Across three handloom hubs in India, weavers confront uncertain futures and resist the erasure of their cultural legacies
The echo of a strange dichotomy reverberated through a street in Phulia, a census town in West Bengal. It was embodied by two rhythmic sounds with two different tempos, two tenors: close, yet varying.
The concrete lane was lined with several pucca houses that seemed to be more prosperous than those found in most villages within the state. Upon closer scrutiny, they whispered of telltale signs of a difficult existence. Many of these homes—barricaded by perimeter walls, embellished with green patches of small gardens or lawns, a few even double-storied—betrayed signs of desolation. Some had adjoining sheds. The sounds emanated from two such sheds that faced each other. The dull thud on the right was outmatched in frequency by a more urgent, mechanical noise from the left.
The shed to the right was supported by short walls that didn’t quite meet its corrugated roof. The resultant gap, at least a few feet long, was supplemented by a wire net which let in daylight and air. Two middle-aged men sat on the other side of the mesh, working diligently on a couple of wooden handlooms. The shed to the left was constructed entirely of metal sheets, marked by a crudely doodled skeleton in red. Inside, a power loom rattled noisily as it churned out textiles.
“These houses were all pretty abuzz in the past when our handlooms were doing well,” said Prabir Basak, a Tangail sari weaver in his mid-sixties, staring at the grim landscape. “That was before [the] power loom struck Phulia.” Now, Basak told Object̉, the weavers were folding up. “Their children have left home to look for jobs elsewhere,” he said.
Nearly 650 kilometres away, the labyrinthine streets of Jalalipura in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi looked very different from those in Phulia. They snaked through the densely populated area sandwiched between the historical Grand Trunk Road and the Varuna river. Red-brick houses were packed cheek by jowl with such intensity that even sunlight just about filtered through.
Most people who live in this mohalla are from the Julaha weaving community. They count among their ancestors the fifteenth-century philosopher-poet Kabir. Compositions attributed to him frequently allude to the craft. In one, God stretches out the whole universe on his loom; in another, a weaver despairs when he is unable to weave himself a new body.
The Julaha community falls under the category of Other Backward Classes (OBC) and comprises nearly a quarter of Uttar Pradesh’s Muslim residents. These weavers are renowned for their artistry in both cotton and silk textiles, including the Banarasi sari—which, for centuries, has bestowed its wearer with a dazzle that is difficult to describe but impossible to escape. However, the allure of this garment conceals the struggles of its toiling creators.
“People have dropped out of Banaras’ handloom sector in droves. Of those remaining, the lion’s share has switched to power looms,” Fazlur Rahman Ansari, a weaver in his mid-thirties, told Object. He spoke from experience.
Ansari was among those artisans—a number he pegged at thousands—who felt compelled to make the transition in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, middlemen and big businesses with deep pockets eclipsed the sector, plunging craftspeople into further oblivion. “The handloom can be saved only by saving its weavers,” Ansari said with finality. “Else, our children will keep exiting the sector.”
Born nearly three decades apart, separated by geographies and cultures, Basak and Ansari were bound by a shared trepidation. They both sensed that their way of life and livelihoods were slipping away, far beyond their grasp.
IT IS DIFFICULT to overstate the role of the handloom sector in India. According to the Fourth All India Handloom Census (2019-20), it engages more than 31.45 lakh households. Of these, nearly seventy percent belong to marginalised communities that are classified as Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and OBCs. About three-quarters of the total workers are women.
These are significant numbers for a country in which nearly half the workforce is dependent on agriculture or associated occupations. A significant portion of India’s citizens are forced to opt for low-quality jobs in the absence of better opportunities. The Periodic Labour Force Survey (2019-20)—which estimates key employment and unemployment indicators—shows that even before COVID-19 upturned the country, the formal sector managed to employ only a little more than a tenth of its workforce. Over ninety-eight percent of those who sought employment in 2019 were engaged in the unorganised sector. Nearly ninety percent found only informal jobs.
Then the global pandemic and a hastily implemented nationwide lockdown devastated the economy. The weaker a section, the harder it was hit. This was true for the handloom and handicrafts sectors as well. But India’s bunkars (weavers) had struggled to make ends meet even before they were dealt this blow. As the handloom census showed, only a third of the households engaged in the sector were able to generate an income of more than 5,000 rupees every month. On the one hand, handloom products steadily captured the imagination of a new generation of consumers with disposable income. On the other, a large section of those who created these products were unable to improve their lot. Their tremendous contributions seemed to be inversely proportional to their meagre gains.
“Unlike others, we never seek jobs from the government,” one weaver said. “All we need is some support so that we eke out a decent income and secure our future, especially in the face of competition by bigger players.” These concerns were repeated by so many craftspeople across different states, clusters, and traditions that he may as well have been speaking for all of them.
Between August and September 2024, Object travelled to three handloom hubs—Phulia, Varanasi, and Maheshwar in Madhya Pradesh—to understand the contours of a crisis that has been several years in the making. Power looms represent one part of this existential threat. But the problem had been compounded by several factors: the easy availability of cheap fakes, the increasing corporatisation of the textile sector, and woefully inadequate state support.
It is easy to be indifferent to these issues, particularly because they seem intractable. To grapple with them would require an unflinching consideration of their impact on those who have been pushed to the sector’s margins. But it is an exercise that is both necessary and urgent. At risk are the disappearing forms of heritage that lend a society its identity, giving it members a sense of pride and purpose. Artisans in myriad regions confront financial hardships even as they resist the erasure of their legacies. Their defeat would signify a profound loss, not just for these communities but for the country’s diversity, reflected in its vibrant work traditions.
