Telangana’s Gadwal has become synonymous with the Gadwal saree. But it is cornering the fame due to other weavers from nearby villages and towns.
Wanaparthy: IN NOVEMBER 2021, when UNESCO declared the Ramappa Temple in Telangana’s Warangal district a World Heritage Site, journalists hailed the moment as a “major diplomatic triumph” for India. Four years later, the thirteenth-century monument—said to have taken over four decades to build—played host to a different kind of diplomacy.
Nearly sixty Miss World contestants, who had travelled to Hyderabad from as many countries, posed around the temple in May 2025. All of them were dressed in flowing ghaghras fashioned from handloom textiles from across Telangana. The designer Gaurang Shah, who had styled the contestants, wrote that he had drawn from the region’s rich traditions to feature “the luxurious Gadwal, the graceful Narayanpet, and the bold, geometric single and double Ikkats of Pochampally”.
The Gadwal saree tends to be spoken of in these terms—resplendent and regal. Once distinguished by its cotton body, zari-brocade silk borders, and elaborate pallus, the garment traces its history back to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, depending on the source you read. “The most fascinating feature of this saree is that it can be folded in such a way that it fits in a match-box,” a 2012 story from Deccan Herald gushed. “No wonder Gadwal sarees have been in great demand the world over since the 1930s.”
Back then, Gadwal—now the district headquarters of Telangana’s Jogulamba Gadwal district—was the capital of a small kingdom, a vassal state under the Nizam’s rule, locally known as a Samasthanam. Maharani Adhi Lakshmi Devamma, its last feudal ruler, took over after her husband’s death in the 1920s. She “promoted the craft with the help of a few weavers who had come to Gadwal from various coastal areas”, according to a 2009 application for a Geographical Indication (GI) tag for the Gadwal saree, which grants recognition to a particular product grown or manufactured in a specific region.
“The Rani of Gadwal wanted a saree in cotton because Hyderabad is too hot to wear silk sarees for special occasions,” Uzramma, a well-known handloom revivalist and founder of the Malkha initiative, which aims to advance small-scale yarn spinning, told Object. She learnt this from a weaver who visited her more than a decade ago, to whom she had shown her collection of Gadwal sarees.
Initially, the sarees made in the region were known as Mathiampeta, the application noted. But since the entire industry was centred in what is today known as Gadwal and its immediate surroundings, they were rechristened to Gadwal sarees. “As the craft developed, it spread to many villages and towns in and around Gadwal,” the application stated.
In 2010, the Gadwal saree obtained its GI tag. The GI journal from that year sheds light on the mechanics of the garment. “There are two joints in each Gadwal saree, namely the vertical and horizontal joints. The vertical joint joins the body of the saree with the border. The horizontal joint joins the body of the saree with the pallu,” the document noted. “It is the horizontal joint which makes Gadwal sarees most unique, for this type of joining is not found anywhere in any other weaving technique.”
The journal went on to note that the vertical interlocking was done on the loom, while the horizontal interlocking involved a more delicate process. “The weaver takes a little gum with his index fingers, rubs it on his thumb…then takes a thread from the body of the saree and another thread from the pallu and twists the two threads together by a front-and-back movement of the thumb and index fingers simultaneously,” it stated. As the journal pointed out, the process is far from easy. It “requires skill and experience to get perfection”.
This perfection is hard-won. Everyone wants a handwoven saree. But not everyone has the patience—or the resources—to own one. “A handloom saree is preferred by the main candidate of the occasion like the bride,” said a salesperson who travels to Hyderabad to sell Gadwal sarees, who spoke to Object on the condition of anonymity. “Powerloom sarees are gifted to the guests. The whole of Hyderabad is like this.”
Seetharamulu, a senior leader from a weavers’ union in Telangana, got married in 1970. His father, then the president of the Handloom Cooperative Society in Nereda, a village in Telangana’s Nalgonda district, bought a Gadwal saree for Seetharamulu’s bride for 180 rupees. “Today, it would cost 7,000-8,000 rupees,” Seetharmulu said. “Back then, Pochampally and all others were nowhere—Gadwal was the one that was famous.” His wife has kept that saree safely to this day, he added. She wanted it to be draped over her when she died.
