Priti David

Sharmila Joshi

Editor

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Tammigamal Kasimiya
 peers through her spectacles as she
fixes a tiny circular mirror onto a piece of cloth. “This sangli
stitch is the most difficult because you have to stop the mirror from
sliding,” she tells me in her home in Akkare Kaattu Tanda, one of the two Lambadi hamlets in Sittilingi valley of Dharmapuri
district in Tamil Nadu.

For 12 years now, Tammigamal
or ‘Gammi’, who is in her 60s, has helped avert another slide, a far more
serious one. Along with her friend R. Neela, she has taught young women of
their community ghater – Lambadi embroidery – to
try and prevent this skill from sliding out of collective memory. What’s more,
the steady, additional income earned from doing the embroidery has curbed the
women’s need for migration.

Lambadi women usually
migrate to the textile mills of Tiruppur, 200 kilometres south of Sittilingi, or to construction
sites. The men in the community mostly seek employment in Kerala for construction and tree-cutting. On average, the
earnings of the migrant workers, men as well as women, range from Rs. 7,000 to
Rs. 15,000 a month.

In Tamil Nadu, the Lambadis
(listed as a Backward Caste in
the state) mainly live in villages in Dharmapuri and Tiruvannamalai districts. In Sittilingi, the village panchayat officer says there are 924 Lambadis (also known
as Banjaras in other states).  Most
Lambadis in Sittilingi have one or two acres of land, where their subsistence
farming depends on rainfall. Over the last 30 years, a growing shift towards
water-intensive cash crops like sugarcane and paddy, and inadequate rain, have created
an increasing need for cash, forcing migration for periods ranging from 15 days
to a year.

“Migration is a
fact of life here, but at least in those homes where the women earn from ghater, it
has stopped,” points out 35-year-old Thaikulam.

In the two tandas
in Sittilingi, other than two or three women over the age of 70,  Lambadi women (and men too) had stopped
wearing their traditional clothes, except on ceremonial occasions. This
happened gradually, over 30-40 years. Thaikulam explains: “We didn’t want to
look different. We felt awkward. So we moved to dressing the way we saw
villagers nearby dress.”

As women in the
community stopped wearing traditional clothes, the cultural need for
embroidering fell. A. Ramani, a Lambadi
artisan in her 30s, and one of Gammi’s early students, says, “My grandmother
did some ghater,
but my mother never picked up a needle and thread, not even for her own wedding
dress.”  

Lambadi
women’s traditional attire is heavily embroidered. The petiya
 is a single- colour satiny skirt,
a choli
or blouse and a scarf or dupatta. Usually,
only the waist of the skirt and the blouse are closely embroidered, with
multi-coloured cotton threads, into a variety of delicate stitches in geometric
patterns. Men in the community though wear white, rough cotton shirts and dhotis,
with no embroidery. 

While the skill of
embroidery languished in Ramani’s mother’s generation, traditional garments
were still needed in most families for ceremonial occasions like weddings. And
most of these garments had become torn or damaged. “Women would come to us and
we would rip out the heavily embroidered parts and affix new [plain] cloth to
it,” says Gammi. This became a slim thread that retained the community’s ties
to the craft. It slowly grew into a revival.

In Sittilingi, 60
Lambadi women artisans now practise embroidery, and all of them are members of
the Porgai Artisans Association, owned and operated by them. “In our language,
‘porgai’
means pride and dignity. Pride in our craft and dignity from the income we
get,” explains Thaikulam, who was recently elected president of the Association.
“It is as though we have got our voices back. Now we have a sense of solidarity
and an outlet for our creativity.”

Porgai’s first
collective stitch was set in motion by a local doctor, Lalitha Regi. She had
moved to Sittilingi shortly after graduating from Kerala 30 years ago to set up
the Tribal Health Initiative (THI) with her husband Regi, also a medical
doctor. Lambadi women were among her patients and she noticed two seemingly
disparate facts: only older women were wearing the heavily embroidered
traditional dress and many of her patients regularly migrated out of the valley
for short periods of time to supplement their farm income, returning with
infectious diseases contracted in closed working spaces and compromises in
their diet. “I thought if I could persuade young women to start embroidering as
a means to earn, the need for migration would come down,” explains Lalitha, a
general practitioner and gynaecologist. 

Gammi and Neela
were the only two women in the Lambadi community who still knew the craft.
Gammi remembers immediately dismissing the idea: “Who will buy?” she asked
incredulously. “Even our own people are not wearing!” But Lalitha was convinced
and ‘borrowed’ Rs. 1 lakh from THI to get things moving. (Later THI  donated the money to Porgai.) 

