‘Our hands keep working’

“Weaving cots is in my blood,” says a smiling Krishnawati, a third generation string-cot-maker. “I even got married to someone who is fond of the craft!” the 45-year-old from the Tharu tribal community tells us.

For almost three decades, Krishnawati and her husband Chandrapal Singh Rana have been making string cots – beds which have string bases in place of wood. They cut and fashion the legs of the cot from wood, and then weave the string base.

In summers, as temperatures rise, people prefer cots to beds, and so the craftspeople work from May through to September; the rest of the year they work as agricultural labour. Krishnawati earns a daily wage of Rs. 350 and Chandrapal a hundred rupees more. They get around 120-150 days of work in the year.

The couple are residents of Kaithulia, a village of around 1,200 people, most of whom work in agriculture on small land holdings. About two to three kilometres from their pucca house, Krishnawati and Chandrapal own an acre of land on which they practice both rainfed and irrigated cultivation. “We grow wheat and paddy for ourselves,” says Krishnawati, mother to two children.

The annual income of roughly Rs 50,000 from cot-making is vital, they say. “Jab pura gaon so jata hai, tab bhi humara haat chalte rehte hai [When the whole village sleeps, our hands keep working],” Krishnawati says, “be it midnight or two a.m., the cot has to be completed.”

The couple have made more than 1,600 cots in the last 10 years – that’s roughly 160 cots a year. They charge Rs. 400-500 a cot.

Customers come from nearby towns and villages like Tikuli, Nagra, Saronja and Bichuwa, all within five to 10 kilometres. Those who place an order also provide the rope and wood – usually sheesham (Dalbergia sissoo) as it is strong and durable, but also mango or neem wood, because of its easy availability.

The first step is to make the beam of the cot, which Chandrapal does with four pieces of wood – two pieces of six feet and another two of three feet. Then, the four legs of the cot are sent to a carpenter in Nanakmatta who carves designs on them and makes the holes where the beams will smoothly slide in. After this, Chandrapal shapes the base of the cot and applies paint to make it shine.

For the weaving, Chandrapal makes the daavan or base, tying a plastic rope from left to right. Then it is Krishnawati’s turn.

“I weave two to three cots in a day,” she says. It takes three hours to weave a zanjeeri (chain-linked) cot. “The saukedar [cotton-weave] cot is big and heavy, so my husband and I weave it together,” she adds. Krishnawati dropped out of school in Class 3 and ended up spending a lot of time with her father. “I held the rope while he wove it in. I was always curious to see what the finished cot would be like.”