This is the invitation for 'Malkha & Crafts' show to be held in Pune from January 13-16 2011. This time the Malkha Marketing Trust is the organizer of the exhibition, rather than participating in one organized by others. Most of the time we have a stall in the Nature Bazaars organized by Dastkar, and in June this year we took part in Sampoorn's Bangalore show, so the Pune show will be a first for us.

As the invitation says, there will be 5 crafts groups besides Malkha, and on the net you can find more information about Neev soaps, Jugaad by Karm Marg, and Weavers Wheel. Parampara Jana Seva Sangh combine jute and leather, or cotton and leather to make bags that last and last, and use traditional techniques in cheaper metals to make affordable jewellery. Radha Chitrakar and her family from Bengal carry on the tradition of painting scrolls [patts]of Ramayana & Mahabharata stories as well as reciting the stories; We hope they'll get an enthusiastic hearing in Pune.

Dastkar Andhra Marketing Association's annual Hyderabad exhibition packed up yesterday. As usual it was full of wonderful fabrics from the Andhra co-operatives. In the picture are some favourites, two natural dyed sarees from Srikakulam woven with extraordinary and specialized weaving skills: The red saree has hand-set jamdani buttas and the indigo saree has a temple border with moga silk extra weft. In the jamdani technique the weaver weaves in by hand each motif line by line after each weft thread is beaten into place. For the temple border on the indigo saree a weaver [sometimes with a helper] uses 3 shuttles, the ones at each end carrying the weft of the borders. At each weft line the end shuttles have to be looped around the middle shuttle. Both these techniques need hand-sleying without the fly shuttle, so of course are much much slower to weave.

Awe-inspiring and humbling that such artistry is available to be worn today.

In the background a couple of dupattas from Chinnur which fly off the shelves because of their soft texture. Dastkar has re-inducted a new generation of weavers in the villages around Chinnur and the fabrics are among DAMA's hottest sellers.

DAMA's supplier co-operatives lost around 20 lakh rupees worth of production during the heavy rains this year, in spite of which DAMA's annual sale this year will be over 3 crores. DAMA has been self-sufficient for some time now, and is a model of a marketing enterprise serving rural production, supplying the vast Indian middle market at low cost with beautiful, good quality & reasonably priced fabrics.

We now get several inquiries from customers who have bought malkha at the various exhibitions, have enjoyed wearing it, and want to have access to regular outlets; particularly in Bangalore and Delhi, where we have now held several exhibitions and have built a loyal and devoted customer base. Our problem is that there is not enough production yet to justify the costs of opening a retail store in any of the metros - other than Hyderabad, of course, where our stock-room will double as retail outlet.

The solution is probably to have more 'home-sellers' like Sowmya Karthik in Chennai, who buys about 50 metres at a time and retails from her home. It would cut down our marketing costs substantially if we could sell in this way, making malkha regularly available to end-users, while we would continue selling larger quantities to retailers through e-mail orders.

So if any of the readers of this blog know people who would like to take this on, do let us know through e-mail [malkhaindia@gmail.com]

Looking in the archive I find we've been talking 'malkha film' since October 09, 13 months. Thanks to a long delay in release of the budget, filming began a year later with the shooting of the Melange event in Mumbai in October this year, followed by the Nature Bazar and interviews in Delhi later that month. This week the scene moved to Chirala.





As you can imagine, the appearance of a large film crew - 5 people in the lighting team accompanied by the huge generator van, 3 camera crew and 4 in the production team with a sound recordist and all their equipment generated much curiosity and excitement in Mohan Rao colony.

Top left [1]Sara sets up his camera with Ipshita and Mr Khan from her team looking on, next, [2]Ipshita arranges hanks of malkha yarn in Vani's back yard while Sara chats to Ipshita's assistant Nikhil and others and below [3]Vani keeps her cool winding malkha yarn while being filmed from a low angle.
(sorry blogger has jumbled the photos, number [2] is at the top)
Later that day the crew moved into the pre-spinning & spinning unit with all their lights and stuff, and Sara's magic camera work makes even that prosaic workspace beautiful.

From here the crew moves to Punukula where they will shoot the hand spinners, the Punukula production unit with the later edition of machines and the nearby cotton fields, the last bit of shooting before Ipshita gets to work on the editing, hoping to wind up in a couple of months.

Hiroko Iwatate's beautiful book on Indian textiles is titled 'Textiles, the soul of India'.. this seems to me to be an adequate response to the question I'm constantly asked: "How did you come to be involved in handlooms?" [I was asked again a few days ago]. People seem to have forgotten, or perhaps the younger generation never knew, that cotton textile making was by far the largest industry in India from about 3000 BCE, and continues today in the 21st century to be the largest in terms of employment after agriculture. I've said it in earlier posts but it bears repeating that while cotton textiles were a luxury in other regions of the world, in India they were worn by both rich and poor. They were affordable because cotton cloth production was so closely meshed with society. Cotton cloth making embodied the particular genius of the Indian civilization: the professional co-operation between very different social groups who did not otherwise socialize. Much of the silver that came into India during its millennia of export surplus was payment for the cotton cloth that India supplied the world -silver that seems to have left India during the colonial period at the rate of almost a shipfull a day for perhaps over 100 years... can an economic historian please enlighten us on this point?

What is keeping us fully occupied these days is the preparation for the new cluster we're planning to set up. Upto now, we've set up one production unit at a time, consisting of one set of pre-spinning machinery with either a 280 spindle ring-frame to do the spinning, or [in one place only out of the 4 in Andhra], motorized domestic 12 spindle charkhas. In the planned cluster we hope to have 4 units with a common facilities centre in which we hope to eventually do our own ginning, dyeing and finishing. Finishing is a critical post-loom process that we don't do yet and consists of washing with soap and an organic softener. Sanjay Gulati of Modelama has been kindly finishing malkha for Tarun Tahiliani's orders.

It should take us about a year to set up the first unit, with each of the next ones coming up at intervals of a few months.

Dastkar's biggest annual event, the Delhi Nature Bazar ends today and not only has the malkha stall has done very well, achieving substantially more than its target sale, but Malkha household made-ups at the stall next door seem to have done well too, and I hope to post some photographs soon of the beautiful things Delhi Crafts Council has made from malkha. We hope they will continue to retail the products from their shop Kamala, and design more stuff too.