I recently visited Kota on my way from Jaipur to Maheshwar keen to learn about the Kota Doria sari weaving tradition. I was kindly helped by Victoria Singh, a local resident and founder of the Kota Heritage Society. After accompanying her on a few errands around town – she is involved in a lot of local charity and heritage work, she took me to the village of Kaithoon which is about fifteen kilometres from Kota, and the main centre for weaving in the region. Victoria Singh and Ritu Jain write more on the kora doria in an article for Hand-Eye magazine. We first went to meet Badrun Nisha, the secretary of the Women’s…
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Five P: Handloom Revival and Innovation in Tamil Nadu
This article is written by Uthra Rajgopal, who worked with Five P to develop their website and promotional material during a textile exploration trip around India last year. An art history post- graduate and currently a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, Uthra is conducting research into Khadi and Handloom in India, and will be presenting at the forthcoming Textile Society of America conference in October. Above Photo: Mr.Kandasamy on a jacquard loom in the Five P workshop. Photo: Ruth Clifford Chenimalai is a small town about 25 km from Erode, at the centre of the ‘cotton belt’ between the textile hubs of Coimbatore and Salem in Tamil Nadu. The area has a long…
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Sircilla: a weaving industry fighting to survive
In Sircilla, a once thriving handloom town, there are now less than ten weavers, none of them under the age of 70, all looking as if they should have retired long ago. But the term retirement is unknown to weavers. They weave until they can physically weave no longer. There is not a single young handloom weaver here now. But then, where is the incentive to work in handloom when the earnings are just 80-100 rupees a day, while a powerloom weaver earns about 4 – 500 rupees because he can produce so much more? The government are supporting these handloom weavers while they’re still practicing but there is no…
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Textile Travels in India: November
Highlights – Introduction to the weaving of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. – Meetings with influential and inspiring people in the textile and craft world in Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Kanchipuram. – Visit to Weavers’ Service Centres in the cities above and the Indian Institute of Handloom Technology in Salem. – Visit to shops, designers and NGOs creating innovative designs using local handloom fabrics. I’ve just arrived in Ahmedabad, via Pune on the same train I caught on my way down to Bagalkot two months ago, the Lokmanya Express. This time I was coming from Salem, about 80 km east of Coimbatore a big industrial hub known for its long…
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Handloom journeys in India
I’m back in India again, and during the last two weeks I’ve been from Mumbai down to Bagalkot in Karnataka, back up to Mumbai then up to Kutch. I was in Bagalkot to visit the weavers of the Ilkal sari, named after the town of Ilkal, an ancient weaving centre. The sari is characterised by its cotton warp, art silk border and art silk pallu in bright reds and greens with shimmering motifs including temples, hanige (comb), koti kammli (fort ramparts), toputenne (jowar) and rampa (mountain range) on the pallu. Alongside Somaiya Kala Vidya’s (SKV) pilot course last year, they ran an outreach project, which involved three weavers from Bhujodi travelling…
