Natural woven thrillers

C. Sekhar, a handloom weaver from a village near Chennai, is making waves by weaving fabrics from natural fibres such as banana, hemp, jute ...

You could reach Chennai, in the south of India, directly by air from Dubai or you could land in Bangalore and take the Shatabdi Express train which will whisk you from India's Silicon Valley to the capital of Tamil Nadu in less than five hours.

Why a rail journey? As many travellers to the subcontinent would agree, there are few better ways to get to know the real India than by travelling second class in a train compartment. The hustle, the bustle, the pushing, the shoving, the noise, the stumbling over piles of someone's luggage ... the sheer cocktail of stimuli overwhelms your senses. It has to be experienced to be believed. And finally, after the chaos has settled and you find your allocated seat and curl up, tired but bemused, the speeding giant paint brush of nature, in nanosecond strokes, paints alongside the running train scenes of lush green fields frilled by coconut palms, farmers and farm hands bending low and working in the fields, thatched huts, pucca houses rigidly following the shape of matchboxes, raucous kids playing in the dust and waving with a mixture of innocence and insouciance at your rushing-by face in the train's window ...

The train ride from Bangalore to Chennai makes you realise that sometimes the journey is more important and interesting than the destination itself.
 
And in some ways, the lives of Chensiah Sekhar and his wife Padma underscore this philosophy. This couple has spun a fine tale of grassroots entrepreneurship with their cottage industry of weaving fabric from natural fibres that range from the humble banana to the more exotic water weeds. This couple's journey towards creating an eco-friendly fabric has been wonderful and to those who hop along for the narrative, mindblowing, to say the least.

In March this year, Sekhar created something of a stir when he displayed a set of saris he had woven using 25 natural fibres including jute, Hessian, linen, hemp, mesta, water weed, pineapple, silk and gold. The sari adorned with bright traditional colours and designs of peacocks strutting their regal plumage overwhelms you with its sheer beauty. It became a rage and a collector's item after Tamil Nadu's Union Minister of Textiles EVKS Elangovan launched it at a modest function. Sekhar wove his way into the Guinness Book of World Records too for using the largest number of natural fibres in a single woven item.

It did not take long for the saris to sell out. Priced at Rs1,500 (about Dh130) each, Sekhar sold all but one of the seven saris he wove. Each sari took him about 21 hours to complete. (His other range of natural-fibre saris made of jute, cotton and wool sell for about Rs550 and the jute silk and banana fibre saris sell for Rs650.)

While natural and organic have become buzzwords internationally and millions of dollars are spent while talking heads look for a way to apply the brakes on the eco-uncaring runaway train the world has turned into, in the humble private world that Sekhar and his wife inhabit, natural fibre is an everyday affair. For Sekhar, it is a means of garnering some visibility for his neglected co-weavers, of creating a worldwide awareness for eco-friendly fabrics and eventually use this global awareness to further his prospects, a dream he has had since he was a boy in loose shorts.

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Seated in his small one-room house in the rural environs of Anakaputhur, in Tamil Nadu, Sekhar tells me (with the help of a translator) of his dreams, his passion for weaving and why a tie-up with the Philippines government would benefit the world of clothes.

"My ancestors,'' he says, "migrated from neighbouring Andhra Pradesh years ago and handloom weaving was the occupation that sustained the entire village.

"The skills, honed to perfection, were handed down from father to son, mother to daughter,'' Sekhar says. "I remember the time when the Real Madras Handkerchiefs (RMH) in colourful checks in earthy colours of indigo, maroon, beige, orange and black were woven from my village and exported to Nigeria.''

The Real Madras Handkerchiefs were actually six yards long and 36 inches wide and were used by Nigerians as their ceremonial national dress. So popular were the fabrics in Lagos that a representative office was opened in north Chennai to facilitate shipping the RMH. Sekhar was just 10 years old when he wove his first mini Real Madras Handkerchief under the supervision of his elders. He dreamt of weaving more such pieces and exporting them under his own name ... and opening a bank account to save all the dollars he would earn.

