Hindu - Saree made from natural fibre launched

According to C. Sekar, president of Anakaputhur Jute Weavers Association, dresses woven out
of natural fibres are in great demand inside and outside India. Kapok fibres are purchased in bulk
from growers in Erode district and are cleaned in a simple bleaching process. After a very
delicate process of cleaning the fibre, they are woven into fabrics like any other material, Mr.
Sekar said.

Launching the saree on Saturday, Divia Patel, Curator, South Asia, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London, appreciated the efforts of women weavers in making their economy stable. She said
using natural fibre was a lesser known skill in garment making in India, and she had purchased
one for the museum.

A struggle to keep the creative legacy of Anakaputhurs weavers

continues
Not too long ago, Anakaputhur used to be known as a quiet village, known for its handlooms. It
may have completely lost its identity in the urban chaos that has subsumed it, but for one man, C
Sekhar, who is bent on keeping the creative legacy of the place alive through the exotic banana
fibre saris that he and his fellow weavers are now trying to promote.

If 48-year-old Sekhars plans come to fruition, Anakaputhur will become world famous for its
100 percent banana fibre saris, shirts, and fabric.

We have succeeded in creating yarn from banana fibre, which is extracted from banana stems.
This raw material is available in abundance in many parts of the country. We have the know-how
to make 100 percent pure banana fibre saris and have made and sold hundreds of such saris in
last couple of years. There is great demand in the market for our saris, but we do not have
enough yarn for large-scale production, says Sekhar.

According to him, they require about 500 grams of fibre to create one sari and each banana stem
would provide about 150 grams of fibre. While banana stems are available in plenty, the manual
extraction of fibres from the stems is labour intensive and time consuming.

The alternative is to go for machine production. Fortunately for them, three IIT students have
offered their expertise to develop a machine that would produce continuous banana yarn.

It would cost about Rs.60 lakhs to develop the machine, which includes both research and
production cost, says Sekhar. But his pleas to several government departments for funding have
fallen on deaf ears.

Private donors are seeking to exploit. Naming a couple of leading sari stores in Chennai, Sekhar
said the owners of the stores invited him for talks and offered ridiculous deals.

They were prepared to give any amount of money, but wanted the machinery, and infrastructure
to be registered in their name. In other words, they wanted to run the operations and give us jobs
as workers, with no stakes in the business.

But Sekhars dreams are for the welfare of his weaving community, whom he sees as
stakeholders in the banana yarn revolution.

He has united the small remnant of families in Anakaputhur still dependent on handloom under
the banner of Anakaputhur Jute Weavers Association.

There are now about hundred families involved in weaving in Anakaputhur, and all of them look
up to Sekhar to lead them out of the dire economic straits they are in.

Sekars experiment with aloe vera, a plant whose extracts are used in beauty and medicinal products,
for weaving a saree became successful a few years ago. It will be very cool if you wear it, he said.

He also used bamboo fibre to weave cloth. The required yarn cannot be extracted directly from
bamboo. Therefore, I made bamboo pulp and with some natural process, I get the needed yarn, he
said. According to him clothes that are made from bamboo yarn, would be stronger than denim.

The innovative weavers success could be attributed to his wife Padma, who encourages her husband
and takes care of her two sons besides helping in the design section of the weaving centre.

Behind success

I create the design and show it to customers before making the dress material, Padma said. As a
traditional woman, Padma takes utmost care to get good output of the clothes, especially sarees. Our
herbal sarees will not only be good for the skin but also they last long as about 60 per cent of cotton is
mixed with the fibre, she claimed.

The price of sarees varies from Rs 600 to Rs 5,000 and some customers want silk strands woven into
them for a reception appeal. The couple also make pillow covers, bed spreads, carpets and wall
hangings with eco-friendly fabrics besides making shirts.

He makes it a point to visit different places to get authentic material for sarees. He said: I had been to
Bihar to collect water reed, Odisha for Chevai grass, Assam for bamboo, Kerala for pineapple, Punjab for
woollen fibre and Karnataka for silk.

Everything went well for Sekar and his company till the December rain in 2015. We couldnt execute
orders due to heavy rain. Most of our members were affected by the flood. In addition, several weaving
equipment were submerged in the water, Sekar said. A majority of the weavers of the association are
migrants from Andhra Pradesh and are determined to continue even after they lost their livelihood due
to heavy rain.
Though, it was a tough situation, we started our traditional business from scratch and somehow we are
back on the track, Sekar said. The determination and success of Anakaputhur weavers was recognised
once again as a Japanese company evinced interest in its technology for importing the eco-friendly
clothes from them.

