Centre for Arts and Culture, produces custom-made shawls, sarees, and shirts from hand-woven kora sourced from weavers in Kannur.
As a trained mural artist, Latha explained that she chose the fabric for its texture, which works well for artwork while also being ideal for the hot and humid tropical climate. “There's a growing trend of people preferring lightweight, breathable fabrics that suit the climate,” she noted.
In Latha’s store, kora cotton garments are displayed in their natural off-white hue, adorned with custom designs and paintings, including Buddha images and floral patterns. Upon closer inspection, the fabric reveals small black specks—cottonseed pigments—similar to those found in traditional calico.
Object tried to reach the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad, established in 1998 and dedicated to showcasing a wide range of Indian textiles, to find out if it had calico fabric on display or in its collection. The museum had yet to respond to requests for comment when this article went to press.
Despite efforts to revive kora, the reality for most weavers like Chathukutty and Sunithan remains challenging.
Calico’s imprint was once visible across the weaving villages that dotted its coastline. Today, these communities face a similar decline as demand for their handwoven cotton fabrics fades. The sound of looms has died down, and the names of traditional fabrics like calico and kora are rarely mentioned. Among Kerala’s last weavers, there is a sense that a unique cultural link has eroded, one that once connected their work to a global trade network.
Even with this decline, the legacy of kora and calico persists. Anjali’s search for calico and Latha’s success with kora show that the connection between Kerala’s weavers and the global fabric trade is not entirely lost. That Chathukutty and his ancestors had been part of this history, producing fabrics that reached far beyond Kerala, is known to very few.
The fabrics the Chaliyas once produced might no longer be the talk of the town, but the history of their craft, like calico itself, blows in the wind for those who seek it.
