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Crisis in the handloom sector

By V. Krishna Ananth

The articulate sections of society show complete indifference to the plight of several hundreds of handloom weavers in the country.

AMONG THE dozen or more films that turned out to be box office hits in the past few years, Dil Chahta Hai probably was unique and could even be called a bold attempt at presenting one reality in an honest manner. It was bold because there is not a single frame showing anything to do with the ordinary people and the way they live. All through the 90-odd minutes, the film revolves around three rich guys and their attitude to life.

Dil Chahta Hai, in this sense, was a break from the beaten track; the familiar story lines of popular cinema in the 1970s — centred around an altruistic son of a rich father or a rich man's daughter spurning all the wealth for the love of a poor man — were missing. Instead, it was an honest statement about the concerns of "the beautiful people" in the present as it happened with popular cinema in the 1970s whose story-line revolved around the "angry young man".

The truth is that gone are the times when the intelligentsia (the middle classes in other words) was also concerned about the well being of others who did not have the space to articulate their own concerns. Now, the articulate sections of society show complete indifference to the plight of several hundreds of handloom weavers in the country, Tamil Nadu in particular.

The plight of the weavers in Tamil Nadu was brought to light only after the cadre of the AIADMK and the DMK indulged in violent street brawls over who among them had the "right" to feed the weavers and their children. It was indeed natural that the issue too faded out from the discourse once the cadre got tired of the brawls. The media too, in the meantime, was led into discussing larger things (than being saddled with the lives of the handloom weavers) by the political leadership in the State.

The weaver, meanwhile, after going through a difficult period when he had to choose between a rock and a hard surface — caught as he was in the duel between those wanting to feed him gruel and those wanting to give egg biriyani — has now been left to fend for himself.

Much worse is the prescription, handed out by a section in the bureaucracy now, that the weavers too should learn to change and "upgrade" their looms so that they produce stuff that would "compete" in the world market. It is indeed strange that such men who come out with "ideas" do not realise that the handloom sector is made up of men and women who know nothing but to work the looms that occupy a major portion of the tenements they live in.

To ask them now, when they are finding it impossible to earn enough to keep themselves alive, to discard the looms they possess and procure new machines is no different from asking those who were demonstrating for bread to eat cakes instead!

These learned men (in the bureaucracy) are so alienated from the reality in another sense too. The shift from handlooms to running power-looms that was undertaken by the weavers in another part of Tamil Nadu some 20 years ago (in and around Erode and Salem districts) did help them produce cloth and make a mark in the export market at that time. But then, it also reduced several artisans to wage labourers (for every weaver was not wealthy enough to invest in new machines).

Apart from that, it is also a fact that the power-loom sector too is now down in the dumps. The fortunate among the workers are forced to operate their looms far below capacity while the rest of the units have closed down permanently. The reason is not different from the one behind the crisis in the handloom sector: there is no market for the goods produced and the weavers are immiserised further due to their debt burden.

Now, what could be the solution; rather is there a palliative in the least other than the state deciding to lift stocks and initiating welfare measures including setting up centres in these villages to feed the impoverished weaver?

There is, indeed, a different solution to the problem; a remedy that does not need the state and the Government agencies to intervene in the manner they do now (leading to brawls as were witnessed in Madurai recently). The simple response to this crisis could be drawn from the legacy of the swadeshi movement and the strategy formulated by Mahatma Gandhi in the context of the struggle he led from Champaran, known in history books as the Champaran satyagraha.

Apart from ensuring that the poor farmer was made aware of his right to decide what he shall cultivate, it was from Champaran that Gandhi defined the struggle against British rule as an anti-colonial project rather than as a movement based on cultural notions.

But then, the Gandhian strategy did integrate important aspects of tradition and culture (rooted in the economic life of the villages of India) into the nationalist mainstream. This indeed was what Gandhi conveyed through the `charkha', an integral aspect of the freedom movement.

In concrete terms, the handloom weaver, whose existence was sought to be destroyed by the colonial enterprise, was given a new life and this was an integral part of the struggle for freedom.

It is this project that is once again on the verge of destruction and it does not require a genius to find a way out of the crisis. A preliminary knowledge of the principles of production and consumption will do to conclude that the quantum of cloth produced in the handloom sector will certainly not fulfil the demand in the domestic market, leave alone export.

Given this, all that is necessary at this stage is for the large number of unions and associations into which the middle classes are organised today (and there are a lot of people in this category), to launch a campaign (just as the Indian National Congress could do for over 40 years until 1947) and change the mindset within these organisations that only the few Gandhians still alive should wear hand-woven clothes.

It is not even necessary that everyone decides to use only handloom garments. This could even lead to shortage of cloth apart from rendering workers in the textile mills jobless.

However, if only the leaders of the trade unions and associations succeed in convincing their ranks that every metre of handloom cloth they purchase would ensure that some weaver (and his family) goes to sleep after having eaten a meal that day, the present crisis afflicting the handloom weavers as a community can be overcome.

True, a cultural transformation has taken place in the past few decades due to which hand-woven garments are seen as a politician's uniform. This needs to be confronted.

A campaign of this kind among the middle classes is necessary as much to prevent the incidence of suicide among the handloom weavers as also to prevent crimes such as petty thefts and frauds in the towns and cities where the salariat lives along with "the beautiful people" (the Dil Chahta Hai crowd).

After all, it is important to realise that not all those who are pushed into poverty and hunger are going to commit suicide. There could be several among them who could think of stealing as a justified means of protest as does `Jean val Jean', the protagonist in Victor Hugo's classic Les Miserables. Let it not be forgotten that Jean was not a bandit out of choice but forced into stealing bread in order to live.

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