Over the years, the Gadwal saree, which occupies pride of place in the wardrobes of women in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, has had to mutate for an evolving market. Customers no longer want to pay thousands of rupees for cotton when they can get cheaper substitutes just as easily. Most weavers have switched entirely to silk, or to silk on cotton. But even as many continue to struggle, some who once left the craft in search of formal jobs are now returning—drawn back to a skill that has proven more sustainable than the work they left for.
In July and August 2025, Object travelled across Jogulamba Gadwal, Wanaparthy, and Hyderabad districts in Telangana to follow the threads of the Gadwal saree. One thing became clear: it is no longer the exclusive domain of weavers from any one single town. Across the state, many hands now stake a claim to its creation, revealing a latticework of contested legacies in which small and marginal weavers are fighting for visibility.
COLONIAL RECORDS ON Amarchinta and its weaving history are sparse. The town was part of the Nizam’s territories, then known as the Amarchinta Atmakur Samsthanam.
“Cloth and sarees both of cotton and silk are made here [in Wanaparthy town], but their texture is not so fine as those of Amarchinta and Gadwal,” a 1909 record from the provincial series of The Imperial Gazetteer Of India noted.
We stepped out of the archives and onto Amarchinta’s streets in search of its story. This is how we met Devarakonda Laxmanna, a weaver in his mid-eighties, who was born in 1941. He spoke of, believed in, and lived the spirit of a bygone era.
“I weave for the body. I feel at ease only if I weave,” Laxmanna told Object. “If I don’t sit on the loom for a couple of days, it feels eerie. My heart feels heavy and restless. It doesn’t feel right. When I sit on the loom, all my attention is concentrated on the thread and nowhere else.”
Even now, Laxmanna weaves for ten hours a day, on a hand loom that he got made a decade ago. This loom predates the mechanics of Jacquard pit looms, which use punched cards to control the pattern of the fabric passing through them. Laxmanna handles individual threads on his loom to weave a design that is sketched on graph paper.
While we were at Laxmanna’s home, daylight streamed in from the gawakshi, a vent in the roof, to illuminate his work. In many houses that we visited in Amarchinta, this vent was located just above the handloom. The gawakshi is an artifact that belongs to a time when there was no electricity in the village.
When we visited Laxmanna, he had run out of graph paper. He pulled out an old wedding card from a shelf and started to plot dots in between grids of squares that a friend of his drew for him while we were there. The design looked roughly like a large flattened flower.
“With a graph paper, swans, peacocks, and elephants will come out quite well,” Laxmanna said. “[On my loom] I will lift the threads of this lotus design, which will be near the stomach of the saree. Threads 1-2-3 will go up and Thread-1 goes down. Then we tie it. It will be done in thirty minutes.” When we returned to Laxmanna’s house a few days later, he had woven several tiny lotuses into the saree.
Weaving was Laxmanna’s father’s full-time profession, not his. Laxmanna returned to the craft after he retired. He learnt how to weave around the mid-1950s when he was about fifteen years old. By the 1970s and 80s, when he was a young man, he operated a cinema projector, fixed motors in the wells of his village, and conducted small repairs. He wove alongside his father and others who sat at the looms in their house only when he had some time to kill.
Laxmanna inhabited a world of Gandhian ideals as a young person. To him, weaving was closely linked to self-reliance. He remembered singing a song for Konda Laxman Bapuji, the freedom fighter from Telangana, when he was fifteen years old.
He sang it for us. “Oh weaving warrior! Oh freedom fighter! Learn O warrior the way of the cooperative method! We won’t budge to anyone,” his voice rang out. He had learnt the composition, written by the poet Maakaala Naganna, in Amarchinta. Naganna was a weaver too.
Laxmanna’s father practised his craft until his last breath in October 1983. “He wove until three days before he died,” Laxmanna recalled. “On Wednesday he was weaving. He fell on Thursday. On Friday, he did not speak. And on Saturday he was lifeless.”
IT IS A FACT so widely accepted that it borders on truism: Gadwal sarees come from Gadwal. But this is only partly true. The town has emerged as a marketing hub for these sarees. But the weaving itself takes place in numerous neighbouring villages and towns that are often eclipsed. One such place is Amarchinta, a village located just thirty-two kilometres from Gadwal.
“The saree is ours and the name is theirs. A lot of weaving happens in our village. I don’t know if it happens in Gadwal anymore,” M Bharathi, a 46-year-old weaver from Amarchinta, told Object.
Bharathi and her husband weave sarees on a hand loom installed in the middle of their home. Since one part of the Gadwal saree is woven horizontally, and the other vertically, it needs two sets of hands working in tandem to bring it to life.