Unfortunately, when Nigeria came under military rule in the 1960s, the country clamped an embargo on fabric imports and overnight, the livelihood of an entire village of artisans almost dried up. Almost, because there was still a tiny trickle of export orders from the UK and other parts of Europe. But not enough to sustain the whole weaving community. Thus they were forced to look at new ways of earning their living.
 
The weavers of Anakaputhur took a delegation to Chennai, the state capital, requesting the government to intervene. The government did and the weavers were able to procure orders for Kanchipuram cotton saris and dress fabric which were pretty much the rage in those days. Thus, once more, the handlooms came alive with the weaves of Kanchi cottons and the community settled into familiar patterns of living.

"But our joy was shortlived,'' says Sekhar. "The advent of power looms dealt a death blow to the handloom industry. While one handloom weaver could produce not more than six metres of fabric a day, the PowerBooks could easily produce more than 20 metres of fabric a day.'' The dealers loved it, the consumers accepted the new more colourful and less expensive variety of textiles and the handloom weavers, forced out of their jobs, began to move into unskilled trades such as portering.

From a village of 10,000 handlooms in 1960, Anakaputhur today has about 750 handlooms which are worked by less than 500 families in a population of 25,000.

But through all these upheavals, Sekhar kept his dreams alive. "Almost every day after school, I would happily settle down at the loom, performing chores such as warp winding, sizing and dyeing, making frames and reels.''

Even after Sekhar stopped attending school to join the family weaving trade full-time, he kept an eye on new trends in consumer tastes by reading any magazine and newspaper he could lay his hands on. "It was in a Tamil magazine that I read of home furnishings in jute fabrics which were catching on fast in the domestic and export market,'' he says. The article also provided details of the history of jute manufacturing in West Bengal and the fact that the Jute Manufacturing Development and Research Council, under the Ministry of Textiles, encouraged production of the same in the handloom sector.

On a visit to Chennai, Sekhar met the Marketing and Promotions Officer at the Ministry of Textiles who showed him a sample of the jute fabric.

Sekhar's gut instinct kicked in and he knew he had a winner on his hands.

 He bought a few reels of jute yarn and wove a few fabric samples on his loom. On his next visit to the city, he took the samples to the Ministry of Textiles.

Providentially, French buyer Jean France Leaseeg happened to be there at the time. The Frenchman was looking for suppliers for a range of linen home furnishings and, impressed by Sekhar's earnestness and sound knowledge about fabrics and looms, he placed a sample order for home furnishing fabrics in linen-cotton. Shekar grabbed the opportunity and thus made his foray into self-driven research and development of natural fabrics other than cotton.

"For the next two years,'' says Sekhar, "I was busy churning out 600 metres of linen fabric per month on five looms, with the help of four weavers. The fabric was then converted to furnishings with the help of local embroiderers.''

John helped him streamline the rest of the production chain and Sekhar had the satisfaction of seeing his fabric turn into fetching cushion covers, pillow covers, bed linen, table linen ...

However, Sekhar still held on to his pet project ? of developing a new fibre. After a lot of experimentation, he developed one that was a mixture of jute (80 per cent) and cotton (20 per cent). It was a good thing too because the home furnishings order dried up after two years. Again the power loom was the villain: John had decided to transfer the supply chain to power loom weavers as they could fulfil orders in a faster turnout.

"Coincidentally,'' says Sekhar, "at around the same time, I got a request to develop a loom for weaving carpets with a pigment paint warp.'' The request was from Dominique Bally, a French artist who was visiting a friend at the Cholamandalam Artists Village in Chennai. Sekhar, excited at designing something original, developed the perfect handloom for him. "The next year Dominique returned with an order worth Rs25,000 per month of hand-woven carpets.''
 
Sekhar, who was 25 years old at the time, had his first export order shipped under his own name ? it took him 15 years to realise his dream of "exporting under my own name and having dollars credited to my bank account''.

"The experience in handling export production orders, albeit small, was invaluable,'' says Sekhar. It set the template for new research and development in an informed and systematic way and came in handy when Sekhar tied up with Swedish home furnishings entrepreneur, Maryam Davidahl.

