Geetanjali Krishna: Weaving from the heart

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Sleep seemed to be one popular way to pass time during Ramzan, I surmised when I walked down the narrow lanes of Ramnagar last Monday. I was looking for Munna, the master silk weaver, sure that I'd have to rouse him also from a deep hunger-induced sleep. But as I neared his home, strains of the radio wafted to me. Then there was silence.

"The electricity has gone again," he said, emerging from the dark loom shed, moodily tying his lungi. "Don't think that the people of Ranmagar like sleeping during the day," he says, "most can work only when there is electricity, which we get barely for a few hours everyday. I'm lucky because my loom shed has big windows that let in light to work by!"

I go inside the shed and see his two looms. An exquisite blue fabric is emerging from one, while a young child works on the other, a classic cream and gold saree.

"They say that it's very auspicious to teach weaving during the holy month, so I'm teaching my nephew Imtiaz," says Munna. The 10-year-old bashfully demonstrates the skills he's picked up in under a month, and I reflect it would take a lifetime to teach half those skills to city kids of the same age.

Munna tells me about the best saree he's ever woven: "10 years ago, I had no orders, but some yarn left over. I dyed it pink, and wove it out of my head with half a kilogram of silver thread." Would I like to see the saree, he asks? I ask him why he hadn't sold it.

"Oh, I couldn't sell something I'd woven from the heart! I gave it to my wife," he smiles shyly. The saree, a soft, lustrous creation, really looks like it was made with love. I touch it with awe, for it's not often that one comes across craftsmanship that's so heartfelt.

It seems almost crass to ask him after that, whether he's able to make a decent enough living from weaving. "The market's down these days," says he, "and with powerloom products being much cheaper, fewer people want to buy handwoven sarees!"

But surely powerlooms couldn't weave such intricate designs, say I, looking at the delicate tracery on his wife's sari. "They can't," he agrees, "but traders now often get us to just weave borders, which they attach to cheap powerloom fabric.

Those sarees are much lower in price than what we weave." Saree weavers like Munna don't source their own yarn. Contractors, called mahajans locally, place orders with them, and give them the yarn to weave. "For the blue saree on my loom," says Munna, "which has an intricate weave, and will take about seven days to complete, I will get about Rs 1,100 from the mahajan.

But usually, I get paid less than that, and I also have to pay my assistants from that."

His brother, also a weaver, migrated to Surat some years ago, where many Banarasi weavers like him make good money setting warps in the weaving industry there. But Munna is content staying in Ramnagar "" weaving to him is much more than a source of livelihood.

It is what his ancestors did, and just for that reason, he's teaching his three sons, in class tenth, eighth and fourth, to weave. "My fingers want to start plucking and knotting silk as soon as I wake up," says Munna, "that's all they know how to do, and there's nothing they like doing more."