From Yarn to Yardage

Seventy years after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, textile designers on why khadi — his adopted fabric — needs to go beyond the barriers of subsidies, and work towards collaboration

Written by Shiny Varghese | Published: January 30, 2018 12:05 am

A khadi creation by Rajesh Pratap Singh

Khadi, by definition, is an ode to the handmade. In 1921, when Mahatma Gandhistripped himself of all excesses and adopted the cloth of the poor farmer, he pitted political will against moral force. In her book, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation, historian Lisa Trivedi writes about how khadi became a shared symbolic vocabulary that could be adopted by Indians across the country. Despite efforts by the Khadi and Villages Industries Commission and pockets of fashion designers across the country, khadi continues to fight for survival. “The process of weaving pure cotton cloth is unavailable anywhere in the world. At the scale that India had done it, we should be proud. Of course, we need to get out of the comfort of discounts and subsidies. The biggest challenge lies in standardisation, and finding ways to make it relevant to the contemporary market,” says Jaya Jaitly, founder, Dastkari Haat Samiti. We speak to textile designers for whom khadi or the handmade isn’t a fashion statement but a lifetime commitment.

Rajesh Pratap Singh, Faridabad