Everybody is talking about Indian handloom, our designers too should wear it on their sleeve
The first time I ever visited a handloom source was in Kerala, it was a project initiated by the Ministry of Textiles as a part of my training at the National Institute of Design (NID).
I still remember looking at that off-white and golden sari, it was overwhelming! I had never touched handloom at its source ever before. I stayed in the village for a few weeks observing Master Gopinathan and working with him, he was so propelled to weave - the whole experience was so inspiring.
Being a science graduate, I thought mechanisation was the future, but this experience jilted my entire conviction. The gold rib of the sari looked more pure than gold in my eyes, it was almost as if I was experiencing a divine intervention for my design process, and to this day, I still say that as a designer I was born in Kerala.
I was first exposed to khadi by my tutor at the NID, the late MP Ranjan. More than the love for the craft of handloom, I was drawn by the system behind it and its potential to empower our villages.
There is so much pressure amongst the rural community to migrate from their hometown villages and settle into big city landscapes, they end up living in slum areas and work in poor conditions.
Of course, it provides them with a basic wage, but it does nothing for their livelihood. The ideology of reverse migration is not only a new way to support craft and handloom, but also a way to ensure livelihood. Weavers can work from the comfort of their home, they are reunited with their families and can practice and sustain our rich heritage. It’s a very Ghandian idea of empowering people.
The handloom industry was very powerful a hundred years back when everybody was wearing saris and dupattas, but today fashion is very different of course.
Rather than making the weavers adapt to our requirements, we have to tailor their produce into new products. It is a great opportunity, but it will require a lot of conviction, synchronisation of different sources and one vision.
I think this is the right time when everybody is talking about handlooms, everybody is looking at handlooms in a very different perspective. There is one thing we need to realise - the world is becoming a more uniform place than it was earlier. There is Zara in almost every city.
Everybody is wearing clothes that are fairly similar. Fashion in the coming years is going to be the other way around, people would like to have an individualistic kind of approach in their clothing. That is what is going to give handloom and other crafts a fair chance to survive in the modern world and this is what is going to help handloom get a better pricing.
In the past, different models have been competing with power-loom fabric or Chinese imported fabric. The ultimate thing is that the daily wages of handloom weavers were getting sacrificed. The weavers are not getting enough money and they were moving out of the profession.
So, that is where I see a silver lining.
Today when I see malls mushrooming up and people wearing similar clothes, but fashion, as I see, is a cyclic phenomenon. It is a natural human tendency to look different, and handlooms are going to give us that originality back, the newness back.
This is not just the kind of thing we are going to experience in India, but across the globe. This is already happening in fashion capitals such as Paris, Milan and New York.
So in order to look different, in order to wear something that has more soul and is more sustainabIe, this is the right time when we can look at handlooms, experiment with handlooms for our local markets or at a larger scale and produce them into more "friendly" clothes that are wearable, since handloom has predominantly been about weaving saris and dupattas.
I think this is the right time for designers to also create a new product out of handlooms - diversifying the product, into something that is going to be fashionable enough and going to be accepted by the masses and something that suffices their need for daily wear clothing. Otherwise, saris are just going to be occasional wear and people are not going to adopt them on a daily basis.
Continuing on the same track, India can be a great international sourcing destination. We have been competing since the past 20-25 years in terms of mass production of goods, which can be produced by any other country. Like India losing out heavily to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka in terms of exports.
People are now turning towards Africa. Nigeria can produce a T-shirt or a western outfit at one-third the cost at which Indian companies would do. I think that is where the opportunity lies in this problem. We have to look at handlooms as strength of India which makes India a very unique product provider to the rest of the world.
If we can create a model where our mechanised mass production techniques can meet the handloom sector and we can provide cutting edge sharp products for the women or the men of the world. I think India has got a winning combination that can meet the demands of the luxury or premium garment market all over the world.
India has also got a competitive advantage because no other country in the world has this kind of richness in craft and handicraft diversity. Every country has got its own craft. Like the US had its, the UK too had its own craft. But every kind of craft died a slow death.
Now, we can only find craft in other countries in their museums. But luckily India is still practicing and found it easy to revive their craft. We have an entire generation that knows how to practice this craft and put it in the right energy and right synergy.
I think the government is already doing a lot. The government has historically also done a lot in terms of subsidies, granting lands etc. I think what is missing is the big idea, the big synergy. There are already too many people who are consulting, and telling you what to do, what not to do.
There are already a lot of wise people talking about different things. But handloom will require the Apple kind of evolution. Handloom will require one vision with one mission which takes care of a holistic problem solving exercise where we have to think about a proper system design.
Just the government trying to do this or hundreds of other designers trying to do this their own way is not going to help. Had it really helped, we would have seen a lot of rich people, with better handloom conditions across the globe.
In India right now, every second designer is using handloom, the government is also pushing forward the entire vision of handloom. But still there is something missing. What is missing is a holistic way of looking at system design.
With handloom, we don’t have to just create a product, one has to focus on a complete system design. The system design has to work on different levels.
Handloom has got strength. If every weaver produces even one metre a day, you will have one region, one cluster producing 5,000 metres of handloom fabric in a day.
It is a myth when people say that we cannot mass-produce it. It is just that it requires sheer commitment, it requires a bit of patience and as a designer it requires planning way in advance so that you don’t miss out the season and one can launch in time.