Handloom 2.0

Lost in Lado Sarai — yet another urban village in Delhi where change and fashion studios have found a new address — epiphany can be a while coming. But when I meet Gaurav Jai Gupta, a designer and trained weaver known for his ‘engineered’ saris and for weaving stainless steel into textiles, and he says, “All I’ve really done is made handloom edgy” — it finally hits home. Handloom is making a comeback. Reclaiming its shelf-space. But not in ways that it always has. Re-imagined and reinvented by new design labels and e-commerce sites, the potential of the fabric is almost at full stretch.

Over the years, handloom has come to occupy a space so decidedly left of centre that few have tried to redeem it or experiment with it radically. Among those who tried — and succeeded — in the mainstream fashion firmament are Abraham & Thakore, Rajesh Pratap Singh and Neeru Kumar. The not-for-profit sector, which has also been fighting the cause of handloom for years and struggling to give weavers a life of dignity, has chosen to focus, perhaps wisely, on preserving and protecting traditional weaves and motifs. Rarely, if ever, straying from the norm. Either way, handloom has long suffered from a nylon-lycra-synthetic-complex.

Changing fabric

Back at Gaurav Jai Gupta’s studio — where a lone loom stands defiantly between designer mannequins like a Dr Who TARDIS — he points out that in the last few years, handloom has become something of a cheat’s formula and sympathy net. “Bridal wear and handloom are the shortcuts to success now,” he says, “but few bother to play with the textile.” A charge that cannot be levelled against his label. Combining multiple weaving techniques and styles from across the subcontinent to ‘engineer’ a single nine-yard sari or a dress, Gupta puts his studio’s loom (and later, looms in Phulia, Chanderi and Banaras) to the ultimate test. Ask him about his signature style of weaving metal and crystals into fabric though, and he’ll remind you that it’s not as path-breaking as it seems at first. “I used copper (and even the tape from audio cassettes) as raw material back in college. And if you think of it, a couple of generations ago, zari inevitably meant threads of silver or even gold, did it not?”

Unlike, for instance, his contemporary Sanjay Garg’s Raw Mango label — which has scripted the biggest blockbuster in handloom retail in recent years with its refreshing, candy-hued treatment of gossamers from Chanderi, hyper-colourising traditional Indian wear like never before — the colour palette of Gupta’s Akaaro almost always mimics an overcast, monsoonal sky. Steering clear of the better-known heavy silks, the Rohtak-born, London-educated designer also tends to return to lighter cottons from relatively obscure places like Tope, near Sambalpur, in Orissa and Phulia in West Bengal.

Making every thread count

A dusty, one-horse town once, Phulia, like Gupta and Garg, has also been imprinted by handloom’s success in the last five years; its ‘overnight’ rise, a precious gift of adversity. With the government-run Tantuja shops on the verge of rolling down shutters, 15 years ago, weavers in Phulia were losing their only source of steady income. Pushed to the brink, they were forced to go out of their comfort zone and scout for takers elsewhere. Today their soft, handspun cotton saris are a canvas for colour and design experiments, often shipped thousands of miles away from their humble homesteads.

Although nascent, the skeins of the story of Meghalaya’s Ri-Bhoi district are not very different from that of Phulia’s. Its beautiful bolts of silks recently planted on the design map by Shillong’s Daniel Syiem. Straining to latch onto broken sentences over a tenuous mobile network, like an indulgent parent, Syiem says, “You should have seen their faces,” pausing for effect, before he recreates the magic of the day he returned to the village after his first showing in Jaipur two years ago. He recalls how the weavers — women, mostly, from the Khasi tribe — couldn’t help beaming ear to ear. He insisted the shy women wear shift dresses and trousers, jackets and shirts fashioned out of Ryndia — the textile they had woven for him and, until that day, only ever used to make traditional stoles with.

Introduced to the villagers by his friend Tennyson Lyngdoh, who was then in the sericulture department, Syiem says he loved the fluidity and the versatile DNA of the fabric at once. A love that was palpable at the Lakme Fashion Week this year, where his all-organic collection with lesser-known weaves such as Ryndia and Thoh Rew Stem opened to much acclaim.

Admittedly, the periphery of Syiem’s experiments have been somewhat limited so far — often restricted to different styles of draping, some inspired by the local attire of jainsem. But buoyed by a newfound confidence, and content in the knowledge that his clothes can straddle the local and global divide, Syiem for his next collection is working with a textile designer to develop new weaving techniques and revive old patterns and checks to add more local colour and heft to his label.

Casting a wider net

The internet, meanwhile, is also spinning a minor handloom revolution of its own. E-commerce sites such as IndianRoots, Chanderiyaan and Ekaya are driving well-thought-out agendas. Chanderiyaan, for instance, is a democratic platform attempting to arm weavers in the Ashok Nagar District of Chanderi with digital skills. Ekaya focuses squarely on decorative weaves, handwoven and needle-crafted in Banaras. The latter’s website also plays a short, smartly produced documentary on the processes of weaving, set to semi-classical vocals and sweeping views of the city’s photogenic ghats. A film that is evidently geared, like the website’s wares, to tug at the heartstrings and purse strings of both an urban Indian and global audience. IndianRoots too has its money on the expanding international market for handloom and an evolved, India-inspired aesthetic that popular design blogs such as An Indian Summer have long espoused.

So even though it’s not an original analogy, when Rahul Narvekar declares, “Hand-crafted leather bags are high-luxury here, yet a sari hand-woven and hand-painted over months was never quite kosher,” it is impossible not to be swept by the force of his argument. As the CEO of IndianRoots, the ethnic retail arm of NDTV, launched in August to serve “India on a digital platter” to the paisely-loving, Diwali-hugging diaspora, Narvekar should know. When we call him, he’s on tour in southern India, retracing some of the 2,600km across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Puducherry that were mapped by management students from Coimbatore at his company’s behest. “And it’s only the tip of the handloom iceberg,” he says.

With savvy strategies — IndianRoots roped in heavyweights Sabyasachi, Anita Dongre, Meera & Muzaffar Ali and Raw Mango, among others, to draw in the deep pockets from day one — the e-commerce site hopes to axe the middlemen and share the benefits of fair trade with average weavers as well. It also hopes to do what others like Jaypore have sought to do in recent times — think out of the box, and quite literally. Breaking the stereotypes endorsed by the offline or big box retailers in countries like the US and UK, it hopes to peddle an idea of India that doesn’t quite subscribe to mothballed ‘exotica’ sold out of incense-scented living rooms, blessed by a whole pantheon of miniature Hindu gods and goddesses.

“The only trouble is,” says Narvekar, “craftsmen and weavers can’t reproduce the same piece or scale up production at the drop of a hat.” A rationale long appropriated and used to good advantage by peddlers of high-luxury merchandise across the world. And a lesson, perhaps, for handloom, as it takes a leap of faith into a new, avant-garde unknown.

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