AROUND THE TURN of the twentieth century, the British colonial administration sought to partition the Bengal Province. Soon after, on 7 August 1905, the Swadeshi movement or movement for national self-sufficiency, was formally launched from the Town Hall in Calcutta. It advocated a rejection of foreign goods—textiles in particular—for products that were created within India. Although the campaign was credited with bolstering nationalist efforts as well as laying the foundation of India’s domestic industry, many historians contested its purported gains and claims to inclusivity.
Over a hundred years later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi designated 7 August as National Handloom Day, choosing the date for “its special significance in India’s history”. During the inaugural event, he said that handlooms could be a “tool to fight poverty, just as Swadeshi was a tool in the struggle for freedom”.
Then, towards the end of July 2020, even as India reeled from the first wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the textiles ministry made a terse announcement. About a week before the sixth National Handloom Day, it said that it had decided to scrap the All India Handloom Board—an official committee that included weavers, activists, and government representatives. The board, which traced its history to 1952, was abolished by a gazette notification “in consonance with the Government of India vision of ‘Minimum Government and Maximum Governance’ ”. Within days, similar advisory boards for the handicrafts, power looms, cotton, and jute sectors were knocked down as well.
The rationale behind the abrupt dissolutions was unclear. “This government proffers information only when it thinks it can benefit from doing so,” a senior retired official from the central government told Object on condition of anonymity.
In a written response to the Indian Express in September 2020, Santosh Kumar Singh, the additional development commissioner (handlooms), dismissed the Handloom Board’s work as “insignificant”, pointing out that the forum had met only six times in fifteen years. Obscure rhetoric was on offer. “The focus is now on field officers who have done some exemplary job in reaching out to weavers and creating links with district, state and Central Administration,” (sic) he wrote.
The move invoked mixed responses, but all the perspectives articulated a fundamental point. The country’s weavers did not have a seat at the table that decided their fates. In theory, the Handloom Board could have solved this problem. Yet, successive governments failed to leverage its potential as a vehicle for inclusive, policy-driven change.
When the decision was announced, Vasanthi Raman—an author who had worked with Varanasi’s weavers for decades—called it “disastrous for small-scale artisans”. During a later conversation, she added, “At a policy level, this government seems to want to finish off the informal, decentralised sectors of the economy”. The weavers needed assistance in navigating the changing markets, more than ever, Raman pointed out. Institutions such as the Handloom Board could have bridged the distance. “It is not only a question of handloom versus power loom now, but also about small versus big,” she said.
Muniza Khan—a senior coordinator of the human rights organisation Citizens for Justice and Peace and a Varanasi-based scholar, who has researched the handloom sector in Uttar Pradesh extensively—concurred. “Weavers have turned into labourers as wages have plummeted amid pro-rich policies. Meanwhile, middlemen have started to make more,” Khan said. “The Board could have helped had it wanted.”
The Board was not a magic bullet. But as the crafts revivalist and a former member of the board Jaya Jaitly said, it was “at least a forum where people from the sector could directly interact with high-level Delhi bureaucrats”. Laila Tyabji, one of the founders of the Delhi-based non-profit Dastkar, echoed this sentiment. The handloom and handicrafts boards started out as useful conduits, she said, through which “officials, representatives of craft NGOs, and craftspeople could share ideas, sectoral bottlenecks, and information”. But over a period of time, the committees stagnated, morphing into spaces “to reward and park bureaucrats and craftspeople past their prime”. She contended that the solution was to revamp the boards, not shut them down.
Bappaditya Biswas, a textile artist and partner at the Kolkata-based handlooms-and-handicrafts store Byloom, was sceptical. “There are two sides to the coin,” he said. “The Handloom Board very much had a purpose—it was to represent the various handloom clusters all over the country.” But, he argued, members of the board, many of whom tended to be based in cities, did not always fulfil this mandate. According to Biswas, the monetary incentives from the board’s initiatives, often “benefitted only a certain coterie—people who were close to the government—not the real weavers”. Similarly, financial aid to cooperative societies tended to be controlled by their managers and secretaries. “This way, money got concentrated in a few hands and never trickled down,” Biswas told Object. He conceded that the board may have led to some positive outcomes. “But I did not notice much of a difference,’” he said.
The accounts of two former members were telling. Nurul Hassan, a Varanasi-based textile merchant, served as a member of the board for two years, between 2013 and 2015. Only one meeting was constituted during that period, he recalled. “That too was so hurriedly organised that it clashed with another engagement, and I had to give it a miss.” Hassan is also a member of Sahakar Bharati—an organisation of cooperators and cooperatives—which is affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological fountainhead of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
Haripada Basak, a 78-year-old weaver from Phulia, spent much of his life trying to highlight the issues artisans in his region faced. In the steering committee on handlooms and handicrafts, which was constituted for India’s twelfth FiveYear Plan, from 2012 to 2017, he represented weavers from Phulia. “The committee would meet once or twice a year, and I attended some seven-eight of the meetings. But nothing much ever came out of those,” Basak told Object.
In fact, suggested government interventions sometimes ran contrary to the interests of handloom weavers. Take for instance, a proposal by the union ministry of textiles in 2013, which called for a change in the definition of handloom from “any loom other than a power loom” to “any hybrid loom on which at least one process of weaving requires manual intervention or human energy”. Basak described this suggestion as one that clearly favoured automation. “We registered a strong protest,” he recalled. The change did not take place eventually.
In one steering committee meeting, Basak recalled, members were given three minutes each to talk. When his turn came, he said the time frame made it impossible to convey anything meaningful. Following a brief disagreement, Basak said, the then development commissioner for handlooms invited him for an interaction. They spoke about the complex problems dogging the sector and possible counter-measures. The commissioner gave Basak a month to draw up a proposal. “Within a week of my return to Phulia, I got a call from someone else in the department who insisted I hand over my plan right away,” the septuagenarian said. He refused, unwilling to make any suggestions without speaking to his colleagues.