A team from China-based Guangxi Zhuang company also visited Anakaputhur recently to learn about the
skill of making garments from natural fibres, especially banana and bamboo.

Going bananas over Madras checks

Anakaputhur was once a weavers village, one of many that produced plaid-inspired checked
fabric, mainly for export. The Real Madras Handkerchief that was woven here has a history with
close links to the slave trade. As a drape, it was popular in Africa, especially Nigeria, but since
the coup in 1966 and the subsequent civil war, the demand for Madras Handkerchiefs also came
down.

Madras checks, sometimes simply known as Madras, became popular in the USadvertising
guru David Ogilvy is known to have played up its limited edition handloom appeal and turned its
tendency to bleed colour into a selling point. Industrialization, colour-fast dyes and the price of
cotton yarn have since eclipsed the handloom process.

In Anakaputhur itself, the difference is stark. C. Sekar, a third-generation weaver who heads the
AJWA, says that while there were 5,000-odd handlooms 25 years ago, there are only about 350
today. About 70% of the weavers make lungi fabric; the rest are weavers of silk-cotton sarees
and those, like Sekar, who weave using natural fibre.

Sekar is famous in these parts and brings together about 12 womens self-help groups under the
banner of the AJWA to extract banana stem fibre, turn it into yarn and weave yardage and sarees.

At Sekars home in Anakaputhur, every inch of floor space in what would otherwise be a living
room has been taken up by four pit looms, their teeming heddles and a spinning wheel fashioned
from a bicycle wheel frame on which Sekars wife spins the yarn onto a bobbin. There is barely
enough space for a single person to pass between the clacking looms, so we sit outside, on the
thinnai or verandah reserved for visitors.

About 20 years ago, begins Sekar, I read a version of the Ramayana in a Tamil weekly
magazine, and came across a story where the abducted Sita needed a change of clothes, and did
not want to ask Ravana for it. She asked Hanuman instead, for vaazhai naaru or banana fibre and
wove a saree out of it. As a weaver, I was intrigued.

The most commonly quoted example of fabric made from banana fibre is that of Japans
bashfu, an integral part of Okinawan heritage. In the Philippines, they weave fabric from
pineapple leaves in a similar process. The machi is a fabric made of the warp and weft of the
banana fibre and is considered sacred in the Micronesian island of Fais.
Sekar, however, came across few references on the fabric in India, so he decided to experiment
until he fine-tuned the process over the years.

The process of weaving banana fibre fabric begins with sourcing the pseudostem of the banana
tree. India is one of the foremost banana cultivators in the world and Tamil Nadu is one of the
leading producers in the country. The sheaths of the banana stem are waste by-products sourced
from the markets of Chennai or from wholesalers in places like Kundrathur, which lies just
across the river from Anakaputhur.

Sekar suggests I visit the workshop of one of the self-help groups he works with, to get a better
idea of how the stem is converted to yarn. With the exception of the four women I meet, the rest
have taken the day off to offer prayers at the Murugan temple on Aadi Krithigai, an
astrologically auspicious date.

The women present are neatly attired in their synthetic sarees and salwar kameez, and live on the
same street. There is a terrace-cum-workshop that has a row of sewing machines to create
products like bags, baskets and files from dried natural fibre, and just enough space to process
natural fibre to make yarn.

Laila is the vociferous self-appointed spokeswoman for the group. She picks out a still-tender
banana stem sheath, presses down on the flat strip with a blunt knife and scrapes the succulent
flesh off it with quick, sure strokes. First, you see the grid of veins in the layer, and as she
continues, the fibres emerge. She picks a single thread of banana fibre and demonstrates its
strength by trying to snap it like cotton thread. It holds its wiriness and has a natural sheen.

To make the yarn, the extracted threads of varying lengths are dried and then knotted in one of
two ways to make it usable on a handloom. This is a labour- and time-intensive process, and
while there is a machine available to do this, it is unaffordable for a small self-help group like
this one.

The challenge is not of demand, but supply, says Laila, who admits to processing the banana
stem even while watching her favourite television mega-serial at home.

The yarn is then handed to the weaver, like Sekar, who first spins it onto a bobbin. This threaded
bobbin is placed in water until it can be used on the loom. It is inserted into the wooden shuttle
that is passed through the cotton or silk warp, making the banana fibre yarn the weft in the
loom.While Sekar has experimented with using banana fibre yarn in both the warp and the weft,
he believes that using a blend of cotton or silk makes it less time-consuming and more durable.

