The Hindu Business Line : Good in patches!

The cloth littering Kovalam's beachfront is their medium of expression... It's an initiative that has deftly, and imaginatively, brought Gujarat's famed patchwork to faraway Kerala.

Medha Ganguly (centre) with members of the Vismaya group.

Cloth waste had, for long, been a blotch on Kovalam's tourism. But not ever since Medha Ganguly set up her `Patchworking Women's Lives' initiative a year ago.

After moving to Thiruvananthapuram in 2002, she was working on product diversification for Hantex, the State handloom weavers' cooperative society.

"Patchwork is a traditional craft in Gujarat. I used to make utility products from worn-out clothes," she says. The idea for the Kovalam project struck her when she visited a stall put up by the Zero Waste Centre, a voluntary organisation, at a local fair. Her proposal was approved by the centre and this gave Medha a chance to work with women at the grassroots level.

Earlier, as part of her NID (National Institute of Design) project, `The Gardens of the Rann', she had helped Rajput communities revive their lost patchwork tradition in association with the Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan. "It gave me new insight into the language of a fabric, essentially not restricting to textiles," she says.

There are about 130 tailors on the Kovalam beachfront who do brisk business, making sarongs, shirts and skirts for foreign tourists. On an average, 35-40 kg of cloth waste is generated every month and these are either littered on the beach or burnt. "This had become a menace," says Medha.

She roped in women living in and around Kovalam, most of whom knew tailoring but were struggling to eke out a living. The Vismaya Patchwork Unit took shape. "We wanted them to use the pieces of cloth as a medium of meaningful expression," says Medha.

Soon they were trained to segregate cloth, identify its figurative character and develop a sense of colour.

Medha, in a smattering of Malayalam, would ask them to narrate stories and sketch on a storyboard before starting work on the cloth. The first wall-hanging was based on a story narrated by six women — a girl goes to the forest for firewood, jumps into a river on seeing an elephant, and villagers rescue her. "It was a novel venture, for Kerala has no patchwork tradition," says Medha.

Each piece of work involves a lot of reading, interaction, sketching and tailoring. The pieces are mostly handmade, except for a few big ones.

They made a banner for the Indian Workshop on Rice held in Kochi in connection with the International Year of Rice in 2004. "We collected songs and documented traditional farming practices that became the focus of the workshop," says Medha.

The 10x12 ft wall hanging had a village background with a small temple and lush paddy fields on the banks of a river. Along the way, the blue water turns murky and the backdrop changes — there is no cultivation anymore; the temple is a modern building complex; there are factories, effluents, pollution and water scarcity.

The women at Vismaya are a well-knit group. One of them collects tailor waste from the beach and they work at the Zero Waste Centre in Kovalam. They manage their costing and accounting too. And they have bagged orders from Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan, and Nepal for bazaar bags and wall hangings.

"Our products mainly sell through word of mouth. Tourists in Kovalam also buy our bags," says Sulekha, a member of Vismaya.

Until they met Medha, many women like her found it difficult to make ends meet. Today all of them earn about Rs 800 a month.

Vismaya members are currently working on a banner describing the impact of tourism on Kovalam for TourismWatch, a Germany-based waste management organisation.

As for Medha, she refuses to be straitjacketed by her work for mills or export houses. She wants to further explore the language of textiles and weave new meanings into it.

Picture by the author

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