In 2020, Basak became a member of the Handloom Board. But months later, “I learnt that it had been dissolved,” he said bitterly. Basak didn’t even get a formal intimation and learnt about the closure unofficially.
TANOPODEN, THE BENGALI WORD for warp and weft, also means “tension”. This duality is allegorical in Phulia—once a thriving handloom cluster in Nadia district, now teetering on the edge of a collapse.
Before India gained independence, Phulia’s main claim to fame was being the birthplace of the medieval poet Krittibas Ojha, who translated the Ramayana and the Mahabharata into Bangla in the fifteenth century. After Partition, the otherwise nondescript hamlet steadily gained in profile as scores of weavers, most of them from the Basak community, fled East Pakistan—modern-day Bangladesh—and sought refuge in India to escape communal violence.
Many of these artisans came from Tangail, the largest district in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka. The saris they wove there, known for their breezy texture and intricate motifs, came to be known by name of the region.
When they migrated to this side of the border, the weavers looked for places that were close to existing textile hubs such as Shantipur, a cluster in Nadia district, and Kalna in Purba Bardhaman district. Phulia, less than ten kilometres away from Shantipur, emerged as an attractive destination.
The Basak weavers that Object spoke to credited Jogendra Mohan Basak, a textile trader, with the transformation of Phulia into West Bengal’s Tangail. He shifted to India, roughly a decade after it gained independence. Once he set up base, the weavers recalled, he encouraged others from his community to shift, helped them with seed capital, and became their mahajan.
Under this system, the mahajan or the merchant supplied the taantis—Bangla for weavers—with raw material such as yarn, and specifications for the saris they were to create. The taanti household then took over, preparing the thread and putting the family taant—loom—to work. The mahajan remunerated the weavers upon delivery and ferried the finished product to the market, usually the wholesale shopping district of Burrabazaar in Kolkata.
Weavers either worked under this system, operated independently, or became a part of cooperative societies. According to Prabir Basak, “Phulia began its ascent to the peak around 1976-77” when these societies were formed. Prabir and his family moved from Gharinda village in Tangail to India in 1963, when he was three years old. He learnt weaving from his father as a child, and as a teenager took over the loom when his father fell ill. The profession helped Prabir build a pucca house, raise a family, and pay for the treatment of a serious ailment a few years ago.
Most weavers in the region prospered for several decades. Their work generated interest overseas. “Exports went up to eight crore rupees in 2008,” recalled Haripada Basak. “Dress material, stoles, and scarves woven in Phulia regularly made their way into markets abroad, especially in Europe.”
Then came the disruptions. “The decline started around 2007-08 with the sudden advent of power looms,” Prabir said. His nephew, Nilay Basak, added that at around the same time, “the global economic crisis took away our business”. Towards the end of 2007, the American housing market crashed because homeowners with troublesome credit histories defaulted on their payments, triggering a two-year-long financial freefall. Its cascading effects rippled through Phulia, which found itself suddenly bereft of its international customers. Nilay—who teaches at a local school alongside pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy degree on the handlooms of Phulia as well as edits a Bangla periodical, Tanapoden, on the subject—described the impact of these two factors as a “double whammy”.
Haripada recalled that the first power loom was installed in Aistala, a town close to Phulia. Soon, retired machines from Surat were everywhere. Now, according to the weavers’ estimates, there are nearly 40,000 power looms across the Shantipur-Phulia belt.
According to Haripada, these devices were often deployed in flagrant violation of established laws. The Handloom (Reservation of Articles for Production) Act of 1985, for instance, protects certain handloom weaves from being replicated on power looms, including pure silk and cotton saris. This would mean that it is illegal for imitations of Tangail saris to be produced on these machines. Additionally, many power looms in Phulia, often located in residential areas, created noise that far exceeded the government-mandated daytime standards of 55 decibels in these areas, and 65 decibels in commercial spaces. Haripada also claimed that those who installed power looms had not procured the necessary licenses. Nor, he said, had they obtained commercial power connections—they operated through domestic connections instead. But there was little recourse.
The increasing use of cheap synthetic threads dented the local handloom economy further. Polyester threads, especially those from China, flooded the market. “We don’t use them while weaving by hand. They don’t make for breathable fabric,” Prabir said as he demonstrated the distinction. “Tug at the threads; the cotton ones will break,” he pointed out. “The easier to snap, the finer the thread—but synthetics will hold steady.”
Old-timers emphasised that this method was not always foolproof. “It has become extremely difficult to differentiate between the natural and the man-made varieties by a simple touch and feel,” Gourango Basak, a 72-year-old independent weaver, said. “The only way now is to soak them: the real ones get heavier and hold starch well.” This is the secret of the Tangail’s sheen. The key, according to Gourango’s wife Shibani, lies in the maad or starch that is applied to the thread before it is woven through the loom. She described the task as “laborious”.
Shibani, who is in her mid-sixties, wakes up at four am on the days that she has to process unkempt yarn into lustrous threads. She untangles the fibre, immerses it in water, and finally starches it with a concoction of panta bhaat, cooked rice soaked overnight; khoi, popped rice; and a little lime. Like Shibani, Prabir’s wife Manju Basak supports her husband as an equal partner. She spends hours at the charkha or spinning wheel, alchemising raw yarn into threads for use at the loom.
But their contributions tended to be invisibilised. Craftsmen are recognised far and wide, bestowed with awards by governments or cooperative societies. The women, without whom this artistry would come to a standstill, are rarely feted. Earlier they could derive some satisfaction from the economic value they generated, but even this reward has become increasingly elusive.
When Object visited Gourango in August 2024, it had been months since any merchant had expressed interest in his wares. “The last time one came calling was perhaps a year and a half ago; he is yet to pay me in full,” the weaver said. “I know he still visits our village to pick up the cheaper stuff. But he avoids me.” The “cheaper stuff” was a reference to the saris that power looms cranked out.
