Reinventing the ‘gamchha’
The Dastkari Haat Samiti refashions the common man’s ‘gamchha’ into a sari, while the fashion industry makes it stylish.
A weaver in Nabadwi. Photo: Courtesy Dastkari Haat Samiti
A weaver in Nabadwi. Photo: Courtesy Dastkari Haat Samiti
Ask a porter, a rickshaw puller or a construction labourer about the reassuring importance of a gamchha. Thrown on the shoulder, wrapped around the head or waist, the 2m cotton cloth with a mix of checks and stripes, mostly in red and white, works as a towel, a shield against the sun, even a bedsheet. “Much like the lungi, the gamchha has been central to the lives of India’s male working class. Of course, the elite class doesn’t look twice at it because it’s the ‘poor man’s cloth’ after all,” says Jaya Jaitly, a handloom expert and founder-president of the Dastkari Haat Samiti, an association of Indian craftspeople.
It’s not just the class-based stereotype that hurt the evolution of this basic handloom product, woven in the rural areas of Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Bihar and West Bengal. “Chinese towels are being sold on pavements across the country at throwaway prices (Rs.30-40). There is also the onslaught of the power-loom,” says Jaitly, 74, who has been trying to draw the attention of the authorities to the plight of gamchha weavers for a decade. “The authorities are only interested in the established weavers, like those in Varanasi. Even if our traditional gamchha becomes extinct, no one would notice it.”
Rajesh Pratap Singh’s gamchha jacket
To find ways to keep handlooms alive across classes and social hierarchies, Jaitly went on a journey in May last year. “There was too much hullabaloo happening. ‘Government is going to undo handloom reservation. Power-loom is suddenly the monster.’ I was annoyed by the armchair discussions,” she says, referring to the power-loom lobby’s demand last year to repeal the Handlooms (Reservation of Articles for Production) Act, 1985. So she decided to visit West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar “to know the weavers, their struggles, and assess what’s happening at the ground level”. She returned with insights on the changing dynamics within families that were part of a weaving cluster.
In West Bengal, for instance, she came across femalegamchha weavers in Phulia and Nabadwip. “Within the state’s weaving communities, gamchhas are made on handlooms by the women of weaver families, while men are involved in the weaving of more famous Bengali saris.Gamchha weaving does not require such meticulous work, unlike a sari made on a jacquard loom. Therefore, women, after finishing their household activities, weave gamchhas. When I saw them (the women), I had a eureka moment: Let’s make saris!” That’s how the Gamchha Project started, to “revive the handloom cloth and take it beyond the working class”. While stumbling into the idea of thegamchha sari was the obvious outcome, Jaitly’s parallel discovery of women slowly penetrating the formerly masculine territory of weaving needs more than a footnote.
Jaya Jaitly and Ankit Kumar at their office in New Delhi. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint
“The aim (of the project) was to link the urban buyer to the rural weaver (which would increase the weaver’s income), and also make the sari more popular. Most women today prefer Western clothes over traditional Indian attire. But the sari is sophisticated Indianness; it’s our tradition. It should be made popular in whatever way possible,” believes Jaitly, who is always dressed in a sari. The day we met, she was wearing a Patteda Anchu sari, bought decades ago—the 10th century Karnataka weave is now on the verge of extinction.
Soon after Jaitly, Ankit Kumar, a textile designer with the Dastkari Haat Samiti, visited Phulia. “After the first survey, we found that Phulia was not very centralized, thus making the process of weaving saris difficult to monitor and manage. We then turned towards Nabadwip (around 3 hours from Kolkata by local train). Weaving gamchhasthere is not only a source of livelihood, but a part of the local tradition and practice,” says Kumar.
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