The Silence of the Looms

 It was the silence that hit my friend when she went to the Angara weaving cluster in November.

Everytime she visited her father, she would make at least one trip to the co-operative, spending an entire day chatting with weavers and picking out the sarees her friends asked her to get for them. The clatter of the looms provided a pleasing background score as she checked out the design innovations and gave her expert advice on which designs may or may not work.

She’s often messaged me from the co-operative store, sending me pictures of a saree she thought I would like and asking which of the colours I preferred. If I didn’t respond on time, she’d just buy the one she thought I would like, and she knows my taste so well, she would always get it right.

When she visited last November, she wasn’t quite sure whether to risk visiting the weavers’ co-operative or not- would the people be following adequate masking and physical distancing or not, she couldn’t be sure. But since a friend had given her a laundry list of sarees she wanted, she decided to brave it.

As she walked through the weaving cluster, what struck her was how surreal the scene was. There were fewer people moving around, and all she could hear was one solitary loom valiantly clattering away as the master wearver worked on a customised wedding trousseau. The rest of the looms had fallen silent. With the co-operative society full of stocks which nobody wanted to buy, there was no point in getting further into debt by continuing to weave.

The economic slowdown has hit the weaving industry hard. With money being in tight supply and fewer opportunities to wear new clothes, people are buying less. Not only do the weavers not have an income from sales, their capital is tied up in the inventory that and their debts continue to mount.

Most rural weavers and artists are in similar situations. Their margins are so low that they depend on volumes to earn anything more than a subsistence livelihood. With the economic slowdown, they are actually losing money everyday, because while there is no revenue, loan repayments don’t stop. Any solution proposed by the government has been ad hoc and unsustainable.

There is not much an individual can do, and my friend did what she could. She bought as many sarees as she could afford, hoping to match sarees to owners later. Since she knows I have put a freeze on buying clothes for two years, she got me one as a gift. It was an Angara saree with jamdani motifs- a pleasing Andhra meets Bengal saree which would have been cherished as a design innovation in better times. As I draped it on a short day trip, I wondered anew about the trade-offs we make. At a time like this, should leading a more sustainable life matter more than supporting rural livelihoods?

More importantly, what is the government doing to alleviate the distress?