Sometimes we get lost in the nitty-gritty of everyday problems and the long-term objectives seem like a distant dream, impossible to achieve. Is it really possible for a coalition of farmers and village textile producers to make a reasonable living out of a home-grown, local cotton textile industry? But then we think of the staggering difficulties we have overcome on the malkha journey, and the dream seems not so distant after all.

The first incredible step was to eliminate baling from the field-to-fabric process. We did it. It was done by conceptualizing, designing and making the Gramaspinner carder, a poem of a machine, treating the lighter-than-air cotton fibres as gently as they had never been treated since traditional hand-carding was practiced on a substantial scale. It's been done, though it was supposed to be technically impossible. The next hurdle was to make yarn strong enough to be sized and woven. It's easy now to take that for granted, to forget what anxiety that step caused us before it happened, and what elation once it did.

That the cloth coming out of this process would be a beautiful fabric was, in the difficult early days, an act of faith. But when it did come, it was. Now the question is: How shall we, based in Hyderabad, reach the people who want it in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore where we have held successful exhibitions?

And now we must ensure that the producers do actually enjoy a democratic way of functioning, do share the fruits of their labour in a just and equitable way. This is the next, monumental hurdle on the malkha journey.

Well the malkha stall at the Kala Ghoda Festival was a great success, exceeding our target by 10%. KGF is unbeatable for the exposure it provides, because it attracts people from all over the city and suburbs who come for the mela atmosphere and the entertainment. Not only did the malkha stall do well in terms of sales, but we were able to introduce malkha to several hundred people from different market segments, many of whom bought the fabric and have left their e-mail ids to be added to our mailing list.

We had mailed all those on last year's Mumbai mailing list and were delighted to see many familiar faces...the most gratifying thing for us is the number of repeat customers, who had bought malkha last year and came back for more because they enjoyed wearing it. There were a lot of requests for sarees and ready-made garments, and several people told us that tailors were a big problem in Mumbai. Many people asked us if we had an outlet in Mumbai, and its a shame that we're not able to retail malkha regularly here and in the cities where we hold exhibitions. It just does not seem possible, with urban rentals being what they are.

Meanwhile on the production side cotton prices this year have gone through the roof.. we only hope that the farmers are the ones benefiting, not just the middle-men.

Its Kala Ghoda festival time again in Mumbai, and Malkha will be there for the first 5 days [February 5-9] in the area organized by Concern India Foundation, on the Lion Gate side.

Its budget time again, and again we go through the exercise that has been fruitless for the last 10 years, of trying to get the Government in Delhi to understand the importance of and to support the critical rural industry of cotton textile production. The affected communities are angry and despairing, the thinking public is mystified at this neglect. The present Minister of Textiles, any more than the last several, is unlikely to take an interest in the handloom sector, which really deserves its own ministry in recognition of the significance of the sector.

Policy making should be bottom-up, not top-down. Critical raw materials have to be made available at subsidized rates. The recent increase in cotton prices are compensated for by trader-entrepreneurs through slashing weaving wages in textile concentrations such as Chirala in Andhra Pradesh, resulting in a huge exodus from the industry by young weavers, loss of skills & further joblessness.

The 'Recommendations of the Steering Committee for Handlooms' set up by the Planning Commission in 2005 are still relevant today, and could form a rational basis for policy for this sector, a sector which still in 2011 provides the largest employment after agriculture in the country.

Here is a picture of Khadu Chitrakar from the recent Pune show Malkha & Crafts. The Chitrakars tell their own versions of the Ramayana and other stories, with delightful additions & improvisations.


The Pune show was the first time Malkha Marketing Trust organized an exhibition themselves... a lot of work, too much, and we probably will not do it again. It's so much simpler to participate in sales organized by others, particularly the Nature Bazars by Dastkar, where we invariably get good sales without having to worry about publicity, security, setting up stalls, drinking water, etc etc.


At the Pune show we had just a few stalls - Weavers' Wheel selling malkha and khadi garments, Jugaad, with patchwork from Karm Marg, Neev soaps and Karnataka jewellery and bags from Banjara and shepherd communities, patt paintings from Bengal, besides of course the malkha stall.

Sutanu's print designs of swans and butterflies are still going strong. It's amazing what a difference a new colour scheme makes, and also amazing how much variety is possible in Kalamkari block printing. Here is one of the new colour schemes for the swan print, which we hope will be available at the Pune show this month.

Six students from the Amsterdam Institute of Fashion are in India on a 4 month exchange programme with the Pearl Academy of Fashion, New Delhi, "to explore the rich Indian culture as well as the country's versatile crafts & textile industry". They visited the malkha stall at the Dastkar Nature Bazaar, the malkha office in Hyderabad and the malkha production centre in Mahbubnagar.

They have "combined their new knowledge with the Dutch way of conceptual thinking and developed two different fashion collections, Freedom to freedom and Coloured by culture" These collections, they say, are "produced in an ethical way using the organic resources of NGOs", including the Malkha Marketing Trust.

The collections are to be presented at the residence of the Ambassador of the Netherlands in New Delhi on January 12, 2011. The students may be contacted through their e-mail amfiindia@gmail.com