Since Gourango didn’t work for a mahajan, he bore input costs on his own, hoping to recover the money through sales. Cash flow was erratic. But the weaver’s joy lay in his work; he crafted only the most bare-bodied white Tangails, austere apart from their glistening red borders and signature golden motif. Occasionally he wove on tussar warps. But the coarse silk fabric drove up costs, making it more difficult for Gourango to break even.
The weavers who continued to work under mahajans did not fare much better. Most give the artisans a lump sum now, meant to cover the cost of production as well as their remuneration.
Prabir broke down the math: “The mahajan usually pays us around 1,000 rupees on an average for a Tangail, depending on the quality.” Of this, he said, 400 to 450 rupees were spent in procuring threads, and an additional twenty-five rupees on hiring people for the preparation of each taana or warp. “That leaves us with around 500 rupees for two days’ work,” he concluded.
In those two days, a power loom could produce eight saris—one every three hours. “These are not the real Tangails,” Prabir insisted. “That has to be done by hand.” But customers, either unable or unwilling to discern the difference, privileged lower prices over quality.
Weavers were forced to follow suit. “Look at these,” said Prabir, pointing towards a heap of brightly coloured saris that had been manufactured on a power loom. “They call these silk but the threads are merely Chinese polyester.” Prabir’s son, Aseem, had produced these saris on a power loom he operated from a shed only a few metres away from the one in which the family housed its wooden handloom. The 34-year-old wanted to keep pace with the demands of changing times.
But this was a race in which being a few steps behind was inevitable. Newer, faster Rapier looms were already overtaking conventional power looms, Aseem’s cousin, Nilay, pointed out. Waiting in the wings were air-jet and water-jet looms. “Air jets can weave at the speed of wind, I am told,” Gourango joked. Often, even if the weavers were willing to make the switch, the costs were prohibitive, putting them at an inherent disadvantage.
The dismal economics pushed many weavers away from their craft. “Taantis never had to worry about subsistence earlier, now they have to. That is why so many are dropping off to pick up jobs,” Nilay said. But stable employment was equally hard to come by. He continued, “In our community, everyone—even the children and the seniors—was used to a sense of financial independence thanks to the loom. Where is that independence now?”
Artisans across West Bengal navigated similar issues, be it the weavers of the airy Jamdani saris in Habibpur, a village close to Phulia, or those in Shantipur, among the state’s biggest sources for traditional saris and dhotis.
So far, Haripada has been unimpressed by state schemes that claimed to support the sector. In 2022, for instance, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government introduced a colour-coded uniform for all students in state-run schools. It recommended that these be stitched by ‘Tantuja’ the brand under which the West Bengal State Handloom Weavers Cooperative Society, a government agency, sells its products. “Those orders will benefit a handful of players with deep pockets and connections,” Haripada said. “Will the sarkari babus”—government officials—“even realise if power loom material is passed off as handloom?”
The pandemic only exacerbated these difficulties. Earlier, Prabir said, thousands would come from north Bengal districts, such as Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar, and even Assam to work at Phulia’s looms. He estimated that there were between 30,000 and 40,000 handloom workers in the town then. But there has been an ironic change of fortune since. “Now our children are moving out to look for jobs in other states. Some have even landed up in Assam,” said Haripada.
The weavers were not optimistic. “It is now extremely difficult for Phulia’s handlooms to stage a comeback,” Haripada said. Prabir agreed, “We live amid hopelessness.”
Gourango recalled that when his nephew went on a trip to Bangladesh sometime in the last decade, he couldn’t find a single Tangail weaver. “They have moved on to other jobs and businesses,” he said, shuttling the weft to create a sari, even as sixty unsold pieces piled up in a corner of his house. “Here too, we are perhaps the last generation to practise this.”
PHULIA’S PRESENT MIRRORS the trajectory of Varanasi’s recent past.
Some say the word Kashi—as the city is popularly known—traces its origins to the Sanskrit kas, which means “to shine”. The city drew much of its radiance from its syncretic history, once a spiritual home for adherents of different faiths. Some of it, arguably, was also derived from the silk weaves upon which exquisite zari was rendered to create the Banarasi sari. “Even now, the emporia of Banaras remain chock-a-block with customers during Diwali or wedding seasons,” said Jaya Jaitly.
Yet, hordes of Banarasis have exited—or are feeling forced to exit—the handloom sector. Many a story has been written about this bleak reality, many a regime has promised to herald change, and many an entrepreneur has sought opportunity in disaster. Through this time, generational practitioners of the craft left handlooms for power looms; left weaving for other vocations such as plying electric rickshaws or doing odd jobs; and left the city to seek work elsewhere, Mohammad Haseen told Object. His family’s association with Banarasi silks is the stuff of lore; it has spun these textiles for a few centuries. Haseen represents the fourth such generation, and his son has followed suit.
Many drivers earned handsome commissions by shepherding prospective customers into textile showrooms, about thirty-five to forty percent of the sale, Haseen said. Consequently, “unsuspecting tourists end up buying fake Banarasis”.
In the early-to-mid nineties, the region was home to at least 1.5 lakh “if not two lakh” weavers, estimated Amresh Kushwaha. Kushwaha is the chairman of the Angika Hathkargha Vikas Udyog Sahkari Samiti, which manufactures and exports handloom products, and the treasurer of the RSS-affiliated Sahakar Bharati’s Varanasi unit. “There were also those who depended on the sector in other ways, like selling raw materials and marketing the saris,” said Kushwaha. “All put together, around a third of the district’s population earned a living off this sector.” (In 1991, according to census data, Varanasi district had a little more than 25 lakh people.)
