What ails Lucknow chikan?

Despite a growing exports market, Chikankari continues to languish, finds Gargi Gupta. The GI status has not been much help, either

The poster of The Next Best Thing looks out of place in the large conference-cum-display room at MLK House, the three-storied office of MLK Exports, Lucknow’s largest exporter of chikan garments. After all, who remembers the 2000 romcom starring Madonna and Rupert Everett today? And who, but a teenager, puts up film poster on the wall? “Madonna is wearing chikan,” points out Jagdish Kapoor, a director in the company, noticing my skeptical gaze. Indeed she is. Stepping closer, I spy that the paisley motif on her white blouse is done in bakhiya (the herringbone stitch done on the reverse of the fabric, creating a shadow-like effect, that is the commonest of the 32 stitches that make up Chikankari), in purple and pale green thread.

“Our buyer in New York sent us the poster,” Kapoor explains. “Apparently, she had picked it up from some store.”

Madonna wearing Chikankari is proof, if any were needed, of how the appeal and reach of the city’s unique embroidery extends far beyond India.

MLK Exports, which has been exporting chikan garments since 1975, has supplied to brands all over the globe — Jackpot (Copenhagen), HHG (Spain), Fashion Fuse (United States), Karma Highway (US), Amina (Japan), GAT (Israel), Betina Gers (Argentina), Coline (French) and Ghora Tabela (Uruguay), to name a few — totting up orders worth Rs 10-12 crore last year, says Harish Kapoor, its proprietor.

MLK is not the only direct exporter— there are nine others in Lucknow (a fraction, to be sure, of the 5,000-odd chikan manufacturers in the city listed by a 2007 report of the Union ministry of textiles). One of these, Radhakrishna Overseas, supplies to Coin, an Italian home and clothing retail chain; Australian kids wear brand Cocoon; Spiegel, the leading American direct-marketing company; Heine, a German fashion brand, and many others.

These may be small, local brands, little known in India, but Rajeev Sharma, proprietor of Radhakrishna Overseas, says he prefers it this way. “Bigger brands have very strict quality norms, and garments are rejected for the slightest of variations. What they don’t understand is that chikan is hand embroidery and that there will be differences between two garments. Also these brands operate on a tight delivery schedule, which becomes very difficult for us.”

Sharma is here referring to the long chikan supply chain. Chikan embroidery is done by around 2.5 lakh karigars in the five districts of Unnao, Barabanki, Lakhimpur, Hardoi and Sitapur that surround Lucknow, most of whom are poor Muslim women who find time to do the intricate needlework in between their day’s housework. They are paid abysmally — the norm being around Rs 200 for an ordinary woman’s kurta with not too much, or too fine embroidery on it which would take around a week to finish — but payments can be lower or higher depending on skill of the artisan. These karigars work on cloth block-printed with the motifs of Chikankari that is delivered to them by thekedars, who in turn get them from wholesellers and retailers in Lucknow, most of whom have their shops in the Chowk area. The middlemen pocket around 10-15 per cent of the value of the garment, while the traders — who buy the cloth, get the garment stitched and the block-printing done and bear the risk of the garment not coming back to them (wastage is around 20 per cent— add another 50 per cent or so as their margin, driving up the price of the kurta to around Rs 350.

* * * * *

It’s a time-consuming affair and a garment can take anywhere from a month to six months to finish. Or sometimes even longer. “It takes eight months to do our garments and we do around 100 styles in a year,” says fashion designer Sandeep Khosla, who, together with Abu Jani, has been using Chikankari for the last 20 years, helping to raise the craft’s profile among the swish set in India and abroad (they, most famously, got Judi Dench to wear one of their exotic chikan creations to receive an Oscar in 2004).

Designers like Abu-Sandeep, who have limited production and cater to the luxury market, can afford such long-winded supply chains, but not large high-street clothing brands with global footprints like, say, a Zara or a GAP, which need to respond nimbly to fast evolving trends. GAP, for instance, prefers to get most of its embroidery done on machines, says Pradeep Kumar, director of monitoring and vendor development at the company’s Delhi international sourcing office.

Despite this, however, chikan has been used by a few of the larger iconic brands. One Chowk-based trader says she executed a 1,000-piece order for Calvin Klein some years ago. “We didn’t know who it was,” she says. “There were no tags on the garments. The order came from a buyer in Delhi and it was only when I visited their factory that I realised what the brand was.”

