This month is going to be a busy one for malkha. Firstly we had to move our Hyderabad office and are now in temporary quarters with the prospect of another move soon. Then, preparations are on for the Kala Ghoda Festival in Mumbai early next month, friends, please pass the word round. We had a visit from the Khazana team and were happy to introduce them to the malkha process before the Mumbai show, we hope Khazana will become a regular customer. Sonya Khan of Yellow Leaf is their designer and is used to working with khadi.

Deliveries of orders have been delayed because of transport disruptions in Andhra [both for and against Telengana activists protesting], of yarn to and from the dyeing centres and of the fabric. We apologize to our customers.
... and a peaceful New Year to all

We've been so busy coping with the problems of putting malkha production in place that we haven't been paying attention to the quantity of fabric now being produced.. and suddenly realized that it's gone up to more than double! Very exciting and gratifying, but of course it also means more marketing.. At the exhibitions and Bazars customers ask us where it is available, but we don't have retail outlets, and in any case would not be able to afford the costs of urban retail at our present margins. It would be against the principles of malkha to have high mark-ups, so what do we do? Invent low-cost delivery channels. We already supply a few customers by mail - we put photographs on the web, they choose & pay through electronic transfer, and we deliver by post or transport.

We also need to scale up our indigo dyeing since there is a waiting list for deep indigo malkha. Its not the dyeing that holds things up but the transport to and from the vat. The indigo dyers are the only remaining family of traditional indigo dyers in Andhra, and they have put up vats for Dastkar Andhra and for Charkha in Karnataka. This picture, one of several documenting the installation of the Charkha vat taken by Pankaj Sekhsaria, shows an indigo pot with fermented indigo dyebath in its newly plastered bed.

The people of rural India are skilled, intelligent and capable of producing excellent products for all aspects of a good life. Today, their access to the natural materials around them is more and more restricted. It began in colonial times with the appropriation by the State of forests, and continues today through appropriation of land and water and poisoning of the air by corporate interests supported by the State. Corporate interests see rural people as buyers of their toothpaste, biscuits, shampoos, soap and cloth... and of course now also of electrical appliances and petrol-driven vehicles. But surely toothpaste and soap does not need to be made in huge factories? Soapnut trees produce shampoo and piloo and neem trees produce toothbrushes which don't need toothpaste. Biscuits which kill childrens' appetites have replaced the nutritious snacks Indian children used to eat of puffed rice jaggery and chana.

'Development' should take as its premise the valuable repository of skills, capabilities and resources of the Indian countryside and the particular character of our varied and diverse society. Its foolish to discard ecological production practices in which we lead the world, in favour of so-called 'modern' production that is energy-intensive and polluting. That has been the guiding principle of the malkha process.

Tribal Health Initiative, which provides health services for adivasis around Sittilingi in Tamil Nadu has encouraged them to grow organic cotton. Weavers' Wheel buys the ginned cotton from them and delivers it to the Kranti Chellapa Nulu Sangam, an independent malkha centre. They turn it into cloth, which is then stitched into garments designed by Altra Qualita of Italy, for the Italian market, at Gandhi Rural Research Centre also in Tamil Nadu. This is happening for the second year, and we hope that eventually both Sittilingi and GRRC will set up their own malkha units to cut out all the intermediate transport.

The clothes can be seen in the Altra Qualita catalogue, and the new range is in production.

Posting Sunny Meeta's comment, in case people miss it:

'You guys have created the freedom fabric of the post-industrial age. Its equivalent to khadi for the freedom movement but more sustainable. Its low carbon footprint, decentralised production, and appropriate technology process is actually creating a new synthesis of the dialectic of nature and technology. A synthesis that comes from the colonised south not from the all knowing western university or corporate system. Great going.'

Hope that the malkha 'synthesis of the dialectic of nature and technology', of traditional expertise with IIT trained engineering, will encourage other such efforts. Rural industries owned by rural people, using the whole gamut of natural resources which at present are sold off cheaply to corporate industry within or outside the country... traditional and new skills.. green energy..what a vista..

nature bazar, Delhi

Dastkar's annual Nature Bazar has become a hugely popular event in Delhi's annual calendar. Folk performances and and childrens' workshops, besides the 160 or so craft stalls, on the lawns of the IGNCA, a lively mela atmosphere. Its a pity that there is little public transport, but the metro will make a huge difference next year.
For malkha it was encouraging to have repeat customers who have enjoyed wearing what they bought last year. This year most of our sales were in retail, directly to users, though some of them lamented the difficulty of finding tailors. As usual the deep indigo was a sellout. So were Sutanu's prints of swans and butterflies and the alizarin red. Our stripes do better in Delhi than they did in Bangalore, and of course this time for the first time we had different weights from the different weaving centres. Also for the first time we tried the bleached plain, which we are a little hesitant about because it's not natural bleaching [we hope to get to that in time].

One of our European customers is from Friends of SEWA and buys indigo malkha for the SEWA Lucknow women to use for chikan embroidery, sounds wonderful, hope we get to see the end product. Another great fan is Aarti, wife of Tushar of Living Blue. She wore a malkha kurta almost every one of the 10 days of the Bazar, and bought lots more. Thanks to retail, this was our best ever sale so far and we feel quite elated by peoples' admiring comments: we were asked is it was silk, or linen... just shows how wonderful cotton can be if its treated with respect. Now the question is how to make it more easily available.. we're encouraging people to order even small quantities through e-mail which we can send by post.

A frequently asked question is why our cloth is called malkha.
In the days of Indian cotton textiles' glory, there were many different varieties of cotton fabrics, and the names too were many and varied, and part of the common vocabulary: bafta, nainsukh, dosuti, moree, jamdani, mulmul, chint [morphed into chintz by the Firangs], mashru, himru, and many more. We made up the name malkha by combining the first syllables of mulmul and khadi. We hope as malkha production gets going in different places that each will develop its own variant, for example the malkha made at Magan Sangrahalaya, Wardha, wants to call itself magan malkha.

At present all the malkha produced in Andhra just goes by one name, though it is now coming from 3 different centres, with the fourth installed and soon to start production.