The first power loom came to Peeli Kothi during the early seventies, and was installed by a merchant from Bhiwandi in Mumbai, (then Bombay). Hassan recalled that the transition to mechanisation was slow but steady. According to him, even by the turn of the millennium, only about fifteen percent of the total looms were mechanised. He said he would be surprised if handlooms accounted for a similar proportion now. “It would be ten percent,” the weaver Fazlur Rahman Ansari insisted.
The change became cataclysmic around the mid-2000s. In her book, The World of the Banaras Weaver, Vasanthi Raman noted that the Census of Handlooms, 2009-10 “presaged the death of the handlooms”. The report found that Varanasi had 31,378 handlooms through that period, but more than thrice as many weavers. At present, Kushwaha—who employed hundreds of weavers for the roughly 200 handlooms he owned—calculated that only 10,000 to 12,000 handlooms remained.
But while power looms could serve as a nifty shorthand for the weaver’s woes, they were not solely to blame. “Handlooms and handicrafts have been bearing the brunt of wrong policies since 1992,” said Shahnawaz Akhtar, a 42-year-old weaver.
Just a year earlier, a looming financial disaster had forced India’s hand vis-à-vis its macroeconomic policy. The country was facing a balance-of-payments crisis; simply put, it was giving more money to other countries than it received. A spike in imports, among other factors, depleted the country’s foreign currency reserves to dangerously low levels. The government secured monetary aid from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, promising structural reforms in return. And so began an era of economic liberalisation. It was marked by fewer controls on imports, the dismantling of public sector monopolies, and the reduction of restrictions on the entry of foreign capital. The new policies led to quicker but inequitable economic growth. Those who already had a certain heft reaped the benefits. Small and medium enterprises were thrown in the deep end as were sectors such as agriculture.
For Rahman and Akhtar, 1992 was fraught with scarring memories. On 6 December that year, a mob of kar sevaks—Hindu religious volunteers—flattened the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya, led on by leaders from the BJP and RSS. If the destruction was meant to be symbolic, the communal bloodletting that followed, and soon spread to other parts of India, left no room for doubt about the true motives. Nearly two thousand people were killed. Most of them were Muslims.
While the handloom sector in Varanasi had historically represented a confluence of different communities, the vitiated atmosphere affected the region too. “Lohta, a small qasba on the outskirts of Banaras went up in flames, with at least twenty-five dead and many more injured,” Raman wrote in her book. Varanasi, she added, “did not go up in flames, strictly speaking, but there was a war-like situation, with sections of both Hindus and Muslims ranged against each other”.
To a certain extent, complex economic interdependencies contained the violence. Raman noted that “at the height of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the 1990s, when tensions were running high, groups of Hindu traders met [the BJP leader] L. K. Advani and told him they would be willing to contribute to his party’s funds, but entreated the riots be stopped since they were adversely affecting business.” However, instances such as these did not negate the inherently unequal relations “between the predominantly Hindu traders and financiers on the one hand and the Muslim weavers, master weavers and even gaddidars (traders and entrepreneurs) on the other”.
Meanwhile, policy measures continued to work to the disadvantage of handloom weavers. The 1998-1999 union budget reduced the customs duty—the tax imposed on a product crossing international borders—on caprolactam from thirty to twenty-five percent and the import duty on paraxylene from fifteen to five percent. Both these chemicals are used in the production of synthetic fibres. Similarly, duties on nylon filament yarn, as well as acetate and cuprammonium filament yarns, which are said to replicate the appearance and texture of silk, were reduced as well. “The duties structure in the late nineties was flawed—too much on threads, too little on textiles that could be produced on the power loom,” said the senior journalist Ateeq Ansari, who met the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee as part of a delegation to advocate for Varanasi’s artisans.
Synthetic silk substitutes took over the market. “While silk would cost around 2,000 rupees a kilogramme, artificial threads sold for some hundred to two hundred rupees,” Kushwaha said. “Traders sold them as silk, and weavers started using them in Banarasi saris.”
Not all buyers were willing to look the other way. Kushwaha recalled that customers from South Indian states, which constituted some of the biggest markets for these saris, were irked. As a result, “they stopped patronising us, there was a huge slump from 2000-2007,” he added. Yet, the dominance of these threads continued. “Now, artificial silk accounts for eighty-five percent of the Banarasi sari market,” Haseen said.
Zubair Adil, a textiles manufacturer and general secretary of the Bunkar Udyog Mandal, a handloom weavers’ collective, said that the international trading climate also changed after the terror attacks in New York on 11 September 2001. As global business diminished, weavers were faced with a cash crunch. Many started to leave Varanasi.
In 2005, the central government led by then prime minister Manmohan Singh attempted to reinvigorate the sector with an ‘Integrated Handloom Cluster Development Scheme’, under which twenty clusters were developed at a cost of two crore rupees each and a hundred more clusters were added the following year. Some weavers and experts believed that these measures led to improvements; but according to others, it was too late; the damage had already been done. According to Adil, the revival around that time benefitted only urban pockets in Varanasi. “The rural areas of Varanasi and other districts in the division—Chandauli, Ghazipur and Jaunpur—as well as neighbouring ones like Bhadohi and Mirzapur couldn’t really recoup,” he told Object.
The artisans could not compete with the efficiencies promised by mechanised processes. Handloom-weaving families continued to leave the profession. Banarasi saris, which took up to ten or twelve days on a handloom could be completed in about two days on a power loom, Haseen pointed out. “Even less on Rapier looms,” he added.
Then there was the matter of price. The simplest such saris, when woven on a handloom, cost around 10,000 rupees. By contrast, power looms could churn out viscose and synthetic look-alikes for much less, about 2,000 rupees. “Customers have also changed in this use-and-throw generation,” Haseen grumbled. “They now want genuine, handcrafted Banarasis only for weddings and important functions.”