“It takes my husband and me over ten days to weave a good design,” Bharathi said. She can’t afford the sarees she weaves. “Even we want these sarees, don’t we? But we don't stand a chance of buying them. We are here only to weave.” When Bharathi needs a special outfit for a special occasion, she buys sarees that have been mass-produced in the powerlooms of Karnataka and dumped in markets around Gadwal.
But the very powerloom that makes these garments affordable for Bharathi is also her fiercest competitor. In only a few days, the clanging machine can spit out several replicas of a saree that would take Bharathi and her husband more than a week to make. Handloom weavers like her struggle to compete with these counterfeits.
Bharathi has stowed away the only handloom saree she owns on one of the shelves in her house. The master weavers rejected that piece just when she was finishing it. “They said the colour combination wasn't good and so I got it woven and kept it for myself,” she said. Once skilled artisans themselves, these master weavers have now morphed into entrepreneurial middlemen who take the Gadwal saree to various markets and profit off it, often helped by their familial wealth and networks.
Before the creation of Telangana in 2014—when Andhra Pradesh had still not been bifurcated—towns such as Amarchinta, Rajoli, and Gadwal fell within the handloom cluster of Mahbubnagar. These towns were key producers of Gadwal sarees according to a 2008 market research paper by the Hyderabad-based Chithrika Foundation, which works to create sustainable ecosystems for artisans.
The 2010 GI Journal also acknowledged that the weaving of the Gadwal saree was dispersed across multiple locations. The saree was “produced in many small and large villages, towns and in particular the township of Gadwal, which is one of the Taluk headquarters in the district of Mahaboobnagar,” it noted. “Therefore the area of production in respect of Gadwal sarees is the entire district of Mahaboobnagar in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India.”
In 2014, once Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated, Gadwal and Amarchinta went to Telangana. For a few years, the Mahboobnagar cluster lay undisturbed. Then in 2016, the district was split. Amarchinta became part of Wanaparthy district, while Gadwal became its own district. Gadwal town, which is its district headquarters, transformed into a marketing hub for Gadwal sarees.
“Gadwal district does about 200 crore rupees worth of business every year,” P Govindaiah, district handloom and textile officer for Wanaparthy district, told Object. If you like, you can divide that by ₹10,000 per saree to get an estimate of the quantity.”
The ‘Gadwal’ in the Gadwal saree refers to the weaving style, not just the town. But artisans from places like Amarchinta, who work with this technique, often feel erased by the nomenclature. Under the GI tag, they’re lumped together as Gadwal saree weavers. “We want a name of our own,” several weavers told Object.
Local officials are trying. Object accessed the publicly available minutes of a District Level Export Promotion Committee meeting, which included various government officials, including the district collector of Wanaparthy district, in January 2025. The meeting had been called, in part, to identify products from Wanaparthy “having export potential”. Among these were the sarees woven in Amarchinta and Kothakota, a nearby town also in Wanaparthy.
A GI tag for the sarees woven in Amarchinta would help the weavers from the region safeguard their products, P Govindaiah told Object. “They can raise an objection if that specific saree design is woven anywhere else. In essence, they get all the rights [on the weave],” he said.
MANY SKILFUL WEAVERS who worked on the looms of Amarchinta had experienced two Indias. A newly independent India that envisioned self-reliance and a newly liberalised India that aspired to sell goods and services. Theirs was perhaps the last generation to witness the golden age of weaving first-hand. “It can be better than a government job if you work,” Yellappa, Bharathi’s 50-year-old husband, told Object.
Yellappa learned to weave in the 1980s. Back then, handloom was treated as a separate priority sector under the ministry of industry and commerce. The use of power looms was strictly regulated. The government recognised that the handloom industry could play a crucial role in addressing issues of unemployment in independent India.
In 1985, the Indian government introduced a new textile policy that removed protections for handlooms as well as capacity restrictions for mills and powerlooms. It “marked a decisive departure from earlier policies, not only in terms of priorities and emphasis, but even in the very way of understanding the textile industry”, K Srinivasalu, former dean of social sciences at the Hyderabad-based Osmania University, wrote in a 1996 article for the Economic and Political Weekly. “For the first time in the post-independence period, emphasis has been placed on productivity in sharp contrast to the hitherto thrust on employment.”
