The Crisis

Many looms are lying silent today and many have even been sold off. The devoted weaver is no longer able to spend days creating beauty and the compulsion of modern life has pulled him out of his doorstep and right into seeking any available livelihood. As the traditional sari has been pushed to a side of the wardrobe of the modern woman, so have these weavers been pushed to the fringe of their community.

Why has the weaver ended up in this rut?

The answer lies in the surge that is conquering the world – Globalisation and it does not wait. One of the main reasons is the product itself. The Silk Sari is not the main attire any longer and is reserved for special occasions like marriage. One of the other key reasons is that the market is constantly being flooded by cheap machine made substitutes from other countries. These are cheaper in price and quality, are poor pretenders of the regal Banarasi silk and yet find a great market amongst the modern day shoppers who cannot tell the difference.

The compulsion of earning for their families looms large and many weavers have entered into professions like rickshaw pulling or construction labour, and many are beginning to forget the art itself. The weaving skill is traditionally passed down generations and that keeps it alive. However, nowadays, the younger generation is not able to find it feasible to follow the family tradition anymore.

The Solution

The solution is to create products and services that are in harmony with the art, the skill, the weavers, their self respect and the demands of the market. It is about bringing a unique skill into the forefront and making it commercially viable for the weavers’ community and designing products with contemporary standards.

Weaving silk is a unique skill that requires both mind and body. There is an aesthetic tradition that has been preserved for centuries but faces extinction today. In a world of mass machine production, uniqueness is in the danger of being averaged out.

We believe in the speciality and indigenousness of the Craft of the Varanasi silk. It is a product that is as relevant and desirable today as it was before and is suffering from not being updated. Our efforts are to bring creative solutions to this situation and make it appropriate for the modern times.

Our Approach

In the interest of being part of the solution, we intiated the project Varanasi Weavers. We believe that these weavers have magic in their fingers; they are not asking for pity. Rather, they are just lacking the chance to prove their skills today. We want to motivate a certain sense of self respect and the right to be. It is our sincere hope to let the craftsmen do what they are good at the same time making a living from it and not be pushed into compulsion. Our hope is that a beautiful tradition, slightly modified for the modern day world, will live on for many years to come, and that another outstanding example of the ingenuity of humankind will be preserved.

What Has Been Done

Re-training of the weaver’s community

13,000 silk scarves were made in Varanasi in 2006 as New Year gifts for Bestseller organisation of Denmark, in a gesture to help the weavers’ community. During this period, their production methods were organised and the weavers received intensive training on production and quality control.

Re-orienting the products to a more contemporary context

Much research has gone into the product itself. Varanasi silk fabrics now have fast colours, which they didn’t have before (they needed to be dry cleaned). This is a big step forward in making the products more desirable and user friendly for the average consumer. The best Zari is now used in the products and it also has been tested repeatedly to make it machine washable. The fabrics itself have been made lightweight and are designed for daily wear and most important of all, is machine washable!

Organisation of the weaver’s

3 Dalit villages have been adopted.
35 looms have been restarted; they had been closed for months, some for years. These looms are currently weaving fabrics which are machine washable, of very good quality, and usable for making modern clothing.
There are about 60 weavers in the programme and more are joining everyday.
Some of the looms are making saris for uniforms for the Taj hotels.
An Office has been set up for the weavers in Varanasi, which will directly follow up on the weavers’ requirements.
The weavers’ community has been organised into groups, which are now ready to take orders for products and services.

Some of the group leaders of the project

Reviving traditional skills and employment of the women

Through this project, the design team has revived the Varanasi embroidered Zardosi buttons that are still much coveted items, but the skill to manufacture which has been largely lost over the past few decades.
90 ladies from 3 villages have gone through livelihood training programmes, and are currently busy with orders.

General Development

The weavers as well as the women involved in the projects have been taken for exposure visits outside Varanasi, a first for many of them!
To help in the overall development of the weavers and their families, solar lamps have been put up to aid the weavers in their work, hand pumps have been installed in their villages and health camps have been organised.

Health camp organised in the villages

Future Direction

The Varanasi project is nearing two years of completion. Many goals have been achieved and we have forged a strong partnership with the weavers’ community.

There are still many targets to be achieved for the community to become self sufficient. Some of our future objectives are:

• Organising villages into self-help groups able to deal with the marketing of the textiles by themselves.
• Linking them with an overall market platform.
• Conducting training programmes for using new technologies such as e-mail and websites, specially for marketing purposes.
• Upgrading the looms. Most of the looms are in a very primitive or dilapidated state, because the weavers' community has for a long time had insufficient money to invest in infrastructure.
• Engaging women in livelihood programmes related to weaving, so they are complimentary to the main craft.
• Encourage designers to create designs which will bring the weavers work and open new markets for their products. In this context, Priyadarshini Rao has just finished a number of new designs, and there is more to come.
• Upasana is also creating samples of Varanasi textiles which can be launched in the market, and is arranging for a dedicated team to become active on site to support the weavers.
• Creating awareness about this crisis of the Varanasi weavers in India (which has not been done to date)

The Women's journey to Empowerment

As we drove head first into this project, we realised that the women were the back-support for the weavers, but lacked important skills and thus the opportunity to earn their own living. We understood the importance of building confidence amongst the women in the villages. Through this project we have been devising ways to do just that.

We explored various product designs and came upon the old but lost tradition of the "Varanasi Buttons" - little pieces of pure beauty much treasured by the royalty at its time, but sadly now forgotten. The women have been trained in creating this beautiful pieces again and this has brought them back into the forefront. Under this initiative, 96 women have received employment and many more have received training. These buttons are now finding new markets again and the women have gained new found confidence thanks to their income.

The initiative for women is also being extended to weaving. Women who are extremely keen can now take training sessions along with the men to learn weaving and even the finer skills such as weaving Jamdani.The women have been organised into Self Help Groups and they meet monthly. Their excitement and their smiles lets us know that we are together on this journey to empowerment.