Abstract
The historical prominence of silk weaving in Tamil Nadu cannot be overstated. The centrality of silk saris from this region as a globally recognised cultural good has permeated the economic, political and moral lives of the weaving community, Padma Saliyars. We Who Wove with Lotus Thread (a title drawing from the etiological myth of the weaving community of the Telugu-speaking Padma Saliyars) is a consolidation of the divergent histories and practices that account for the regional valorisation of Tamil Nadu as the centre of silk production in India, and for the resurgence of the weaving community in the public sphere in the aftermath of industrialisation in the 20th century. The book focuses on two neighbouring silk-weaving towns within Tamil Nadu—Kumbakonam and Swamimalai. Informed by ethnography and adopting a historiographical mode, Kawlra offers complex, analytical and at times intimate narratives about the meaning of ‘work’ and about the self-perception of the Padma Saliyar community as a site of resilience, negotiation and value-creation.
In order to build her thesis around the production of handloom, of locality and of communal identity, Kawlra critically reviews the inter-relationships between caste claims among the Padma Saliyars, the geographical and physical distribution of weaving, and the emergence and distribution of technological innovations. These three pegs resonate throughout the book, and their centrality is cited and acknowledged in the Foreword. What differentiates Kawlra’s book from previous scholarship on the transformation of caste patrimony into cultural associations in India, such as Balmurli Natrajan’s The Culturalization of Caste in India: Identity and inequality in a multicultural age (Routledge 2013)—an ethnography among the kumhar (potter) community of North India—is her unpacking of the very notion of politics that underlies the articulation of collective/individual agency. Kawlra analyses the commitment of the Padma Saliyar community to securing economic and cultural rights for itself as part of the ‘work’ of the community, namely weaving. The act of weaving then, as Kawlra elucidates, is an ethical act where ‘trust’ and ‘fiduciary responsibilities’ are integral indicators of skill of the weaver (p. 60).
The organisation of chapters within the book indicates that Kawlra wishes to engage with the subject matter, namely the institutionalisation of weaving among the Padma Saliyars, by juxtaposing two perspectives. One is from a macro viewpoint highlighting structural and historical contexts within which weaving as an industry took shape over the course of the 20th century. The other looks at weaving as an embodied performance which emerges within moral claims— practices of the body and spaces one articulates in everyday life.
As a historical account of the silk-weaving industry in Tamil Nadu, We Who Wove is furnished with a complex of narratives that demonstrate the political, institutional and economic negotiations through which ‘tradition’ begins to take shape. First, the book locates the Padma Saliyar community within the history of the anti-Brahmanical movement and of the movement against industrialisation of textile production (p. 5). Second, it recounts the historical correspondence of the revival of the devadasi dance practice as classical Bharatnatyam by Kalakshetra in the 1930s with the emergence and popularity of the korvai sari or the south silk suited to the Brahmanical norms of drape and decency. Third, the book traces the genealogy of some of the leading sari traders of Chennai, such as the famous retail chain Nalli, and highlights the role of kinship-based networks that permeate local (weaving household), regional (town) and national (urban centres) levels of production and distribution. These are some of the narratives Kawlra illuminates to critique the ‘Marxian insistence on a single labour history’ that ‘has tended to isolate “culture” from material activity, disassociating subjective ideas from objective conditions of production’ (p. 162).
The book argues for weaving among the Padma Saliyar community not only as a lived and embodied practice, but also as an ethical one by looking at the way claims of personhood are both negotiated and enacted. First, Kawlra dwells upon varied and locally available printed versions of the Bhavanarishi Puranam, mythology about the cosmic lineage of the community, to locate the various self-perceptions of the community regarding technological prowess and ritual purity. Second, the loom is not a mere implement or a mechanical apparatus, but is invested with subjectivity and agency akin to that of the body that acts upon it. Third, the physical presence of the loom and the act of weaving within the household are points of reference for imagining the physical design and sustenance of a weaver’s household. It is by bringing ‘together seemingly unrelated strands—myth, speculative history and daily practice of weaving, worship and social reproduction’ that We Who Wove proposes new ideological underpinnings to understand the experience of artisanship (p. 11).
We Who Wove is a commentary on the history of a very specific period in the silk-weaving industry of Tamil Nadu, namely the 1990s. Interestingly, this is a qualifier Kawlra offers only in the last chapter when she talks about the ‘desertion’ that the weaving communities of Kumbakonam and Swamimalai face in more recent times (p. 160). The book is contextualised within the ethnography of the Padma Saliyar community that Kawlra was engaged with for several years during the nineties. However, it is this ethnographic texture and Kawlra’s narration of her fieldwork that the reader sometimes yearns for. But composing an ethnographic text is not what We Who Wove intends to do; rather it offers its readers a map with which one can trace the many strategies and practices through which work, community and locality are constructed as representational of an important chapter in the economic, cultural and political history of South Asia. This book can be taught as part of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Material Culture in South Asia, Anthropology of Development, Anthropology of Work, Contemporary India, and Industry and Society.