The powerloom and mill lobbies had hailed the changes in policies as “a harbinger of ‘hope’ and a ‘bold’ departure from the past,” the economist LC Jain, who was a member of India’s Planning Commission from 1989 to 1990, wrote in a 1985 article that critiqued the textile policy. “It did require some boldness, if that is the virtue we are seeking, to have reversed the textile policy rooted not only in the freedom struggle and nurtured by [Mohan Das Karamchand] Gandhiji and Rajaji [C Rajagopalachari], but also rooted in India’s socio-economic realities as recognised by the successive Five-Year Plans in the past.”
Rather than prioritising handlooms, the government appeared to be setting them on a collision course with the mechanised textile industry.
That November, the government also created a Ministry of Textiles, which was separated from the ministry of industry and commerce. Meanwhile, India enacted a new law, the Handlooms (Reservation of Articles for Production) Act, “to protect and promote the handloom industry in India by reserving certain textile items exclusively for production on handlooms”.
It protected certain handloom weaves from being replicated on powerlooms, including pure silk and cotton sarees, while opening up others to mechanisation. By the 1990s, the list of twenty-two handloom products under the Handlooms Act had shrunk to eleven.
The cascading effects of these policy changes eventually rippled through the lives of weaving families. “My father and mother used to sometimes send me around 10,000 rupees a month before 1990,” M Chandra Sekhar, a 54 year-old resident of Amarchinta, told Object. “By the 1990s, that dropped to 300 rupees as business dried up.”
Chandra Sekhar moved away from weaving and pursued an education in engineering. He worked as a programme officer in the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD). As part of his job, he often travelled across India to many states including Tripura, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh. A few years ago, he quit. “Instead of travelling to all those places, I thought it would be better to start a project in our own village,” he said.
Chandra Sekhar returned home to organise the weavers in and around Amarchinta into an entity called the Amarchinta Silk Handloom Weavers Producer Company. The company focuses on “soft interventions”, such as skill development programs and market promotion initiatives, as well as “hard interventions”, such as the establishment of a Common Facility Centre, the provision of support to individual artisans, and the establishment of essential infrastructure, its website states.
The Amarchinta Silk Handloom Weavers Producer Company has a retail outlet at Amarchinta. The young men and women Chandra Sekhar employs for ancillary activities—such as for sales and marketing—also come from weaving families. In 2020, the Ministry of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises gave the company a grant of 1.8 crore rupees. It also received a grant of 75 lakh rupees from NABARD, and a loan of 1.25 crore rupees from the Telangana State Cooperative Apex Bank Limited, Chandra Sekhar said.
About 538 weavers from Gadwal, Tippadamapalli, Kothakota, and Amarchinta joined as shareholders in the company by paying 1,000 rupees each, Chandra Sekhar said. With the working capital that the company has access to currently, it is able to actively extend support to 180 people. The company provides the raw material, such as the silk, yarn, and looms.“There are thirty-five looms for regular weaving and nine for training,” he added. “The weavers often find it inconvenient to work from their own homes, so they prefer to come to the cluster location to do their work.” The weavers received 40 percent of the share from the annual sales of their sarees, while the company retained 60 percent, according to Chandrasekhar.
A second salesperson Object interviewed, who is from Amarchinta, brought out a Gadwal saree that had been made on a power loom. “This saree is to demonstrate to our customers,” he said. To us, it appeared to be a handloom saree in most respects, except that it was a bit more shiny. On closer inspection, we realised that the garment also had many loose ends on one side. But for most buyers, the bargain is hard to resist. “[The power-loom replica of] a handwoven saree that costs 10,000 rupees to make is sold for just 2,500 rupees,” the second salesperson told Object. “Most customers choose the cheaper one. No one really checks if it’s handwoven or cares about the quality.”
Of the 10,000-15,000 rupees that a handwoven saree is sold for, the weaver gets about 5,000 rupees or less for their labour across ten days. The master weaver pockets the remainder. Before India’s economy was liberalised in the early nineties, master weavers primarily taught others how to weave, and derived their power from their skill.
The master-weavers don’t weave anymore. But their capital is the source of their authority, interviews with multiple weavers revealed. They have been reduced to money-lending entrepreneurs. They control the designs, the pay scales, and the markets of the Gadwal saree. The more they cost-cut, the more they profit. Weavers, who are at the bottom of the market hierarchy, are the most exploited.
