HYDERABAD: “The future will be hand-made. We have to ask whether we can retain the hand-made in us,” said designer Padmaja Krishnan from Mumbai, whose eponymous label Padmaja creates clothes that combine traditional skills and sustainability.
She was speaking at a discussion on ‘Handloom and the Future of Fashion’ organised by the Ministry of Textiles in association with the Lakme Fashion Week. The event, which was held at Elahe Urban at Banjara Hills on the occasion of the National Handloom Day on Wednesday, also saw three designers – Soham Dave, Padmaja and Santanu Das from Maku Textiles unveil their handloom collections.
Sustainable fashion curator Gautam Vazirani revealed the enormity of the Indian handloom industry at the outset by stating that 95 per cent of the handloom in the world is contributed by India alone. “After agriculture, the handloom sector is the second-largest source of income in India. There are more than 642 handloom clusters in the country,” he added.
Despite its rich legacy and diversity, the handloom sector is, however, not a very profitable one. Jayesh Ranjan, secretary (IT) to Telangana government, said that the government started taking several measures to revive the sector after a large number of weavers died by suicide due to financial losses. “As part of our revival programme, we have decided to focus on Telia Rumal weave and a Tussar strain called Mahadevpur Silk this year. A simple way to make the handloom industry profitable is make more people wear them.”
AG Govardhan, who won the Padma Shri Award for his role in keeping the Telia Rumal weave alive, said that one of the biggest challenges handloom is facing is that it is not considered a lucrative profession by weaver families anymore. So what can be done? Sudha Mullapudi, project lead at ReWeave, has been working with the state government to find ways to address the grievances of the weaver community. “Young weavers rue that there is neither fair wages nor recognition for their work.
A weaver is not given the same social status as an engineer or a bank official, and they also believe that the profession mars their marriage prospects. To address these issues, we are working with NIFT (Hyderabad) to accord weavers a ‘designer’ status. As many as 200 weavers are being trained in CAD programme and English.”
Stating that it is essential to preserve the identity of every weave, Santanu said that he has worked with Eri and natural dyes in his new collection. “We have dedicated the collection to climate change. Each garment is named after a species that has gone extinct,” he added. Soham, who unveiled his first festive collection, said that logistics is one of the issues that weavers are struggling with today. Padmaja has used flowers and coconuts from temples to make dyes for her new collection. “Natural dyes fade over time, but that adds to their beauty,” she said.
But are consumers ready to buy handloom products at a premium price? Smita Shroff, who helms Elahe Urban with her husband Rajiv Shroff, said, “Only a handful of customers appreciate handloom and are ready to pay a premium price for it, but times are changing. It is necessary that we arrive at a middle path which will make handloom products more affordable.”