The dyeing can be done at two stages in the process, either as yarn or after the fabric is woven,
and in artificial dyes or natural ones, depending on the order received. While natural and off-
white colours are preferred abroad, the Indian clientele favours dark and vibrant shades.

Along with the self-help groups and his weavers, Sekar has experimented with extracting and
weaving a variety of natural fibre. The shawl that the PM was gifted last year was a blend of
many natural fibres, including banana, aloe vera, bamboo, erukkan, cissal, vetiver, coconut and
pineapple. There is even a herbal fabric that we created with natural fibre treated in a solution of
neem, turmeric and tulsi, he says.

On this day, Sekar has only three sarees to show. While the dyed ones look no different in
texture or colour from silk-cotton sarees, the natural one stands out with its subdued sheen and a
hint of copper.

Down the river from Anakaputhur, the locality of Adyar in Chennai is named after the river,
which is at its widest here, before it joins the sea. Vanitha Vadivelu, whose family hails from the
Salem district, renowned for its handloom industry, sources sarees from Sekar for her outlet here.
For a little over a year, she has been actively promoting the use of sarees made from natural fibre
among her clients.

Vanitha believes that the banana fibre fabric has been woven in India for decades, if not
centuries. She speaks of a visitor to her outlet, a 65-year-old customer, who took one look at one
such saree and remembered it as being similar to naaru-pattu or fabric made from banana fibre.

Her grandfather draped a length of the fabric over himself when he performed pujas, requiring a
greater degree of madi or sanctity. In India, we have always had banana fibre fabric, but cotton
became a cash crop and this part of our cultural legacy was forgotten, says Vanitha.

She admits that when it is dyed, the banana fibre saree looks no different from a silk-cotton one,
but clients have returned for more, delighted that the fabric breathes better than others in the heat
and humidity of summer.

In terms of care and maintenance, the cotton in the warp is already treated for shrinkage before
the weaving process, and the strength of the banana fibre yarn gives the saree a starched
appearance. The fabric needs to be hand-washed like traditional Kanjeevaram silk, using
shikakai or reetha (soapnuts), and avoiding blue liquid and detergent.

For the present, Sekar faces a production challenge, not one of demand. The biggest hurdle that
faces the handloom weavers of Anakaputhur is not a lack of looms or material, but a lack of
space to install pit looms and the finance to extract fibre mechanically.

Sekar speaks of allocations under the National Fibre Policy and how banana fibre is deemed as a
game-changer in the category of Other Natural Fibres. But today, he is, in essence, a weaver
with orders in hand and no means of increasing production without the help of the government in
what he believes is the only solution a handloom cluster.

In the year since the first National Handloom Day celebrations, Anakaputhurs weaving
community has also faced setbacks in the form of flooding of the Adyar river in December 2015,
which not only destroyed the banana crop upstream but also damaged raw processed fibre, dyes
and looms in Anakaputhur.

Despite these setbacks, Sekars pride is palpable when he speaks of a shawl woven by his
weavers being draped over Modis shoulder. The future also seems promising, for despite
education and job opportunities that could upgrade the social status of the family, one of Sekars
sons has expressed an interest in following in his fathers footsteps.

Vanitha, too, is proud of following in the footsteps of her forefathers from the handloom belt of
Salem by enabling the revival of an ancient form of weaving by creating demand for it.

Lailas pride, however, is significantly different. Despite the damages caused to her livelihood by
the flooding, she bristles, taking offence to the word kalva being used to refer to the river
kalva, due to rapid urbanization, has come to mean sewer.

In these parts, the Adyar is still a river, she says with native pride.

Saritha Rao is an independent writer based in Chennai

Chennai Weavers Make Eco-Friendly, Banana Fibre Jeans to Help You

Beat the Heat!
According to C Sekar, the president of the Jute Weavers Association, the fabric that he has
developed along with others in the association has the look and feel of denim, but as its
made from cotton and banana fibre, its better for the summer months as it absorbs more water.
Currently, his weaving unit has made both jeans and skirts using this material. The buttons are
made from coconut shells rather than metal and the material is dyed using natural colours.

Sekar is well-known for experimenting with different forms of weaving methods, having made a
saree from 25 different kinds of fabric. In fact, a report from the Times of India notes that,
hoping to tap into his expertise, officials from Andaman and Nicobar Islands have solicited his
help in training artisans in this innovative methodology.