Some artisans adapted. In the early 2000s, the weaver Fazlur Rahman, along with many others, went to Bhiwandi so that he could learn to operate power looms. Some weavers purchased machines that were no longer in use and brought them back. “They fixed them with whatever parts and pieces they could get hold of and installed them at their homes,” Rehman recalled. But, as one master weaver pointed out, not every artisan could afford the switch. “I will stick to my kargha [loom] for as long as I can,” he said. “But the new generation doesn’t take it up anymore.”
Rehman believed that the real problem lay elsewhere, in “the collapse of the traditional market system where the individual weaver enjoyed agency”. Shahnawaz Akhtar agreed. When he was growing up in the late eighties and early nineties, Akhtar accompanied his father to localities such as Peeli Kothi, Lohta, Chowk, and Golghar in Varanasi, where they sold their finished saris. “It was a real marketplace, where buyers and sellers congregated on an equal footing,” he said.
Most sellers were like Akhtar’s father—individual weavers with a loom or two. Traders came to these markets to identify the products they wanted to purchase. “The two sides would bargain, come to a consensus, and the payment was instant,” Akhtar said. According to Rehman, this gave the weavers agency over their work. They bought their materials, used their own designs—or hired the services of nakshebands, who design motifs—and wove at the looms in their households.
But as investment costs rose, and established merchants with capital tightened their grip, the weavers lost this independence. “Girhastas [the master weavers] turned into mazdoors [labourers],” said Zubair Adil. “Large players have cartelised the market, blocking access and stockpiling raw materials,” Rehman told Object. “Only by finishing off our cottage industries can big business thrive.”
Rehman said that the average pure silk sari required an investment of about 10,000 rupees, which included 7,000 rupees for the raw material alone. If a weaver sought help for complex pieces, they would spend about 4,500 rupees more. Without direct access to the market, the artisans were compelled to “approach some seth at his gaddi to sell the finished product”, he added. There, Rahman estimated, “I will probably be offered 12,000 rupees, but not upfront.” The same sari would be marked up to more than five times this amount at a swanky store, the researcher Muniza Khan pointed out.
The wait to be paid in full could last a few months. Individual weavers found it difficult to sustain for that long, especially when the lion’s share of their compensation was locked in the supply costs. Without any liquidity, they could not purchase raw material for their next sari until they were remunerated for the ones they had sold. The money that was left, Akhtar rued, was “just enough to cover the physical labour we put in, not the knowledge we bring to the craft or our physical asset—the loom—or the work of other family members”.
By 2014, as countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, and China shored up textile production, even textiles manufactured through power looms were affected. “Now, inventories keep piling up,” Adil said.
Over the past decade, union and state governments have introduced measures to support craftspersons. These include the central government’s Upgrading the Skills and Training in Traditional Arts/Crafts for Development (USTTAD) scheme, launched in 2015 “to preserve heritage of traditional arts and crafts of minority communities” and the UP government’s One District One Product (ODOP) scheme to encourage “indigenous and specialised products and crafts”. But for the handloom weavers of Varanasi, these seem to have led to little change. The ‘double-engine sarkaar’ has not done anything for our sector, said one manufacturer, referring to the BJP, which rules both at the Centre and in the state. Adil concurred. “Be it Handloom Day or the National Handloom Development Corporation [a public sector undertaking which functions under the ambit of the ministry of textiles], nothing has been of use to us,” he said. Ansari believed that there was a fundamental issue in the approach that several policies adopted. “Instead of providing training to outsiders, government schemes should focus on helping existing weavers,” he told Object.
Varanasi now finds itself at the centre of a religious dispute not unlike the one that had besieged Ayodhya. A protracted legal battle is playing out over the seventeenth-century Gyanvapi mosque which abuts the Kashi Vishwanath temple. A slew of petitions has claimed that the mosque was once the site of an ancient Hindu temple.
“Banaras was not the only one to suffer,” Akhtar said of the systemic neglect that had stunted a once-thriving craft. He rattled off the names of products suffering similar fates across Uttar Pradesh—the fabled knives of Rampur; the sturdy padlocks from Aligarh; the carpets of Bhadohi. Akhtar did not think it a coincidence that most of the artisans engaged in creating these products were Muslims.
After Phulia and Varanasi, Maheshwar revealed itself like a welcome secret, hidden within the folds of the undulating Malwa Plateau, along the north bank of the Narmada river. This region seemed to have escaped the troubles that bogged down the other two hubs.
Handloom, here, was not equated with gloom. Instead, it was a source of gender empowerment, a legacy bequeathed to the town by its centuries-old royal matriarch.
Ahilyabai Holkar—a preeminent name in the Maratha confederacy—ruled over the kingdom of Indore in the eighteenth century. According to historical accounts, she was known for her political and military acumen as well as for the welfare measures that she advanced. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, noted in his book Discovery of India, that the thirty-year-long reign of Ahilyabai—whom he described as an “able ruler and organiser”— became “almost legendary as a period during which perfect order and good government prevailed and the people prospered”.
According to Sanra Shaw, the chief operating officer of the non-governmental organisations Rehwa Society and WomenWeave, Ahilyabai initiated the practice of handloom-weaving in Maheshwar—which she had anointed the capital of Indore—to bolster the local economy. When she established the hub, Shaw said, the queen’s requirements included gifts for royal guests as well as “formal” nine-yard white saris for the women of the Malwa court. The saris were made with two pallus and borders of different colours. When one side frayed, the garment could simply be rotated for longer use.
The queen invited weavers from Gujarat and parts of Uttar Pradesh. According to Shaw, they were tasked with creating the geometric patterns that embellish Maheshwari saris. They found inspiration in their surroundings, sometimes from inside the fort that Ahilyabai constructed during her reign, and sometimes from the intricate stone carvings chiselled into its walls outside.
