WARP AND WEFT
Weaving difficult yarns
SWATHI. V
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It's a thankless job for the women of Pochampally. But without them the beautiful ikat saris would lose their sheen.
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PHOTO: SWATHI .V
Caught young: Tedium at the loom
P erched on one of the two frame-looms that occupy half the premises of her house in Pochampally, 21-year-old Seetha Padmavathi does what she has been doing for six years. One swift movement of her slender arm spins the shuttle from end to end, and hastens a weft across the warp of a beautiful silk sari. After a wee moment spent in checking if the thread is following the design, she prepares for another arm-sweep for another scurry of the shuttle to put another weft in place. Several such efforts and wefts later, the sari would roll out, splendid in its Ikat design with feathered edges. Several such saris later, Padmavathi can hope to pay for a worthy groom.
Padmavathi has to earn if she is to get married. The kind of wedding she would have hinges on the quantity of her weaving and the earnings thereof. Her sister, who worked on the other loom, had a wedding that cost Rs.2 lakh. She paid her own dowry through contributions to a chitti (small-time finance). Padmavathi threw in her weight too and with a final tug her family could pull through safely.
“I cannot hope for marriage any time soon. It involves huge expenditure which means six more years of toil,” she says bitterly. Till a decade ago, weaving had been an unthinkable occupation for unmarried girls in Pochampally Handloom Village Cluster, 40 kilometres away from Hyderabad. Barriers are breaking now, not owing to modernity, but due to poverty ruling the roost in over 40 artisan villages specialising in the craft of Ikat.
“When we married off my sisters-in-law, we had borne the whole burden. Times were different then. Girls did not have to earn their dowry. They never sat on a loom,” says Seetha Anasuya, Padmavathi's mother. Sitting in a corner, she winds yarn from the hank to a bobbin, her attention fastened on the intruders.
Strenuous work
Like many women of her era, Anasuya cannot operate the loom. Pre-weaving tasks which can make or mar a sari have been her forte. Any normal day for her is occupied with chores such as treating the yarn, winding bobbins, marking the design, boiling the dyes, and dyeing the yarn a dozen times before it is fit for the loom. These are no ordinary tasks. Marking the design on a chitik i(warp-block) could be strenuous and time-consuming. Each time the yarn is dyed, it should be secured with rubber shreds in parts where colouring is not required. The yarn requires as many dips as there are colours in the design. In case of ‘double Ikat', it would be double the toil because the design is to be marked on the weft too. Pre-weaving for an average sari takes eight diligent days.
“Ikat work engages the whole family, and can never be done alone. Women play a prominent role without which a sari would never take shape,” says Punna Sudarshan, an artisan-turned-journalist.
When Anasuya was young, a girl's ability to perform these supplementary tasks was her passport to marriage. Early marriage was an economic expediency. A bride brought two more toiling hands.
The work was never rewarding either in creative or financial terms. Apart from being tedious, it causes severe erosion of shoulder joints owing to its repetitive nature. The joint family being the ideal set-up for the economics it ensured, it goes unsaid that the key financial decisions are taken by the patriarch, with only an advisory role played by the wife. The male family-head registers himself as weaver in the cooperative society, and avails of the resources thereof. The whole gamut of backyard operations run by the female members goes un-thanked and unpaid for.
With the sheen of its silk lost to the market onslaught, Pochampally Handloom Cluster is now experiencing a social and cultural churn. Artisans abandoned their looms for odd jobs in the city as private security guards and salesmen. More children, including girls, flocked to schools and colleges. ‘Sanghamitra', a voluntary organisation working on improvement of weavers' lives, noted 60 per cent decline in the number of looms in Pochampally village alone. “None from the present generation wants to work on a loom. Of the 1,400-odd looms, only about 600 exist now,” says P.Krishna Kumar from ‘Sanghamitra'.
Plight of girls
With pre-weaving skills losing their charm, poor girls are at the receiving end. Parents, despite their poverty, consider it suicidal to marry their daughters off to fellow artisans. Pressed to pay hefty dowries for non-artisan matches, brides-to-be are forced to fill the spaces left behind by their fathers and brothers at the looms. Some even travel to work in a Handloom Park six kilometres away.
“I learnt loom-work three years ago from my father, though working here only for the past two months. I'm paid Rs.50 per metre of double ikat work on a blanket, and end up finishing two metres in a day,” says Nalla Bhavani, a teenager from Siripuram village. She is educated only upto Class V and deposits her monthly income in a chitti, towards an obvious end.
Doomed to the loom are also married women with children. Chintakindi Rama, mother of two children, is an example. If her two children are to go to college, she has to labour at the loom along with her husband Ch.SiddhaiahBhoga Rukmini, another woman weaver, cannot agree more. Rukmini's husband left her, peeved over the birth of a daughter. Learning the craft from her father, Rukmini took to the loom six years ago, and hopes to provide a decent education to her two children.
“I will never allow my kids to touch the loom. It is like an addiction. If you learn a little, you will end up tangled in the twine forever,” she says philosophically.
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