The cost of forgetting the Mahatma’s mantras

It’s that time of the year again when we wake up to the reality that India has a textile ministry. When the ministry itself wakes up to acknowledge its own existence (the last few years have seen it as one of two portfolios for a Union minister) and reminds itself of its pet project, an ‘influencer’ campaign each August 7 called the Handloom Day.This year, minister of Textiles Piyush Goyal (also the very busy minister of Commerce & Industry, and of Consumer Affairs & Food Distribution) hosted a ‘function’ at a New Delhi five-star, after sending a letter to assorted movie stars, businessmen and female politicians to promote a handloom weave on their social platforms.Last year, the government showed its ‘commitment’ towards textiles by abolishing two major spaces for artisan representation — the All India Handloom Board and the All India Handicrafts Board. Their reasoning was less government more governance and we are breathlessly waiting for the latter to begin. medium nocaption85301694It’s ironic how little the ministry of Textiles matters to governments. Thanks to Indira Gandhi’s friends — Pupul Jayakar and Martand Singh — handlooms enjoyed the favour of Congress leaders. Sonia Gandhi carried forward the legacy by herself becoming the ambassador of Indian hand-loomed saris, with an exquisite collection of her own.Textile is singularly the most important India story. There is a reason why Mahatma Gandhi picked the spinning wheel — the charkha — as the emblem for an independent India. It was more than a symbol, it veritably was the economic reality of the country. The British were looting cotton, called the ‘white gold’, from India. The East India Company sourced cotton from Indian farmers, spinners and weavers, made it into cloth in the UK and sold it to the rest of the world. As much as 40 per cent of the world’s wardrobe came from Indian-grown cotton.British factories cheaply manufactured large quantities of yarn and cotton in the late 19th century. India’s population became its supplier as well as its customer. So, in effect, they sold to us the cotton they took from us. medium nocaption85302454“By the 1890s, the resulting influx of foreign fabric into India was increasingly seen as a threat to its domestic textile economy. This sparked mass protest and galvanised a political movement to liberate India from British control. In the wake of great social unrest and emerging nationhood, Indian textiles were used as symbols of protest and national identity,” the exhibition note of the ‘Fabric of India’ 2015 showcase at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum reads.Britain’s low-cost fabric and high tariffs on import of Indian cloth allowed its own industry to boom but sabotaged our textile mills. Cloth that was manufactured in the industrial Lancashire mills replaced Indian fabrics and caused mass unemployment and hardship for Indian artisans.So, Gandhi’s clarion call for Swadeshi, or ‘homegrown’, was firmly entrenched in developmental economics. His idea was that India could make its own cloth and sell it and, thus, become a global player. He obviously had great foresight, since the only thing that India makes that’s among the best in the world is still cloth. For Gandhi, developing India’s rural economy was the only way to alleviate poverty. He believed in production by the masses, and not mass production. He often stated that if the village perishes, India perishes. This is not only the history of cloth in India, but it’s an ongoing economic struggle even 75 years after the Independence.India remains poorer than it has ever been. According to the World Bank, the number of poor in India has doubled in 2020 alone. According to the same report, 60 per cent of the world’s poor (those that make under US $2 a day) live in India.The humble weaver, maker of the finest cloth in the world (and most sustainable, as it’s entirely handmade and a loom consumes no electricity at all), lives an arduous existence. Under the new GST regime, he must now pay tax too. Makers of yarn get charged at 5 per cent tax and makers of fabric at 12 per cent, further encumbering his measly earnings.Textile revivalist and founder of Dastkar NGO, Laila Tyabji, speaks of weavers who were distraught with no orders and no livelihood last year. This year, it is a crisis of living or dying since Covid has reached the villages. Needless to say, in villages poorly equipped hospitals could barely save lives. “The weaver community in Kota had 160 deaths, a tiny village in Barmer had 80. In an Odisha village, 100 out of 500 infected sabai grass-weavers died. A durry weaving cluster in UP had 250 deaths. In Andhra, among handloom weavers, one in every eight cases proved fatal. The sad stories poured in – from Uttarakhand, Bihar, Kutch, Bengal, Kashmir…” she writes in an article. medium nocaption85301719It’s interesting to see Sabyasachi’s international launch at H&M this week has an archival chintz print similar to the cover of a book, ‘Fabric of India’, by Rosemary Crill, the V&A’s senior curator. It’s almost as if he takes the chintz, what the British appropriated from India, and sells it back to the West as an Indian print once again, tongue tightly in cheek.Email: namrata.zakaria@gmail.comTwitter: @namratazakariaRead more: 85103973