“It has the blouse piece too.”
“Looks like there are four saris.”
“There’s no border for the green one, see.”
The conversation unfolds between three men under a tamarind tree in Kanchipuram as they unfurl a bundle from a plastic bag. They’re talking about a hank, a coiled form of twine. Two men hold on to one end while the other uncoils it; three more men join in. There, in the dusty backyard of Pillayar Palayam, the air undisturbed except for the occasional moo of a cow and her calf nearby, a Kanjeevaram pattu sari is conceived. It’s in its most delicate form, much like an embryo. Over the next one week, it will grow inside a weaver’s tile-roofed home, the womb.
Weavers Venkatesh, Ezhil, Kalathynathan and friends spread the fibres of the hank lengthwise across a pair of wooden structures called oondhi , each of which consists a horizontal beam tied to two criss-crossing ones fixed to the soil. “The pavu (hank) has just come from the dyer,” explains Venkatesh, talking about the off-white kora silk hank that was sent to him by his boss, who owns a sari outlet in Kanchipuram.
“We will separate the individual ezhai (fibres), undo all the knots and spread it out neatly. Following this, we will douse the pavu in a trough of starch to strengthen the fibre,” he explains. The hank is spread out between the oondhi once again after it is starched. “This process takes half a day,” he adds. The oondhi in his backyard is several decades old; Venkatesh says that it’s shared by his friends and neighbours. “Every neighbourhood will have a pair to spread out the pavu ,” he adds.
At the narrow portico of his one-roomed home a little distance away, the zari fibres are spread out in a similar fashion, to prepare them for the loom. Walk into any household in Pillayar Palayam and you are likely to see a weaver at work on his loom. “This area has countless weavers,” says Kalathynathan. On late afternoons when televisions are turned off, you can hear the clackety-clack of the hand looms in the locality.
It’s one such song that leads us to a darkened room in the neighbourhood. The power has been turned off and inside a man is seated by a gigantic structure that’s a convoluted beauty of wood and twine. This is the hand loom where the raw silk fibres embrace each other. Velayutham smiles in greeting. A shy man of 38, he has spent all his life weaving silk. Sun light falls from an opening in the tile-roofed ceiling on his creation — a pink sari that Velayutham will dress up with gold buttas and a green border.
Seated with his feet on the two wooden paddles that are below ground level, he weaves. It looks simple — Velayutham slides the pen-like ‘nada’ or shuttle through the two sheets of silk warp held between the row of ‘teeth’ made of taut twine. This releases one horizontal strand of silk. Clackety-clack — he presses the paddles and swipes the wooden reed once over the gathering piece of cloth. For every press of the paddle, alternate strands of silk rise. The shuttle passes one horizontal strand through these. The swiping movement locks this into the cloth. Clackety-clack, clackety-clack…the cycle repeats with mechanical precision; the sound is almost hypnotic. “This movement,” points out Velayutham, to the chord hanging from above to his left that he tugs at regular intervals, “weaves the design that’s imprinted on the jacquard.”
In the 20 minutes that we spend by his side, Velayutham weaves a little over an inch of the sari. “I bought my wife a silk sari the colour of vadamalli (purple) for our wedding,” he smiles. “I couldn’t weave it myself, but it looked nice.” As an afterthought he adds, “No, it was not as good as the ones that I weave.”
A sari offers employment to several people during its making. Before the weaver sits to work, women of the household participate in a process called ‘achu punaikiradhu’. This involves merging by hand individual strands of the hank to the loom. “It’s a painstaking process,” explains Venkatesh. “They have to merge over 5,000 strands.” The women are paid around Rs. 200 for the job, which takes almost a day to get done. “We can do it too, if we wish to cut cost,” he adds. But outsourcing it gives the weaver that rare day of rest and also ensures distribution of labour.
An average silk sari takes around eight days to be woven; but the more complicated the design, the longer it takes. “I make Rs. 7,500 for three saris,” says Venkatesh. This too varies according to the design. “But we get nothing over Rs. 15,000, no matter how grand the sari is.”
Weavers who work for the many co-operative societies in Kanchipuram earn more than those who work for private showrooms, but work at the societies is erratic. “There are days when I sit idle for 10 days at a stretch,” says Sumathi, who works for a co-operative.
A weaver’s annual income will probably be lower than the cost of the most elaborate sari he/she weaves. But this is how it is; this is how it has been and perhaps will continue to be. “Our children will not be weavers like us. We are sending them to college so that they get good jobs and lead better lives,” says Velayutham.
Sumathi’s daughter, who’s in college, doesn’t know a thing about weaving. “I don’t allow her anywhere near the loom,” smiles Sumathi. The most special sari she wove is a sky-blue one with a peach border. She extracts it from the bureau at home. Sumathi was a bride-to-be when she wove it — it was to be her wedding sari. “I wove it slowly, adding more silk to each strand so that the fabric is nice and thick.” She places it on herself and poses for a photo. Just then, she says, “Wait,” and pulls out the elaborate pallu from within the folds. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” she blushes, as the camera clicks. In that moment, it all seems worth it — the efforts of over half-a-dozen people to create a precious length of cloth.
