The malkha stall is no 44 at Dastkar's Nature Bazar in Delhi, the first event at their new premises... a good location, easy to get to by metro with no parking problems for those who use cars.

Malkha had a good first day yesterday, and most of the sarees are gone. We apologize to disappointed customers, but there are some great developments in the pipeline. The production centre that makes the sarees has now set up its own malkha yarn unit, and will be making thinner sarees & dupattas, which should be available for the first time by mid-December.

News from MMT

Malkha had very good sales at National Archives, and made some promising connections:

itokri, an online portal, will retail malkha online
Kashida will embroider & tailor some garments for malkha to retail
Pavan Mitroo will try retailing  malkha in Delhi:

Pavan Mitroo

Phoenix Designs & Printing Solutions

NANAK BHAWAN

2nd floor, 252, Shahpur Jat

(Landmark : Opp. Panchsheel Commercial Complex)

New Delhi - 110049

Tel : 011-416-55440

Tara Aslam of Nature Alley got orders from Fabindia for the malkha garments she makes

and people loved the phulkari motifs on malkha by the Nabha Foundation ...see pic on Facebook/malkhafreedom.

Meanwhile the garment samples Julie Kagti has designed for us are much sought after, but we have yet to find a tailor to make them.

Exhibitions in Delhi, Kolkatha, Bhopal, Pune and Mumbai coming up between now and February.

our guardian

and here is the guardian of exhibition, an official employee of the National Archives of India, a female langur. She keeps away the predatory rhesus monkeys

letter in malkha mailbox

Had the camera to hand when Shubhaji came and in the excitement forgot to take pictures!
Meanwhile here is a letter in our mailbox:

Dear Sir.......early this year when you had a stall at the exhibition in Kalakshetra my daughter and I bought quite a lot of your beautiful fabric and recommended it to many friends.....we are so pleased with the material and how suitable it is for our climate. Is it possible you will be coming to Madras in the near future? I am told it is
unlikely that Kalakshetra is having an exhibition soon. Please would you let me know if you are going to be here sometime soon. All good wishes for your  continuing success.

Sincerely...radha gopalakrishnan

Shubha Mudgul to visit malkha stall

We look forward to Shubha Mudgul, the great Hindustani classical singer, visiting the malkha stall at the NAI show... will post pics

Minister for Rural Development Shri Jairam Ramesh will open our exhibition on October 1 at 5 pm. All welcome

India’s cotton cloth: the once & future king

This is the abstract of my talk in Delhi at India International Centre planned for October 6:

India for at least 18 centuries was the acknowledged world leader in cotton textiles, making a breathtaking diversity of fabrics. With the entry of the British East India Company into production in the mid 19th century the chain of interdependence between cotton farmers and weavers was broken, losing with it the process of cotton textile production that had made India the world’s supplier of cotton cloth. 

The background of the talk is the history of  the traditional Indian cotton textile industry over millennia. Since Roman times cotton cloth from India had been exported to Europe. But for the first time in the early 19^th century there were European interventions in production: Changes were introduced by the East India Company into both cotton textile making and cotton growing. Spinning was mechanized & centralized. Cotton had now to be grown for one standardized type of machine, in other words nature had to adapt to technology, rather than – as before - flexible technologies adapted to a huge diversity of cotton varieties.  The damaging effects of those changes on the environment and on the Indian cotton textile industry can be felt today.

The last part is the 20 year story of malkha, from the 1990s to the present. Malkha combines traditional and cutting edge technologies to suit a contemporary context, replacing the resource intensive process of industrial yarn making with a series of small-scale, village based, field-to-fabric production chains.