Word spread, and 10
young women signed up in 2006. Gammi and Neela began teaching the neat lines
and tight stitches that are the trademark of this craft.  Ramani remembers: “We were told not to
disturb our teachers in their daily work, so we would sit with them only when
they were free. It took me about a month to learn a stitch well.”

Lambadi embroidery
has many distinctly different types of stitches: jaali (mesh), potah bandhan vela (cutting a line through the
middle) and eksuigaad
(a single running stitch). It is used in motifs, border patterns, edgings,
hemming and fillers, and is similar yet distinct from the shisha embroidery of Gujarat and
Rajasthan from where the community is said to have originated.

In six months Ramani
and the other students were ready to start working on Porgai-commissioned work.
But marketing and sales were slow and it was three years before Porgai could clear,
in 2009, the backlog of wages owed to its artisans and begin paying on time. 

“My first earning was from a paan,
eight lines of eight each,” Ramani remembers proudly. She and her husband own an
acre of land on which they grow sugarcane and turmeric for sale, and millets,
pulses and vegetables for their own consumption. Ghater helped pay off their
tractor loan (Rs. 2.5 lakhs, with payment of Rs. 8,000 per month) and it is a
steady source of income during a bad year. “I started when my son Dhanushkodi
was two months old [he is now 13] and I have not had to leave the valley to
seek an income,” she adds happily. “I carry my ghater with me at all times. I
can fill in stitches while water is filling my field.”

During the last
financial year (2017-2018), Porgai earned Rs. 45 lakhs, of which the bulk is
paid to the artisans. Depending on how much time they can spend doing
embroidery, each woman earns between Rs. 3,000 and Rs. 7,000 a month. &quot;I try to do eight hours [a day],” Ramani says. “If not
in the day, then I do it at night.&quot;

The rest of
Porgai’s profits are spent in buying raw material such as cloth, threads and
mirrors. The Association added a tailoring unit six years ago – seven machines. housed in the office building – as production increased and so did the
variety of products – from cushions covers, bags and pouches to more complex
pieces like sarees, kurtas and shirts and even jewellery,
all selling at various retail outlets and craft exhibitions in different cities. 

Thaikulam says that
after Porgai started, none of its members has migrated. “If we can get more
work, more women will join us and migration will come down even more,” she adds.
“When women go out to work, families get split and parents are separated from
their children. They return with all sorts of diseases because they work long
hours and the living conditions are difficult.” 

With visits to
various handicraft fairs, Porgai is slowly pulling in more orders and its members
have grown from the original 10 to 60 today. Annual design and training
sessions are held in the Porgai office and any Lambadi woman interested in
learning is welcome to join.  As an
incentive, for the 10-day training period women are paid daily wages of Rs.
200. Experienced teachers like Gammi get an additional 50 rupees – and the
prestige of being a veteran embroiderer.

Young Lambadi girls
like Ramani’s nine-year-old daughter Gopika have already started learning the
craft. She proudly shows us her first effort made during craft time
in school. 

So what does Gammi
think of this revival? “If somebody dies and then comes back to life, you tell
me,” she responds. “We are the ones
who brought it back to life.” 

The writer would like to thank K. Gayathri Priya, Anagha Unni and Abhay
for their help with the translation.

Stitching together an upturn in Sittilingi valley

സിട്ടിലിംഗി താഴ്‌വര: തുന്നിച്ചേർക്കുന്ന ഒരു മുന്നേറ്റം

சிட்டிலிங்கி பள்ளத்தாக்கில் முன்னேற்றத்தை தைக்கும் பெண்கள்

सिट्टिलिंगी घाटी में सिलाई से बदलता जीवन

سِٹّی لِنگی وادی میں سلائی سے بدلتی زندگی

সুচ-সুতোর জোরে সিট্টিলিঙ্গির মেয়েরা পেলেন নতুন পথের নকশা

ସିଟ୍ଟିଲିଙ୍ଗି ଭ୍ୟାଲିରେ ଏକତ୍ର ସିଲାଇ କରିବା

পৰম্পৰাগত শিল্পৰে ছিত্তিলিংগি উপত্যকাত উত্তৰণৰ বাট মোকলাইছে মহিলাই

बदलाचे विणतो शेले – सिट्टिलिंगी खोऱ्याची कहाणी

Sittilingi

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Stitching together an upturn in Sittilingi valley

Lambadi women in Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu have painstakingly revived 'ghater', their community’s signature embroidery, and the income from this traditional skill has ended their need to migrate for work

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