http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0731/p07s01-wosc.html
Indian weavers sidelined by market forces
As traditional handmade saris go out of fashion, their makers resort to
unskilled labor to make ends meet.
By Mian Ridge | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the July 30, 2008 edition
Varanasi, India - In a windowless hut lit only by the sunlight pouring
through an open door, a bone-thin man bends over his wooden hand loom,
weaving a shimmering silk sari with violet, turquoise, and gold threads.
The beautiful six-meter-long garment will take 10 days to complete and
will fetch the weaver, Abdul Majid, 600 rupees (approximately $14),
which is little more than he would have earned for the same work a
decade ago.
Diminishing demand for handwoven saris coupled with competition from
power looms – which belt out several garments a day – in other parts of
India as well as China have left the 300,000 hand loom weavers of
Varanasi, a city in northern India, wretchedly poor. Once prosperous,
craftsmen like Mr. Majid are now struggling to survive.
The increased competition also affects Majid's family: beside him, his
sweet-faced, 7-year-old son, Ashraf, helps him weave the leaf pattern
running down the sari's edge.
Nearby, his 15-year-old daughter, Rakshanah, is deftly spinning thread
on a foot-powered wheel that appears to have been manufactured out of an
upturned pedal bike.
Neither child has ever been to school, says Majid's tired-looking wife.
Like most weavers' children, their labor is needed at home.
The Varanasi-based People's Vigilance Committee on Human Rights says
that a number of weavers and their children have died of starvation in
the city in recent months.
"It is so difficult to feed the family," says Majid, who himself looks
undernourished. When he completes the sari he is painstakingly weaving,
the proud artisan admits that he has no more work. "I don't know what
will happen next."
A tradition in decline
Varanasi has long been famed for its silk saris. In India, hand-woven
saris are to this ancient city what tea is to Darjeeling or papier mache
ornaments to Kashmir.
Praised in ancient religious texts, Varanasi's silks were particularly
celebrated by the Mughals in the 16th and 17th centuries. So loyal was
the Mughal courts' patronage of the hand-loom craft that many weavers
converted to Islam. Today, 90 percent of Varanasi's weavers are Muslim.
"Even in the 21st century, Varanasi's woven silk saris and fabrics
remain the finest and most elaborate loom-patterned textiles in the
Indian weaving tradition," says Rahul Jain, a leading Indian fashion
designer.
But today, Varanasi's weavers are typical of the millions of Indians
left behind by market forces while elsewhere, India booms. They live
hidden away too, in neighborhoods reached by narrow lanes, out of sight
of tourists who throng India's holiest Hindu city, picking up silk
handweaves – or machine-made cloth passed off as the real thing – for a
song.
As more Indian women wear jeans and business suits, the taste for
Varanasi's intricate weaves is disappearing. The closets of middle-class
and upper-middle-class women once burst with sumptuous handwoven saris
in every hue. But today they buy such garments primarily for their
wedding trousseaus.
Fickle fashions worsen the plight of the weavers. The extravagant
embellishments – sequins, crystals, and embroidery – now in vogue are
better suited to plainer silks, woven on power looms, than to
multitextured handweaves.
The weavers' downturn has been exacerbated by a structural failure to
adapt to changing market conditions. Many weavers are stuck dealing with
traders who might not buy their products or offer a fair price, but
continue to prevent them from selling their wares to anyone else,
explains Adarsh Kumar, chief executive of the All India Artisans and
Craftworkers Welfare Association, a New Delhi-based organization that
works to improve artisans' access to markets.
Since hand-weavers group into small cliques along complex village and
caste lines, they have not pulled together to find more efficient ways
of doing business.
For example, an entrepreneur who wants to invest in hand looms would
find it impossible to bring the necessary number of weavers together to
work on a project, says Mr. Kumar.
"What we really need is for crafts in India to reposition themselves,
like in Italy, where handmade has a high value. That hasn't happened in
India yet," he adds. "These skills could have been redeployed into
making curtains, for example, but that transition has never been made."
Resorting to unskilled labor
Instead, a different kind of transition – from skilled labor to
unskilled labor – is under way. Indeed, many weavers are opting for
rickshaw pulling and daily-wage construction work.
Many weavers' huts in Majid's neighbourhood, which once thrummed with
the click-clack of looms, now lie empty. Inside, those carefully crafted
wooden looms lie covered in dust and cobwebs.
Nizamuddin Ansari closed the door on his hand loom hut last year and
started working as a bicycle rickshaw driver. As a weaver, he was
earning the same 300 rupees a week as he had made 10 years ago, which
was not enough to feed his seven children.
As a rickshaw driver, he earns 125 rupees a day. Both jobs are tough:
"Rickshaw driving hurts my feet; bending over a loom hurt my stomach,"
he says. But Mr. Ansari wistfully admits that he would prefer weaving
the designs passed down in his family for "hundreds of years."
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