Kodiyala - A village of weavers who wove clothes for the Maharajas

Small houses on either side of narrow roads, busy traditional bazaars that bountifully display spices & vegetables, old-fashioned name boards that remind you of the 80s and a group of elderly at the pocket-sized tea shops who make you forget GPSs and Google Maps... that’s a scene from a small village called Kodiyala located a few kilometers away from the historical town of Srirangapatna that was once ruled by Tippu Sultan. What makes this village unique is the fact that the weavers of Kodiyala wove the clothes for the royal families of Mysore, Tippu Sultan and many political leaders. This village is a home to hundreds of ‘Padmashalis’, a Telugu-speaking weaver community known to have migrated from Andhra Pradesh hundreds of years back. 

A closer look at the village reveals that almost every house has a weaver and the weaving equipments. Every second house is a tiny retail shop with interested customers coming from far off places ready to buy in bulk for marriages and special occasions. Although the designs have changed with time, catering to the needs of the modern customer, the Kodiyala weavers still make a living selling sarees, dhotis etc, keeping alive the traditional Kodiyala weaving.

"Threads of amazing colors ready to be woven into a saree"

An elderly weaver who started at the age of 18 and with an experience of 62 years now runs a shop in the busy market street. The eighty year old, who proudly talks about the Padmashalis  says he is happy with the sales as he counts notes of rupees five hundred  just handed over by a customer. A small room next to the shop accommodates huge powerloom machines with only a minimal space to walk. Beautiful rolls of colorful threads of unimaginable colours adorn every nook and corner of the room. With the colourful threads, well-thought out patterns and designs carefully fed to these giant complicated machines, all it requires is electricity and minimal supervision. With around 6 such machines making sarees of varied designs and colours, saree after saree was neatly being piled up.

"The powerloom machine weaving a Kodiyala saree"

With technology making everything easier, with weavers who are still willing to take this art forward and with customers who come to the doorstep of the weavers to buy in bulk – everything might seem perfect.

But the other side of the Kodiyala story is not all that green. While traditionally, ‘handlooms’ were used to weave the sarees by earlier generations of Kodiyala weavers, almost every weaver has now introduced power looms. Well, power-looms have definitely made the lives of hundreds of weavers easier. Power-loom machines offer speed, accuracy & efficiency with minimal human interference, thereby reducing the costs and increasing profit margins. That’s an attractive deal! That also makes beautiful Kodiyala sarees very much affordable to the customers.

But I was curious to know if there were weavers who have still retained the age-old handlooms in-spite of machines . After much enquiry, I could find only one weaver in the whole of Kodiyala village who is still practicing time-taking, labor-intensive, handloom weaving that demands skill, experience and patience.  Mr. Govindaraju, who is a third generation weaver says that the very beauty of weaving is in being involved in that process that can be experienced only through handlooms and sadly admits that people are opting out of handlooms. Inspite of excellent government schemes that protect the interests of the handloom weavers and benefits given to weaver families with respect to health, education, housing and bank subsidies,  problems in implementation, monitoring, lack of focus-oriented approach and loopholes in the system are posing a threat to handlooms. Although a number of training programs are conducted by the government investing a huge amount of money and resources, there is no mechanism to cross verify and take things forward post-training. While work is being done only to satisfy certain paper works, the program lacks a vision-oriented, coordinated and sincere efforts to revive and promote handlooms. While it takes a few hours to make a saree in powerloom, it takes 3 to 20 days to complete a saree depending on the complication level of the design with 1-3 people working on it!

"The traditional handloom setup"

"Criss-crossing threads at a handloom weaving unit"

"Rows of beautiful silk threads of vibrant colors in the process of being transformed into a masterpiece"

Inspite of all these hurdles and lucrative powerloom markets, handful weavers like Govindaraju continue to uphold handloom tradition in Kodiyala and are bent upon breathing a new life into this age-old weaving method. Hats off to these weavers. It is people like these who make India a truly beautiful country – a country where people are so very attached to the roots that money takes a backseat, where people are so much in love with a craft that machines take a backseat and where people still live with a hope despite a seemingly irreparable system.

After having witnessed both the powerloom and handloom weaving, my heart votes for the latter. I might be quite emotional but believe me, handloom woven sarees have their own charm, feel, texture and quality. After all, no machine can match the love, care and craftsmanship of a weaver who criss-crosses every bundle of thread through his skillful fingers that blends amidst those silk threads almost naturally, with his eyes constantly focused on the detailed designs, his experience of decades aiming at beauty with perfection and with his heart making every saree, nothing less than a masterpiece!