Such indirect exports, with chikan manufacturers in the Chowk area acting as vendors for sourcing agents elsewhere, are widespread.

Savita Rao of Soul Quest Clothing in Mumbai, for instance, gets chikan embroidery done on garments for high-end British brands such as Leila and Paul Smith, and Japanese importers and stores like Nano Universe, Oeno-Shokai and Royal Flash. “We make the collections, in that we select the patterns, decide where they will be placed on the garments, design the garment, get the embroidery done and deliver the finished product,” says Rao.

SEWA, the award-winning Chikankari artisans’ cooperative, too has an Italian client, Comitato Per SEWA Chikan, to which it has been shipping small orders — just 2,000-2,500 garments — of the “very finest” Chikankari done on wool and khadi garments for the past 10 years, says Runa Banerjee, CEO of SEWA Chikan.

Interestingly, this is perhaps the only instance of a retailer identifying “chikan” as the embroidery on the garment — none of the other brands or stores do. This is ironical because post December 2, 2008 Lucknow Chikankari is protected under the Geographical Indications Act, which means that only proprietors of the “Lucknow chikan” tag or registered users can use it.

The problem with Lucknow chikan is that close to two and a half years since it got GI-status, no artisan or trader has registered as an “authorised user”. “Four applications have been filed until now,” says Pankaj Arya of Shilpa Sadhana, the crafts NGO which is one of four registered proprietors of the Lucknow Chikan GI. “Of these, one has been approved and should be registered in the next two months.” Even a logo, which would be the first step to creating a brand, has not been registered, although Arya says that the design is almost ready.

“The GI status has not done anything for the craft of chikan,” says SEWA’s Banerjee, a sentiment that is echoed by almost everyone in the trade. “Quality is falling,” she continues. There has been no attempt to get designer inputs to create products that are more in sync with the market. “Everyone has to come together to lay down quality parameters and standardise the stitches,” says Arya.

“Nothing has been done to explain to the people what benefits they can derive out of GI,” says Har Prasad Agarwal, treasurer of the Lucknow Chikan Handicrafts Association, a body of 600 traders which too is a proprietor of the Lucknow Chikan GI.

* * * * *

Expectedly, the artisans continue to have the worst of it. The GI status has not meant any improvement in their wages, and neither has any attention been given to improving their skills. Says Sanjay Rastogi, a chikan garments trader, “Uplifting the lot of chikan artisans can be a very effective poverty alleviation tool since there are at least 5-7 lakh poor people associated with it in Lucknow. A chikan karigar gets at most Rs 800 a month. Now you have even NREGS paying Rs 100 a day.”

One innovation tried some years ago was to open centres and get the women to come and work there, instead of supplying cloth to their homes. This is a more organised format, since there is a supervisor to enforce quality and workers are given salaries, usually higher — Mamta Varma, who runs Bhairavi Creations, says she pays workers at her centres between Rs 800 and Rs 2,500. “But it hasn’t worked well,” scoffs Pramesh Rastogi, another Chowk-based trader. “How do you measure embroidery — some may work fast and produce shoddy work, while another works slowly and do exquisite work. There are fights in centres between workers with different skill levels.”

On February 25-26 this year, Network of Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (NEED), an NGO that works with craftsmen around Lucknow and is the third proprietor of the Lucknow Chikan GI, organised the first workshop on the post GI scenario, bringing together all the stakeholders in Chikankari — bureaucrats from several Centre and state government departments, bank officials, artisans, designers, traders and NGOs — to debate the future of the craft.

“But much more needs to be done,” says Anil Singh, CEO of NEED. Only the creation of producer companies, feels Singh, can give an impetus to chikan. “This is the only way to cut out the middlemen so that the artisans get better value for their handiwork. Artisans must take ownership of their craft, innovate and creating new products that will go down well in the market.”

To this end, NEED has organised the women artisans and trained 35 marketing entrepreneurs who have linkages with export houses and domestic retailers such as Fabindia in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kanpur and Lucknow. “Early this year, three rural entrepreneurs, Md. Akram, Santosh and Rizwan, registered an export code from Kanpur,” says Singh. “They support around 1,500 women artisans. But, they are finding it very difficult to export directly as payments are cleared in six-nine months. So for now they have gone back to routing through exporters elsewhere.”

But at least a start has been made in ensuring that chikan and the rural artisan get their due.