Last week, four of us interned with the Varanasi Weavers Foundation, an NGO founded in 2007 that works to support the weaving community around Varanasi. VWF works as a bridge between the weaving community and the world market - their initial start was an order from a Danish company, Bestseller, for scarves for all its employees as Christmas gifts. The NGO has two main leaders - Dipti, who is involved with the social justice and development side of the organization, and Uma, who runs a clothing company called Upasana that buys a lot of the weavers' products to produce garments for western consumers. VWF also facilitates orders between the weavers and other traders; they are not directly involved in the market. In five years, they will no longer need funding from Bestseller or other international donors to sustain themselves. In addition to facilitating the weavers' market, VWF also helps the weavers apply for Health Cards and Weavers Cards to ensure they can get the government benefits they are entitled to; the weavers make too much per day to qualify for a Below Poverty Line Card, but make too little to fully support their families. Right off the bat, we were told that weaving is a community-based, small-scale industry, and everything I saw throughout the course of the week only reinforced this idea.
Weaving came to Varanasi with the Moguls from Persia, so it was traditionally a Muslim craft. The Muslim weavers then taught the craft to the local, lower caste (class) Hindu community as a way for them to improve their livelihood; it's a deeply-rooted tradition in both communities. It's funny that we've talked so much about and had firsthand exposure to the Hindu-Muslim tensions that exist in contemporary India, and yet the trajectory of weaving through Varanasi is a perfect and quite literally beautiful example of religious pluralism. Weaving is done only by males, so it's usually the sole income for a family.
The silk market went down in 2000 primarily because of an influx of cheap Chinese silk and synthetic goods flooding the market and loss of the traditional socio-cultural status that was once associated with wearing a Varanasi silk sari (especially at your wedding). The silk market is incredibly unstable too, so the weavers could never count on a steady price for silk (the instability comes partially from the fact that in order to make zari, a particular type of silk yarn that's used in Varanasi silk weaving, you need gold, so the silk market is linked to the gold market). Weavers began to commit suicide or change professions in 2003. Today, the weaving community consists of about 50,000 weavers, down from 500,000. Dipti estimates that in about 20 years weaving could be completely extinct because in addition to the weavers changing professions, India's child labor laws prevent children from learning the craft. Weaving requires incredibly deft fingers, as well as intense concentration. We were told that children had to start learning the craft between the ages of 7 and 15, otherwise they will be too old to train themselves to have the mental and physical capacity required to weave.
On our second day with VWF, we went to the Muslim area of Varanasi and walked through a whole bunch of alleways to see the entire process: a (Hindu) raw silk salesman, who buys silk from Bangalore and Calcutta; the silk dyers who work on a completely open street corner; and a man who has looms on the whole first floor of his home, where his family can all weave. All the businesses we saw were family-owned and had roots going back for many generations. It was amazing to see (almost) the whole supply chain contained within one square mile of each other. I think that for all of us this day really made us begin to realize how much the craft is intertwined with Varanasi's history and culture; it's one thing to be told the story in a history lesson/NGO briefing, but actually meeting the men involved in the process - men whose fathers, and grandfathers, and great-grandfathers did the same job they do. Men who are the present manifestations of a much larger cultural, historical trajectory.
The next day we went to two villages outside of Varanasi to visit weavers in their homes. This was an equally amazing experience, as we got to see how important weaving is to the families. Weavers often live in one-room, dirt-floored homes. Half of the home is taken up by the hand loom, and the other is the living space for their families. Weavers usually have 5-12 kids though, so it's very cramped quarters. Though it's preferable to weave at night, without all the distractions of family life, the villages will only get electricity for 12 hours a day - one week, during the day, the next at night. We got to watch weavers weaving in their homes - as the craft has traditionally been done. Watching and hearing them weave was such a soothing experience - in the second home we visited all of us just sat in silence for about 5 minutes listening to the sound of a weaver weaving on his loom. At the end of the day there was a freak rain/wind storm, so we all ran in to one of the weavers' homes to wait for the storm to break. Consequently, the India-Pakistan Cricket World Cup game was was just starting, so we got to watch it on the weaver's tiny, grainy TV. It was pretty incredible to think that the same scene was being played out in villages all across India. Minus the four white girls.
On Thursday we saw a completely different mode of production. After sitting in over an hour's worth of traffic (on the shortcut we had taken because there was a "jam" on our original route), we crossed the Ganga and met with a business man who was from a weaving family, left Varanasi to get a law education, and returned to the community to help support the weavers. One of the main things he does aside from acting as a trader for their goods is providing them with a space to weave. He as a room on his property with about 7 looms in it, and weavers can come to weave on them without paying a rental fee and earn a fair wage for their labor. This is great for weavers who have had to sell off their looms, but want to keep working in the craft. I saw it as a bridge between what weaving is now and what weaving used to be since it provides the weavers with a support system for their work and is reintroducing them to the market. I think one of my favorite parts of this site visit was that the businessman who facilitated the whole workshop returned to his community and is using his education to work for their benefit. It really drove home the community-based, small-scale industry point that Dipti made to us on our first day, and also showed that getting a higher education is not synonymous with leaving your family, village, and traditions - a problem we had seen in many villages we had visited in the past.
That afternoon, after going back across the Ganga - this time on a terrifyingly rickety "floating bridge" (we were later told by our Hindi teacher that her husband was once driving across it in a rickshaw in a rainstorm and the bridge split in two) - we were given a task: after being exposed to all the different aspects of the organization that week, we were asked what we thought VWF could do to improve their business and development models. At first, this seemed like an incredibly daunting task - who were we, four college undergrads with no training in business and the teeniest training in development, to determine what this organization should do? But we got over our identity crisis and had a really great time brainstorming ideas for VWF. Surprisingly, business was a lot easier than development, even though this program has exposed us so much more to the development side of things. Our main idea was that for the weavers, development and business are linked - they need the market to keep their livelyhood. So we wanted to capitalize on the high quality, incredibly local nature of the craft through big tags that tell the story of VWF and a personal story of the weavers, create an online presence for VWF to sell products directly to the western consumer market, and a store in Varanasi for VWF to sell products and offer a tour through the weaving community.
Dipti is starting a new organization though - rangSutra, a fair trade craft company that is providing women in the villages surrounding Varanasi employment (and empowerment) through stitching, embroidery, and patchwork. And, she's giving me an internship for the summer! I'm so excited to work with a company that's just getting started and getting hands-on experience in the field. Also Varanasi is definitely my favorite city that we've visited so far, so I'm really excited to spend the summer there. It feels like a very beautiful, livable city with just enough westerners/western cafes to keep me sane. But also a delicious South Indian restaurant that I plan on frequenting. We went for dinner on Monday night and were the only white people there - definitely a good sign. On Sunday morning we took a sunrise boat ride on the Ganges:
Then hopped on a night train back to Jaipur. India won the Cricket World Cup en route, and sadly there were no celebrations on the tracks.
