Based in Delhi & working with women makers, NGOs & master artisans, House of Wandering Silk (HOWS) reimagines India’s most beautiful textile traditions like Kantha embroidery. Proudly crafting one of a kind, zero waste and small batch textiles, clothing & accessories founded on values of authenticity, respect & beauty, since 2011.
Kantha, one of the oldest forms of embroidery from India and a craft practised today by millions of South Asian women, originated in the rural villages of Bengal. This art form all but disappeared in the early 19th century before being revived in the 1940s by the daughter-in-law of the famed Bengali poet and Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore.
Artisan cooperative
Taking the train northwards from the urban sprawl of Kolkata, you will pass verdant paddy fields, endless fields of coconut palms and small mud and brick villages, finally reaching Bahrampur, the district capital of Murshidabad, many hours later. Murshidabad is nestled in the center of West Bengal state, in Eastern India, bordering Bangladesh.
A few hours south of Bahrampur will bring you to a cluster of picturesque, though unremarkable-looking, villages. These aren’t just any rural Bengali villages, however. They are home to an extraordinary cooperative of 1,400 women artisans who specialise in exquisite Kantha embroidery.
Taught by their mothers, who in turn were taught by their mothers, the women have now made Kantha stitching their livelihood. Through training, experience and perseverance, these artisans have elevated Kantha from a craft creating items for personal use, to an artform in products sold across the world.
The work is perfectly suited to the needs of the artisans – they pick the materials from the cooperative office once a week, and then work at home in their own time and at their own pace. They deliver the piece once it’s complete and receive their payment. The cooperative provides training and loans, as well as regular work and payments at least 2x above market rates.
Since 2011, HOWS has worked with hundreds of these artisans. It takes 15 to 30 days to complete one Kantha Sari Scarf, and one to two months to complete a Kantha Sari Shawl or Shrug, depending on how many hours per day the artisan works; in general, the artisans work around 3 hours per day. The artisans say that they enjoy the work, though some fabric is more challenging to work with than the traditional cotton, like slippery upcycled silk saris.
Economic Empowerment
Katherine, founder, HOWS says, “Having worked with Kantha for many years, I think what draws people to this craft form is the combination of pre-loved fabrics and meticulous artistry, which transforms used cloth into something aesthetically beautiful, yet durable and highly utilitarian. Kantha is on the edge of craft, recycling, art and design. It cannot be mass-produced and the small irregularities in the stitching are a reminder that each piece has been hand-made and is unique.”
She adds, “Moreover, as a skill learnt in childhood by millions of rural women, many of whom are impoverished and live in socially conservative communities, it offers a vehicle for economic self-sufficiency, independence and empowerment. For me as a designer, Kantha is highly versatile and can be applied to almost any fabric in unlimited pattern/colour combinations, lending itself to constant re-invention.”
There are visible improvements in the village: brick houses are replacing the mud huts families used to live in. Girls are sent to school. And then choosing – and able – to gain higher education further afield.
There are non-visible changes too. In a society where women are highly restricted – socially and economically – and in a context where their husbands earn consistently higher wages for the same work, the ramifications of an independent income are great: increased self-confidence and social standing; the benefits of an added income to the health of their children; and the pride that comes with knowing your hand work is cherished and appreciated around the world.
Rural life continues unchanged in many aspects; buffalo are still used to plough the paddy fields; cow dung is dried into cakes and used for fuel, and many families still struggle economically.
However, Kantha now provides a sustainable, independent and dignified source of income to any woman who wants it, turning this region – once highly vulnerable to girl and women sex trafficking – into a model of empowerment and positive development.
The NGO which created the cooperative many years ago also runs a local school providing top-quality education to girls and boys alike. Something unheard of in this area, where government schools are notoriously ineffectual.
Sari recycling in India
The tradition of bartering off old saris is an old one. While saris are most often kept for decades, or handed down to people close to the family (such as servants), used or old pieces can also be sold to a ‘bhandiwali’.’Bhandi’ means utensils in Hindi.
A bhandiwali will make her rounds of one particular area on a regular basis. When a woman wants to trade her used sari, she calls out to the bhandiwali who will come to her home and scrutinise all the saris; the ones she thinks can be recycled will be traded for steel utensils; cups, pots, pans or ladles depending on the condition of the clothing she takes.
HOWS sources its saris from a community of Gujarati sari traders in Delhi.The saris are then brought back to the company’s studio where they are cleaned and carefully checked for all defects. Working with pre-loved textiles takes an inordinate amount of time in terms of quality control. Sections of the sari which pass the quality check are cut to size and piled to one side. (Fabric which does not pass the quality control goes to another pile, for cutting into smaller sections and making into Sari Silk Necklaces.)
The process
The HOWS team then sort, piece by piece, through these cut fabrics, pairing fabrics which look fabulous together and which will form the 2 layers of each of the scarves. Next, they match each pairing with cotton thread before tying up the fabric/thread bundle.
Once they have a large enough pile of bundled fabric, they are posted to a remote village in West Bengal and the cooperative with which HOWS works. The cooperative, consisting of some 1,400 women kantha artisans, processes the bundles and prepares the fabric for the artisans.
This preparation in itself is a big job: the bundles are counted and each piece of fabric is ironed. One artisan then makes large, tacking stitch around the edges of each scarf to hold the layers of fabric in place. The cooperative manager notes down in his ledger how many scarves will go to which artisan, before distributing the bundles to the workers.
This is where the hardest work begins – the laborious running kantha stitch which covers the entirety of each scarf. This is particularly challenging and time-consuming on our silk fabric; traditionally, kantha is done on cotton which is much less slippery and easier to handle. An artisan will finish off a scarf by embroidering her name in the corner, just as an artist will sign their masterpiece.
The Kantha stitching is often done outside together with a group of friends. It’s not only a job, but an important social activity. Once a week the artisans come to the cooperative center, where they drop off the scarves and receive payment. The scarves are quality checked and finished – this involves trimming thread ends and stitching the edges so the finishing is neat and tidy. After washing and ironing, the completed scarves are sent back to the HOWS studio in New Delhi.
Around 2 months after posting out the fabric bundles, the team receives the completed scarves with great excitement. Each scarf will then go through at least three rounds of quality control before being photographed and put up for sale.
Source: http://wanderingsilk.org