Eager to push the boundaries of fabric production further, he set about weaving fabrics that were 100 per cent natural and not regularly seen in the fabric arena. "I first tried mesta, another fibre from the jute family,'' he says. "I blended it with cotton.'' He soon got adventurous and developed several blends for window blinds such as bamboo and cotton with korai (a fibre from which the Indian mat, chattai, is made); cotton with bamboo, linen with cotton ...
 
"I began investing my savings into the research and development for the home furnishings product range. I also began weaving block-printed window blinds from an indigenous grass from Orissa and a certain water weed (from Bihar).''

After painstaking research and development, Sekhar has come up with quite a few innovative fabrics ? a blend of cotton, jute warp and jute, silk and cotton which he began supplying to boutiques in Chennai and Bangalore.

Again, it was an article in a magazine that got him to weave banana fibres into fabric almost 15 years ago. "It said that fibres from the banana tree were being used to make fabrics in the Philippines and that it was much in demand,'' recalls Sekhar.
 
He did what he was good at: setting about developing a loom and frame to weave banana fibres into a fabric. "However, with the existing know-how, I can work on only a 2x2-foot frame and hence can only weave short lengths of fabrics and then join them to the lengthier cotton ones.'' Generally he uses this section [made of banana fibre] to form the sari's pallu (the part of the sari that when draped, falls off the shoulder and usually bears a horizontal design). This is painstakingly attached to the cotton sari.

The silken sheen of the banana fibre translates into an attractive visual tapestry which is absolutely breathtaking to behold. Such a sari would cost about Rs10,000 (about Dh800). "With the right technical know-how the price could be reduced by half and the sari can be woven in a single day [he needs about three days now],'' says Sekhar.

 Sekhar is keen to accompany a governmental delegation to the Philippines to seek transfer of technology in this field. "I am sure the government of Philippines would be more than happy to cooperate and share their knowledge with us,'' he says. He sees a huge business potential here because there has been influx of orders for 100 per cent banana fibre fabrics.

In his tiny one-room house, the clackety clack of 10 looms resonates while Sekhar's wife of 13 years, Padma, switches between the roles of general manager, mother, wife, taskmaster seamlessly and pitches in with names and figures when requested.

When a representative of Pothis, a chain of textile retail stores in Chennai, walks in to inspect and raises some doubts about how durable the banana fibre would be if it is hand washed, Sekhar's team is unanimous in stating that they each own at least one banana fibre sari which have all withstood the rigours of hand washing quite well.

At 43, hope reigns supreme in Sekhar's heart. It was to commemorate 25 years of innovative weaves that Sekhar came up with the idea of weaving a sari with 25 natural fibres.

"I have also developed a concept of a jute model village in Tamil Nadu,'' he says. He envisions a village of about 10,000 families, who each would be given a house with a work shed and their own loom. The village would have potable drinking water and electricity. A fortunate fallout of the media blitz following the launch of the 25 natural fibre saris was that the government of India has promised him the funds for the weavers' houses with work sheds and looms.

The weavers' current wages are paltry indeed with some earning Rs100 (Dh8) a day which Sekhar says could double if he were to master the banana fibre technology.

Despite the strokes of luck he enjoyed ? and which kept his looms busy ? Sekhar continues to live in a rental work shed-cum-home with an asbestos sheet for a roof. "I earn well enough to feed my family and educate my children and I am okay with that. I know all my dreams will come true soon. I can wait for that day," he says with an optimism that seems to be spun from steel.

Where does Sekhar see himself 10 years from now? "I want to see Indian handloom fabric and apparel take its rightful place in the top apparel stores in the UK, US and Europe," he says. "I would also want my own research and development facility. I am willing to exhibit my research and skills at international exhibitions.

"I also hope that my sons Karthik, 12, Mahendran, 9, and Mohan, 7, will follow the family profession. One day we will weave a sari with 50 natural fibres, hopefully breaking our earlier record.''