The soft, unbleached fabric feels good on the skin, its texture is lovely to touch, and its natural, creamy hue emanates an aura of benign calm. The fabric also gives the wearer a definite sense of satisfaction. After all, the cotton that went into making it is ancient desi cotton, grown by farmers who have found an economic lifeline in growing it for city folk. Rain-fed, organically grown, hand-spun, hand-woven, and manually-tailored by women’s SHGs in villages, this fabric makes a statement in more ways than one. Being completely hand-made by farmers and rural artisans, the money we pay for acquiring a Tula outfit provides livelihood to the entire chain of rural economy that includes farmers, spinners, weavers, dyers and tailors, who would otherwise struggle to stay afloat.
“Do you know cotton farmers constitute 60-70 per cent of all farmer suicides in the country?” quizzes V.R. Ananthoo, who started Tula with the support of many of his friends. Through Tula, Ananthoo hopes to reclaim both rural livelihoods and a return to desi cotton. Why desi cotton? “India has a cotton tradition that goes back thousands of years. There is Karnataka’s jayadhar cotton, Tamil Nadu’s ancient karunkanni, fine comilla cotton from the north-east, so fine that several metres of it can be rolled into a match box, kala cotton from Bhuj, Andhra’s ponduru, the tree-cottons of Rajasthan, the punasa cotton…
We are losing our wealth of desi cotton varieties because of the influx of Bt cotton. And besides, Bt cotton sets in spate a vicious cycle of higher investment, costs for buying seeds and consequent poverty among farmers,” Ananthoo points out. Tula has also engaged tribal groups in Sittlingi in Dharmapuri to create Lambadi embroidery in the garments.
Ananthoo went about creating the Tula solution in his trademark style — by creating an economically productive, ecologically sustainable, randomly replicable model of the entire production chain. Friends chipped in with money to pool an initial investment of Rs.15 lakh, Bangalore-based Tara Aslam of Nature Alley designed Tula’s range of outfits free of cost, and volunteers took care of the marketing and admin work.
Today, such production chains are in operation in Kallupatti village near Thirumangalam in Madurai, in villages near Gadag and Hubli in Karnataka, and in villages in Akola district in Vidarbha, Anybody can replicate this model, says Ananthoo. He adds, “A Rs. 15 lakh investment can provide livelihoods around the year to 60-80 rural folk, including farmers, spinners, weavers, dyers and tailors.”
Tula decided to go handmade, because a single spinning mill displaces a thousand livelihoods, while mechanised looms displace hundreds of livelihoods, and because factory ‘baled’ cottons drinks up our water resources — 24,000 litres go towards every single baling cycle that happens before the cotton fibres are transported to factories, not to mention the carbon footprint of transportation and factory manufacture.
Obviously, use of chemicals for manure, bleaching and dyeing destroys the soil ecology. “The Noyyal river in Tirupur is literally black now, because here, we ‘dye’ for the west,” says Ananthoo. So Tula largely stays clear of chemical dyes. And of course, grown organically, the cotton dust from Tula is non-allergic, while cotton dust from chemically dyed, non-organic fabric can irritate our respiratory system and skin. “While 5 per cent of our land is devoted to cotton farming, over 55 per cent of the pesticides used up in the country is used up in cotton fields,” he points out.
“Eco-friendly things may not be cheaper at face value, as they take more labour and time to produce. But there are invaluable advantages to organic cotton,” Ananthoo says. Perhaps, like the symbolic entwining of Khadi with the freedom movement, we need to get urbanites to look at wearing handmade desi cotton as a contemporary social statement for rural revival.
Tula outfits are available at OFM/Tula on Besant Avenue, Adyar. Details: 9840525516.
