Indian weavers sidelined by market forces

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."

Previous

1 | 2