L is for ... Love ... n ... Labour

 

All this month I am writing about the luscious Indian handlooms, a quick but captivating dive into the saree specifically, a garment worn by Indians for five millennia. Come with me into the amazing, complex and utterly fascinating world of fibre and yarn, of skills and techniques of dyeing and printing and embroidery, traditions unchanged for centuries. Of sumptuous finished fabrics that not only make a fashion statement, but also constitute our cultural heritage and political identity.

L is for Loom...obviously!

This animation below shows the process of weaving. Basically, weaving consists of three different motions - 1) the raising of some of the warp yarns (called shedding) creating a space between the raised yarn and the resting warp yarns 2) the  throwing of the shuttle with the weft yarn to travel between the 'shed' (this is called picking) and 3) the motion to gather the weft yarn thrown across the shed flush and tight into the final woven fabric (beating, battening). 

The basic loom was devised many thousands of years ago. Most archaeologists/historians agree that the loom developed in several cultures in Asia, Europe and the Americas, independent of each other.

Textiles do not survive over any length of time, they tend to decay. Even wood falls apart. Therefore most of the archaeological evidence for textile weaving comes from representations - sculpture in stone, on ceramic or rock art, and from the equipment like spindles, warp weights (we'll see in a minute what they are) and needles. The oldest archaeological evidence of weaving actually goes back to the Paleolithic (Stone Age), confirmed through a study done in the 1990s/2000. Read more about this fascinating search for these 'soft technologies' employed by Paleolithic humans here, here and here. 

What these studies show is that weaving was already happening some 28-30,000 years ago, and it was sophisticated enough that researchers felt textiles must have been woven for many years prior to get to that stage of advancement. How the loom has evolved from the Paleolithic to modern times is covered briefly in this article.

In India, textile evidence goes back to around 6000 years with earliest surviving yarns dated to 4000 BCE. And dyed fabrics have been dated to around 2500 BCE. Remember how Indigo was named 'the blue dye from India' by the Ancient Greeks? Weaving and indigo dyed cotton textiles were practically synonymous with India in the ancient world. 

Excavations in the Indus Valley Civilisation sites have yielded copper sewing needles, buttons, spindles, wool and cotton yarns. Cotton seeds have also been found. So from the archaeological evidence, cotton cultivation and textile weaving were quite established in the IVC by around 2500 BCE.  Indirect evidence comes also from Vedic literature (1500 - 500 BCE). These texts mention unstitched lengths of cloths covering the upper and lower body, the use of wool, silk and hiranya vastra or 'cloth of gold.' 

There were basically two types of looms from antiquity till the middle ages. The earliest looms we have evidence of are the warp weighted frame looms in which the warp yarns were tied to a beam at the top and kept in place by weights of terracotta/stone at the bottom, as illustrated on this vase from Ancient Greece. These weights from antiquity have been excavated in many sites across Asia and Europe. 

Image credit

The draw loom was invented around 300-400 BCE. This loom required two people, the main weaver and an assistant (a draw-boy, usually a slave) to operate a figure harness that could raise separate groups of warp yarns and weave pretty complicated patterns.  The dobby (a corruption of the term draw-boy) mechanism was introduced in the 19th century, which replaced the assistant. The Jacquard loom, where a series of punched cards controlled the warp yarns to be raised, was introduced a few decades earlier than the dobby.   

Image credit

As is evident from both the images, weaving was women's work all through antiquity, at least in the West. Even royal women were expected to spin and weave.  Think of the princess pricking her finger on a spindle in the fairy tale, or Queen Catherine making and mending Henry VIII's shirts in Tudor England. Women did all the weaving and spinning - it was considered a 'domestic' skill. That's why the multi-spindle spinning device invented in the 18th century was called 'Spinning Jenny' and not 'Spinning Jack' (though the inventor of the device was a man.) 

As  always, the labour and love ordinary women put into textile production no contemporary historian has recorded. It is only now that archaeologists and historians are trying to piece together the textile stories of the past. Read about one such study in this fascinating article on Viking textiles. 

The Industrial Revolution started with the invention of the 'Spinning Jenny' and the power loom in the 18th century. Textile production moved from a cottage scale women's domestic activity to factory based commercial production. We've seen in an earlier post what these advancements, combined with ruthless colonial control, did to the handlooms industry in India. 

Talking about Indian textiles, it is not crystal clear if weaving was as genderised in the Indus Valley Civilisation as it seems to be in the West, the jury is still out on that one. And from what little I know of Mughal princesses, they never did an iota of actual housework themselves, were not even schooled in any practical domestic skills, but were instead educated in religious studies, music, poetry, literature, languages, calligraphy, sciences of their times, and the arts, to be able to take their place in royal life confidently. Mostly lofty pursuits of the idle rich, no weaving or spinning, though Mughals themselves were great patrons of arts and culture and all aesthetic pursuits. Textiles grew and expanded under Mughal rule (1526 - 1857), but I'd imagine most of the spinning, weaving, dyeing and embroidery was left to the hoi polloi.  

With one exception. I've read that Aurangzeb, the grandson of Jehangir and the longest reigning Mughal emperor, was one grumpy austere religious fanatic - he made and sold the Islamic prayer caps by the dozen so as not to dip into the royal treasury for his personal expenses. A pious Muslim, he wrote out copies of the Quran in his own hand when he wasn't expanding the empire or taxing the living daylights out of the his subjects. He was an illiberal exception and very unlike the rest of the Mughals. I don't see his daughter Zebunnisa, (an accomplished poet and calligrapher, well versed in several languages, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy) or any of her four sisters, weaving or spinning. So no - Indian princesses didn't produce textiles in any noteworthy way. 

By and large we see both men and women involved in weaving handlooms in modern India.  In weaving communities, entire families are involved in handloom production. However, women do outnumber men - the Fourth Handloom Census in India 2019-20 indicates that an overwhelming 72% of the workers in the handloom industry are women. Even in the organised textile mills in India, over 60% of the workforce is female. 

L is also for Leheriya

Since this has already exceeded all decent word limits, keeping this brief.  Leheriya is a tie dye method which yields colourful diagonal stripes or chevrons. 

The word itself derives from the Sanskrit word 'Lahar'  which means wave. It is a fabric from Rajasthan, a desert state located on the western border of India, and the patterning is thought to echo that of the ripples on the sand dunes.  Women wear the patterns in sarees and odhnis/dupattas, a long strip of fabric used to cover the upper torso and head. Men wear it too, in turbans. 

The earliest known samples of Leheriya are dated to the 17th century. Leheriya has a deep significance in Rajasthani culture and is worn at family celebrations and religious festivals. Many communities/regions within Rajasthan have their own signature Leheriya patterns and colourways (like the Scottish clans with their plaids.) Read more here and here.

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Did you know that the loom predates the wheel as an invention? Yeah, me neither...but on second thoughts, that's quite logical really...a coat is more of an urgent priority than a set of wheels...

Thank you for reading. And happy A-Zing to you if you are participating in the challenge. 

A-Z Challenge 2025