On the eve of Independence Day, two of India’s leading designers pay tribute to cool khadi.
The period, pre-1947; the mood, an Indian national identity beginning to find political expression and the struggle for independence gaining momentum. A time when khadi became a symbol of the struggle for freedom and steered the people away from British mill-made fabrics to handloom textiles. It was the first time in the history of any nation that a textile had come to symbolise a movement for independence.
On the one hand were fabrics and styles with a sophisticated sheen, glamorous with satin finishes and heavy embellishments, showing signs of a strong foreign presence. On the other was the raw cotton hand-spun on a charkha, and hand-woven to give a look which was crushed, where no two lengths looked alike. The miracle of khadi is that it has survived the whimsical cycles of fashion.
There is never a season when I don’t use khadi as the base of a collection and it always flies off the racks. Khadi, along with other fabrics indigenous to India, forms a dominant part of our textiles, even as we move into the 21st century. The problem, if one may call it that, is that it has come to be associated with what our politicians wear. Most designers would bear out that it makes wonderful crinkled skirts, kurtis, tunics, churidars and salwars. Stubbornly, despite the influx of luxury designer brands, this fabric in its multitudinous avatars is part of the fashion scene in India, but is not nearly as ubiquitous as it deserves to be, considering our climate and cultural sensibilities.
| Fine things |
| Of the many stories about khadi, the one that’s most romantic is about Bengal muslin, a fabric coveted by sultans and nawabs for being so fine that it could pass through a ring. On the verge of dying out, a group of weavers in Nabadwip in Nadia district of West Bengal revived it sometime in the 1990s. In fact, Ritu Kumar sourced khadi with this fine count for her ensembles from an old weaver in Nabadwip, who has since died. Recently, Rabindranath Saha, a master weaver from Kalna in Bardhaman district, developed a technique to make the 500-count cloth using a faster, less laborious method with the help of the Khadi and Village Industries Commission. He was awarded the Sant Kabir national award this year for his innovation. Saha sells his 500-count cotton khadi for Rs 1,600 a metre. His next challenge is to weave a 1,000-count khadi. |
| Numbering up |
| Employment: 9.50 lakhs |
| Total Production: Rs 585.25 crore |
| Sales: Rs 799.60 crore |
| Export: Rs 104.84 crore |
| Number of government outlets around the country: 7,050 |
| (Figures for 2008-09 from the Khadi and Village Industries Commission) |
Khadi evokes for most Indians, the image of a robust, homespun cotton fabric that is porous, cool and absorbent. It could easily be the fabric of choice for our scorching summers or humid monsoons, and it is also surprisingly insulating in the winter chill. Less apparent to most Indians today is that khadi is the last vestige of what was once the world’s finest cotton spinning and weaving tradition. More significant is the support that its production provides to the lives of nearly a million poor artisan, an estimated 80 per cent of whom are women.
Whether acknowledged as a material product, a cultural symbol or an economic aid, khadi derives its distinctiveness from a single textile process, hand-spinning. It is the processing of cotton fibre into yarn by human hands that endows the fabric with its defining material character, its unique tactile quality and unsurpassed comfort level. Repeated washing serves only to enhance these, so that the fabric assumes, over time, a texture as natural and soothing as skin. It was not without reason that India clothed the world in cotton for 2,000 years.
The essence of khadi, like any other hand-crafted fabric, lies in its ability to drape as an unstitched garment. It does not have the pliability of, say, jersey or other mill-made fabrics which tend to drape once cut and stitched. This essentially gives a limited scope to the styling of khadi. It is best worn in the same way linen is — rough and crushed.
The other quality of khadi is its eco-friendliness. At a time when speed, precision and replicability have become the hallmarks of production technology, the wholly hand-spun, hand-woven, and hand-patterned fabric is a product of ultimate luxury. The product gleaned from such a process has a unique distinction and sensibility. The fabric is not produced in an atelier, nor is it rarefied in its production, but gives employment to a million people. It is in our national interest to portray this fabric as a most coveted one.
As a fashion designer, one has often wanted to marry the elements of khadi with, say, more uniformity, more pliability and more adaptability. If this could be achieved, it would by far surpass any other fabric in our country. There have been alternatives like the amber charkha, that only requires one to turn a lever by hand and not draw the yarn from the cotton sliver. This in essence takes away some of khadi’s charm but is not a bad alternative to mill-made fabrics. Other versions of khadi like poly khadi, where polyester is used with spun yarn to produce a far more ‘engineered’ fabric, have made an appearence in the market. The government should give technology inputs to the institutions producing the fabric, so that they can produce fabric of a uniform quality, which arrives clean and unstained. Currently there are thousand of yards of ‘imperfect’ khadi rotting in warehouses, and of no use to anyone.
As all cultures in the world become more sophisticated, the appeal of khadi acquires a haute couture, albeit non-ramp appeal. It is the ultimate ‘poor look’ — for someone who has everything and has acquired all manner of goods, an antidote to conspicuous consumption. And most essential are the colours on khadi. The slubby cotton dyes beautifully and even bright acid colours take on a language of their own as the fibres tend to diffuse the colour to look rich and earthy. The fact is that this fabric can be produced in bulk, given the right institutional and design inputs. If uniform quality was made available, then mass shirtmakers of brands like Allen Solly, Van Heusen, Zodiac, etc., could make khadi shirts, which would give a big boost to the mass consumption of this fabric.
I have often been asked this question: Why is khadi more expensive than a mill-made fabric, and then why is there this perception of it being a ‘poor’ fabric? By default we all partake in the responsibility whenever we allow a skill to be lost without contributing to replace it. Is it asking too much of our government to preserve khadi, to not allow the skills of a million textile craftspeople to be wasted?
