As one motors towards Kolkata from Chennai, fashion-conscious people make it a point to take a diversion to travel through the dusty lanes to a sleepy village of Paturu, seven km from Kovur in SPSR Nellore district.
The village is known not just great Telugu poet of medieval times Tikkana who translated part of the great epic Mahabharata into Telugu along with Nannaya and Yerranna, but also for exquisitely woven ‘pattu’ saris as the weavers carry on the centuries-old tradition with aplomb.
The speciality of the saris made in Paturu is that silk is used in warp and cotton in weft to give a grand look and at make it more affordable and comfortable for the women who wear it at a time when the silk price keeps going up, say a group of weavers as fashionable-eves make a beeline for scores of shops in the small village, where every household turns beautiful saris in the attached workshed labouring for hours together at a stretch. Over 10,000 ‘maggams’ operate in and around Paturu.
Showing a glittering sari weighing about 400 grams, Pendem Venkata Seshaiah explains in the saris woven by their counterparts in Kanchipuram silk comes both in weft and warp. “We use silk in weft to give a shiny look to the product and at the same time make it available at a much reduced cost, especially to middle class people who love to own more number of saris for the same price,” he adds while convincing a group of customers who make a tough bargain with him on the weaving method put into practice in the recent times to face competition.
It is the price of silk in China, where it originated that decides the price of the key raw material across the globe, says another weaver P. Venkateshwarlu while exhibiting saris in the price range of ₹1,600 to ₹7,000 per piece. The silk price fluctuates depending upon global demand-supply condition and we end up making losses because of volatility as the silk price is over twenty times more than cotton.
“The Silk Board should give us the raw material at reasonable price. We do not want any other subsidy . We will work wonder with our hands,” he explains to The Hindu . “We cannot stop production when the price goes up or build up stocks when the price comes down in view of uncertainty over the future trend,” adds yet another weaver Boyna Venkata Ramanaiah.
However, the handloom sector like elsewhere in the country is facing a slow death as the members of GenX tend to look for greener pastures elsewhere due to inadequate patronage.
Traditionally, men and women work together. But now-a-days, girls from the community are shying away, they lament while pressing weaver-friendly initiatives like making it mandatory to wear handloom products at least once in a week by public and private sector employees to bring back past glory to the sector which employs maximum number of people next only to agriculture.
“We want to make Paturu one-stop place for handloom products from Kashmir to Kanyakumari in a year,” says Venkata Seshaiah who has a rich collection of ‘Maheswari’, ‘Pochampalli’, ‘Chanderi’ and Batik printed saris from Ujjain also so that handloom weavers from across the country get benefited.
