Rendal's weavers: and then there were four

Siraj Momin can’t afford to make an error. One slip and he could lose the Rs. 28 he gets per metre of cloth. He must precisely maintain the number of warp and weft threads. So he looks through a magnifying glass now and then to inspect the weave. And, over the course of six hours, presses the handloom’s two pedals 90 times a minute – or 32,400 times a day. His foot movements close and open the harness, a rectangular frame with 3,500 wires or heddles (this number varies in different machines). The warp thread wound on the metallic beam passes through these wires with the steady foot movement. From this feat emerges a fabric that has 80 warp and 80 weft threads per inch – one metre of it every hour. 

Siraj, now 72, has been doing this for more than half a century, since he was 15. His handloom though is nearly twice as old, a family heirloom made of a century-old sagwan (teak) wood. On it, for 57 years, Siraj has choreographed the creation of fabric – the handloom requires a skilled weaver like him to simultaneously scan the thread, coordinate hand-leg movements, and ensure that the fabric has the required number of warp (longitudinal) and weft (transverse) threads.

Only two handlooms, each nearly seven feet tall, now stand in Siraj’s house. He once owned seven, and even hired labourers to operate some of them. “There was a lot of work till the late 1980s,” he says. Three decades ago, he sold three looms to buyers in other villages for Rs. 1,000 each, and after a while donated two to a non-governmental organisation in Kolhapur city.

In Rendal, his village of 19,674 people (Census 2011) in Hatkanangle taluka of Kolhapur district, three generations of Siraj’s family have sat at the handloom, spinning out fabric. After clearing Class 8 around 1962, Siraj too picked up the craft of weaving from his father’s sister, Halima. She was one of the few woman weavers in Rendal. Most other women in the village would hand-spin the thread which was used as weft – as did Siraj’s wife Maimuna, many years later.

But in Rendal village, as elsewhere, handlooms slowly gave way to powerlooms – machines that run quick and unceasing, and produce cloth that is cheaper than handloom. Raosaheb Tambe, president of the Powerloom Association of Rendal, says, “The same cloth can be made on a powerloom for less than three rupees a metre.” From 2,000-3,000 powerlooms in Rendal in the year 2000, he estimates there are now 7,000-7,500.

Siraj knows that customers now prefer the cheaper cloth. “If the same cloth is woven on a powerloom, no one will pay more than 4 rupees per metre. We get 28 rupees,” he says. Handloom cloth costs more because of the weaver’s skill and effort, as well as its quality. “People don’t understand the value and quality of hand-woven cloth,”  Siraj adds. A single labourer can handle at least eight powerlooms, whereas one weaver works each handloom, paying attention to every thread. This makes each piece of hand-made fabric unique, he believes.

With the march of the powerloom and the passage of years, the handloom weavers of Rendal have tried to adapt. Traditionally, the weavers here produced nauvari sarees (a little over eight metres long). In the 1950s, they wove a saree in four hours and earned Rs. 1.25 for each – by the 1960s, this sum increased to Rs. 2.5. Today, Siraj makes shirting cloth in deference to market demand. “It began two decades ago, after the cooperative societies in the village shut down,” he says.

The Automatic Handloom Co-operative Vinkar society and the Hathmagh Vinkar Co-operative Society, were intermediaries between the weavers of Rendal and the purchasing corporation in Solapur city,  the Paschim Maharashtra Hathmag Vikas Mahamandal. The societies shut down in 1997, Siraj recalls, because of the decline in the demand for handloom sarees. 

To continue to get raw material and sell his woven cloth, Siraj then enrolled at a sub-centre of the Karnataka Handloom Development Corporation (KHDC) in Koganoli village in Chikodi taluka of Belgaum (now Belagavi) district in Karnataka. He shows me the enrollment receipt of November 6, 1998 and recollects that 29 weavers from Rendal had paid a refundable deposit of Rs. 2,000 to enroll. Now only four are working the handlooms in his village – Siraj, Babalal Momin, Balu Parit and Vasant Tambe. (See A life measured in metres and yards.)  “Some passed away, a few stopped weaving, and the rest sold their handlooms,” Siraj says.

Among them is Rendal’s fourth weaver, 76-year-old Balu Parit. He started out as a labourer in a handloom karkhana –  workshops with multiple looms, once bustling in his village. Balu began working as a weaver in 1962, after training himself to operate the handloom. “For four years, I used to spin the yarn and wind it. Slowly, I started using the handloom, and that’s how I learned to weave,” he says. “After winding the yarn on 300 pirns, we would get one rupee [in the late 1950s],” he says with a laugh. This work took him four days.

In 1960, Balu bought an old handloom for Rs. 1,000 from a weaver in Rendal. “I use the same loom even today,” he says. “I work so as not to be idle.” Balu’s wife, Vimal, in her early 60s, is a homemaker who, till some years ago, washed clothes for an income. Their son Kumar, who is in his late 40s, irons clothes. 

Siraj and Maimuna’s older son, Sardar, 43, works as a labourer for a sugar factory at Hupari town in Kolhapur district, and their younger son, Sattar, 41, works for a businessman in Rendal. Their daughter, Bibijan, 41, is married and a homemaker. “There is no market for handloom cloth. So, we decided not to learn this art,” says Sattar.

Babalal’s family, too, has sought work other than weaving. His eldest son, 41-year-old Munir, runs a grocery shop at Rendal. The second son, Jamir, 39, works as an agricultural labourer. The youngest, Samir, 36, owns a meat shop in a nearby village. There’s only Babalal on the handloom now.

“Karnataka [just across the border ] has thousands of handlooms even today. Why can’t the Maharasthra government too keep the handloom industry alive?” Babalal fumes. The Handloom Census shows that Karnataka had 34,606 working looms, while Maharashtra had 3,251 in 2009-10. Of these, just four remain in Rendal.  “After the four of us die, this occupation will also die,” says Babalal Momin, and returns to his loom.