They call it the freedom fabric, so it seemed only fitting to write about Malkha cotton this week. I came across it at Bangalore’s Dastkar Nature Bazaar, where I was intrigued as much by its drape and soft colours as by its name. “Malkha frees handloom weavers from the tyranny of mill-made yarn,” said Uzramma, director of the Hyderabad-based Malkha Marketing Trust, “it is a beautiful organic cotton fabric that is woven by weaver families on handlooms from cotton grown by smallholder farmers.” It echoed Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas on khadi, I commented. “That’s exactly what it is,” she said, “just that we don’t want to be merely revivalist...our idea is to create a contemporary fabric with modern, sustainable small-scale technology.”
I looked at the cloth, soft and lustrous, standing out amidst all the silks and fancy cottons in the exhibition. Proponents of Malkha claim that this difference in quality is literally the difference between the violent processing to which mill-made cotton is subjected, versus the gentle hand carding, spinning and weaving that Malkha fibres encounter. “Mills process cotton until its fibres are dead. In contrast, Malkha is gently spun and then woven by hand, keeping the springiness of the live fibres all the way into the cloth. That is why the resultant fabric feels soft and is breathable, absorbent and colour-fast,” said Alessandra (known here as Chandra) of Swadeshi Joy, an organisation that makes garments from Malkha. The fashion fraternity loves it too — Tarun Tahiliani, Aneeth Arora, Peter Ascoli and Mayank Mansingh Kaul have all interpreted Malkha in their unique styles. In fact Tahiliani has showcased it in the 2011 Fashion Week.
Contrasting piquantly with this is the fact that the Malkha process is entirely village-based. It is cultivated, harvested, spun and woven by skilled rural artisans. In many ways, Malkha fabric could be a possible way out of looming (excuse the terrible pun) crisis in cotton farming and handloom weaving that Uzramma and her colleagues have seen grow in the past few years.
Currently, Indian cotton farmers are caught in the trap of high input costs, growing mostly the long staple American cotton varietals that spinning mills use. These, unlike traditional Indian rain-fed cotton varieties, need lots of water and farmers have no safety net if the crop fails. Traditional Indian varieties, however, aren’t dependent on irrigation and are usually intercropped with pulses. Their shorter fibre, unsuitable for mill weaving, is perfect for handloom. On the other hand, our small-scale handloom weavers are dependent on large spinning mills for yarn. “It is an unequal relationship in which the weavers have little control over the yarn they are able to get,” said Uzramma, “that we are seeking to change.”
This is where Malkha comes in, creating more lateral relationships between weavers and spinners by ensuring the yarn is spun near the places where the fabric is woven. It links farmer to weaver and maker to user, much in the way that Gandhi once envisaged for khadi.
I ended up buying swathes of Malkha — not just because I loved the way it looked, but also because it felt as if I were wearing freedom on my skin. As I said at the beginning, it seemed an appropriate time of the year to feel this way.