After Ahilyabai’s demise in 1795, the cluster declined. A dramatic turn of events in the late 1960s brought about its resurgence. According to Shaw, who had learnt of this history over the years, Shivaji Rao ‘Richard’ Holkar—the son of the last Holkar king Yeshwant Rao—and his wife Sally Holkar, a Stanford University graduate, resided in the United States but frequently visited Maheshwar on vacations. On one such trip, they encountered an old man during a riverside stroll. He walked up to them, presented them with a piece of fine handwoven fabric and said, “This is what I am capable of producing.” He asked the erstwhile royal scion for work.
This got the couple thinking. They wanted to help generate livelihood in the small town, especially by empowering its women, and keep the threat of power looms at bay.
Over time, they found an old loom and engaged a master weaver. By 1978, they had established Rehwa Society through financial support—which, according to its website, included a grant of about 80,000 rupees from the Central Social Welfare Board, an autonomous organisation under the Ministry of Women and Child Development. Sally and Richard studied the handloom sector as well as its attendant economy, seeking the help of professional textile designers. They mobilised friends and acquaintances in Maheshwar, Mumbai, and other parts of India for monetary help to procure looms—one of those early benefactors was the actor Shabana Azmi. The couple then set up a marketing mechanism, built a residential colony called Ajilya Vihar, and established a school for weavers’ children. Right from the beginning, women were offered training as weavers so that they could earn incomes of their own.
The society, which functioned from within Maheshwar Fort, expanded into an integrated handloom centre. Currently, it operates seventy looms spread across four units, employing sixty-five weavers and an ancillary staff of thirty people. The weavers work according to their convenience. Their earnings are dependent on the number of hours they put in, and could go up to around 10,000 rupees a month. The prices of Rehwa’s products usually range upwards of 1,200 rupees for a metre of cotton fabric, 1,700 rupees for a silk-cotton dupatta, and roughly 4,000 rupees for a silk-cotton sari, which can go up to about 11,000 rupees.
The centre devised an end-to-end system. It bought cotton and silk yarn from trusted suppliers, which it then dyed according to the production plan devised by a project manager. The organisation used only “premium quality yarn and colours” to ensure a certain standard for its textiles, Sandip Soni, a project manager at Rehwa, said. The yarn was spun into threads once it dried, and the water used for these processes was repurposed for plants on the premises. If the saris were not very complicated, they could take a little over a day to finish.
While men performed supporting roles, the main work of weaving the saris, dupattas, and fabric, was done almost entirely by women.
For its Maheshwari saris, Rehwa tended to use a technique in which silk was deployed in the weft and cotton in the warp. The main bodies of the garments were defined by their restrained simplicity while the borders and pallu featured neat designs.
The finished products were then sent to an in-house quality control unit, where staffers pored over each piece to remove stray imperfections. If serious lapses were found, the saris were marked and separated, so that they could be sold at a discount.
Once the quality was ascertained, the garments were tagged with a label that had a barcode, the price, the name of the sari’s design as well as of the weaver who produced it. Finally, they were sent to the two shops run by Rehwa within the fort. The only other way a customer could purchase a Rehwa saree was through its website. “We do not sell outside to ensure our quality is never compromised,” said Vidya, who looked after one store and was also involved in administrative coordination.
Over the years, Maheshwar’s handloom sector evolved with technical and mechanical changes. On occasion, Rehwa also brought in designers as consultants. By the mid-nineties, retail brands such as Fabindia showed interest. Through such efforts, the not-for-profit appeared to have forged a model that could ensure the self-reliance of the weavers it collaborated with. The society still accepted donations for its work.
Rehwa’s experiment also led to a spurt in handlooms elsewhere in Maheshwar. Soni claimed that the focus in those workshops, staffed predominantly by men, tended to be on “higher volume and lower cost... they put in longer hours and produce more out of cheaper inputs”. Consequently, he added, quality was often compromised. The weavers worked independently as well as on orders from merchants. More recently, Soni said, Ahmedabad-based Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India—a not-for-profit organisation—took some of the weavers to other clusters in India so that they could share their knowledge with other artisans.
Richard and Sally separated in 2000. Three years later, Sally embarked on a second experiment, which led to WomenWeave. According to Nilesh, a project manager at the organisation, it supported three hundred people in three clusters across Madhya Pradesh—Dindori, Balaghat, and Maheshwar, which accounted for more than half its workforce—and sold its products to nearly sixty institutional buyers.
The branch at Dindori, which was established in 2012, comprised sixteen looms which produced stoles, fabrics, and dupattas. It focused on the heritage designs indigenous to the Baiga community, a Scheduled Tribe which is sub-classified as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group.
In 2015, WomenWeave opened its Balaghat centre. The district was once known for its fine-textured cotton. But by the eighties, WomenWeave’s website notes, its artisans sought alternate professions, unable to compete with power looms. Weavers at this centre worked on ten looms to create garments and fabrics made from pure cotton.
That same year, according to its website, WomenWeave secured a three-year-long grant of 1.21 crore rupees from Tata Trusts for another initiative in Maheshwar: the Handloom School. The residential institution, which built on the organisation’s earlier training exercises for women weavers, started with an inaugural batch of fifteen students. Since then, Shaw said, it has trained twelve batches of about fifteen or sixteen students each from twenty-two clusters in fourteen states including West Bengal, Telangana, Maharashtra, Odisha, and Rajasthan.
The school initially contacted local non-profits so that they could recommend people who could benefit from the programme. Referrals poured in. According to Shaw, they looked for students who possessed weaving skills, owned a loom, were formally educated until Grade 7, and had a “passion for the vocation.”
In this way, three projects with distinct missions, launched at three different points in India’s economic timeline, converged to nourish a culture of handloom entrepreneurship in Maheshwar. In 2021, Shaw recalled, a survey conducted by a Weavers’ Service Centre found that there were about 3,300 to 3,400 weavers in the region. She estimated that the figure would have risen to nearly 4,000 weavers since then. “Along with some 2,000 supporting workers, the total would go up to about 7,000. Then there would be traders, merchants,” Shaw continued. Nearly 24,500 people lived in Maheshwar in 2011 according to census data. Shaw’s estimates would indicate that at least thirty percent of them were engaged in handloom-related work.