“They stay in the city and have arrangements with around 100 looms. We weave as they tell us to. They bring us the design they want. Even if there is a minor mistake, they don’t accept the saree or buy it at a discounted price,” one weaver from Amarchinta told Object.
Many weavers said that since the master weavers catered to what they believed were the demands of the market, their decisions were often arbitrary. Given that they occupied the top of the hierarchy, they could decide whom they deemed a good or bad weaver, or who they would nominate for awards and ceremonies. “A weaver won’t even be allowed into an exhibition,” the salesperson who travels to Hyderabad and has been to handloom shows told Object.
“The master weavers once had cycles. Now they have cars. And we have neither,” said Laxmanna, who also works under a master weaver. But for him, weaving feels like a matter of vitality. “If I take to my bed once, I will be bedridden for a month. I won’t be able to weave at all,” he said. For others, the handloom is a matter of sustenance. “If we don’t weave, we will have to stay hungry,” Yellappa said.
But it isn’t easy to cut out the middlemen either. Some people tried without much success, the weavers Object spoke to said. Weavers who went to sell their sarees at markets in Gadwal were often made to stay back by shopkeepers until their own wares were sold. Most of the shopkeepers also belonged to weaving families, except that they had decided to sell the craft instead of practising it.
“The master weaver is better, at least he doesn’t make you wait,” Raghavendra, a resident of Amarchinta who is forty years-old and comes from a family of weavers, told Object.
WEAVERS IN AMARCHINTA remember the early 2000s as a particularly turbulent time. Many saw their hardships as part of a karmic cycle. But the crises in their lives weren’t the result of fate—they were shaped by the way India was changing.
By the late 1990s, powerlooms were multiplying across India. Over the next decade, they had begun producing goods once reserved for hand looms. Within a few years, power-loom products flooded the market. At the same time, the price of raw materials rose sharply, driven by the soaring demand from power-loom operators. Unlike hand loom weavers, who bought a few kilos of silk, power loom owners purchased it by the ton.
Over time, weaving became undesirable as a profession. “After I die, no one is going to weave on this,” Laxmanna said, referring to his loom. In 2023, when one of the reporters of this story visited Amarchinta village, many residents were using looms to store the trash in the houses.
In March 2025, the Telangana government announced that it had sanctioned thirty-three crore rupees to waive loans of up to one lakh for weavers. During our reporting across Amarchinta in July 2025, we noticed that many of the looms that had earlier been discarded, had now been revived.
Meanwhile, the young men and women who had abandoned the family profession for studies are slowly returning. “I feel like stopping everything and want to get into weaving,” Raghavendra told Object. Raghavendra aspired to a government job, for which he was “always studying”—he had secured a Master of Science degree as well as a Bachelor of Education.
Raghavendra couldn’t afford to be a master weaver or leave town to seek coaching for a government job. He had faith in the education system, and he waited through many unpredictable government job notifications. But he couldn’t clear the recruitment exams. “It’s hard to get books related to [exam] preparations, money for coaching and sometimes even examination fees,” he said.
Raghavendra is tired of his dreams now. He wants to return to weaving. “I even approached a master weaver,” he said. “There is no value for educated people. My class mate in tenth grade learnt work and started a mechanic shop. They are buying flats.”
Raghavendra said he would make more from weaving than he would from a job afforded to him by his education—which he thinks would fetch him about 20,000 rupees a month. “If I weave, I’ll get more than that and I will have freedom as well,” he said. Many people in Amarchinta, facing unemployment and professional struggles similar to Raghavendra’s, seemed to be returning to weaving as a source of stability.
“I make the young boys of the family sit at the loom for at least some time,” Bharathi said. Her husband Yellappa concurred with her optimism for the future of the craft. “If you learn to weave, it is better than a government job. If we do three to four sarees a month, that’s 30,000 rupees,” he said. “We can live independently without asking for help. We can even shut for a couple of days and return later.”
“Weaving is definitely better,” Vamsi, a 28-year-old weaver, told Object. Until 2020, he worked as a team leader at an Amazon warehouse in Hyderabad. He lost his job during the onslaught of COVID-19 and returned to the village. In the end, it was the skill he picked up as a child that helped him through the crisis. Now he is determined to give it his all.
Vamsi is among those who believe that a GI tag for the Amarchinta saree will turn the fortunes of its weavers around. “We have expressed our intent,” he said. “Now the government should recognise our sarees as Amarchinta sarees.”