Women who married into weaving families taught themselves the craft. “A set of sixteen saris fetches me a profit of 10,000 rupees,” said thirty-year-old Puja Pawar. Her in-laws live in the weavers’ colony that Rehwa established inside Maheshwar Fort. Pawar picked up the skill by observing her husband’s and father-in-law’s work. The family works independently, generating around 20,000 rupees a month from two looms. Both of Pawar’s children attend an English-medium school in the town.
Nilesh said that most families in Maheshwar tended to own one or more iron-frame looms, which were more space-efficient than the older wooden-pit looms. A majority of the weavers were Madus, Salis, or Muslims, Nilesh said. “The community is a relatively close-knit one and communal harmony has prevailed among Hindu and Muslim weavers,” he added. This is in contrast to the rest of Madhya Pradesh, which has seen a spike in instances of communal violence over the past decade.
Over the last two decades, Maheshwar has undergone other changes. In 2003, the then chief minister Uma Bharti brought it into focus when she convened her first cabinet meeting there. (Bharti was among the BJP politicians charged with criminal conspiracy by a special Central Bureau of Investigation court in 2017 for her role in the destruction of the Babri Masjid. Everyone was acquitted in 2020.)
Subsequently, the government developed the temple town as a tourist centre, with improved road connectivity and uninterrupted power supply. “Soon, the flow of tourists increased as did the sales of Maheshwari saris,” Soni said. Word of the town’s popularity spread. Other artisans, such as those who worked on intricate Chikankari embroidery in Lucknow, migrated to the region. “Now, those who have multiple looms in the town prefer to invite migrant workers, as they are much less likely to ask for holidays,” Soni added.
Nilesh said that workers had steadily migrated to Maheshwar from places such as Lucknow, Nagpur, and Malegaon in the second half of the previous decade. Many shops had mushroomed in the region since. “The new ones often are not serious about quality and are not as focused on the sector’s fate as their older counterparts,” Nilesh told Object. Some were sourcing products that were manufactured in Surat—home to all manner of fake textiles—from Indore, and selling them in Maheshwar. This, he fretted, “could impact the credibility of Maheshwari sarees”.
Tahir Sheikh—who operated several looms at his workshop in the village of Mominpura—said that while the weavers didn’t mind the entry of these workers, more people inevitably led to high outer outputs and lower profit margins.
When Object spoke to Shaw, she said she was not worried; she foresaw a stable future for the weaving industry in Maheshwar for at least a decade. She did not think the incursions of power looms posed a threat, but she was sceptical of government policies that tended to favour big businesses. Large corporate houses, such as the Tatas, through the brand Taneira; the Birlas, through Aadyam; and Reliance Industries, through its brand Swadesh, had already made inroads into the handloom market. Shaw recalled hearing of a large protest that had taken place in Maheshwar around 2009-10, supported by the town’s weavers, to oppose the government’s attempts to introduce power looms. “Perhaps the time for another movement has come,” she said.
INDIA HAS TESTED the limits of its weavers’ resilience for several decades now. But individual grit is no match for structural disrepair. If the country’s arts and crafts are to survive, then its political elite will have to act with imagination and resolve.
The journalist Ateeq Ansari expressed concern over how, in the absence of government support, “most cooperative societies are now defunct, and weavers have had to manage on their own” since there were “no comprehensive schemes to help them at a mass level”.
But Jamal Kidwai—the director of the civil society organisation Aman Trust and the founder of the textile venture Baragaon Weaves—did not have much faith in cooperatives. According to him, the bundling of creative people in economic collectives led to limited success. “We need a paradigm shift,” he told Object. “We have to think of models that are dignified, just, and transparent.”
“There is no point in simply pumping in money,” Bappaditya Biswas said. “Those making policies must come and work at the grassroots first.” At the same time, a one-size-fits-all approach would be counter-productive. As Jaya Jaitly pointed out, each weaving tradition was unique, and so were the communities that practised them. “We shouldn’t try to arrive at one answer for all of them,” she said.
The national and international interest in handloom products presented huge opportunities. Laila Tyabji believed that the state could help artisans seize the moment. “The government should be an empowerer, facilitator and catalyst, not a player,” she emphasised. According to her, interventions were needed to support weavers in design development, provide organisational training, create marketing linkages, and extend adequate credit.
Nurul Hasan from Sahakar Bharati advocated for the formation of a Bunkar Ayog or Weavers’ Commission, comprising experienced weavers from across Indian states. He envisaged it as being similar to the Khadi And Village Industries Commission, a statutory body constituted by a parliamentary act in 1956, which has been instrumental in promoting khadi across the country. “Like Khadi, handlooms should be exempted from paying Goods and Services Tax,” he added.
But none of these measures would count for much if big business flattens the sector. “Corporate players are interested in huge numbers and fast returns,” Tyabji noted. “They need to understand that while we do have millions of handloom weavers, this number is made up of many small weaver groups, ranging from a dozen to a couple of hundred at most, each with a different distinctive skill and capacity.”
Back in Banaras, Zubair Adil pushed for weavers’ control, so that they could wrest their freedom back from mediators, commission agents, gaddidar and kothidar merchants. “This class has now become the boss even though it is the individual weaver who bears the most risk,” he said. Adil believes that the government needs to simplify the export process for handloom products, regulate the import of textiles, commit to the implementation of existing schemes, and set a minimum support price for weavers.Fazlur Rahman Ansari agreed. He felt that handloom artisans needed a minimum selling price, just as farmers did. “Artisans cannot exist without a market,” the Varanasi-based weaver pointed out. “There can be no social justice without income equality.”
