India's silk sari-weavers face bleak, hungry future

By Jonathan Allen

VARANASI, India (Reuters) - Shiwajatan Rajbhar spends his days weaving golden and silver flowers across exquisite silk saris on a rickety handloom in his mud hut.

Once completed, the handloom sari -- traditionally a prized part of any Indian bride's trousseau -- will be sold for many times his monthly income.

The northern city of Varanasi is to handloom saris what Darjeeling is to tea. Yet despite producing some of the most coveted saris in the Indian subcontinent, the weavers -- said to number between 200,000 and 500,000 -- have never been rich.

Now, with the market flooded with cheap machine-made saris, they are poorer than ever with some turning to farming and manual labor and others resorting to begging.

The weavers are typical of the millions of Indians left behind by market forces even as parts of the country's metropolises enjoy increasing prosperity from a booming economy.

In the 1990s powerlooms became increasingly common, spitting out several saris in a day -- the same time it takes someone like Rajbhar to weave only the first yard of a classic six-meter sari on his wooden handloom, thread by thread.

Machine-made Chinese imitations have in recent years flooded the market, often sold by dishonest dealers as the real thing.

Varanasi's weavers say they cannot compete, and so thousands of looms have fallen silent.

"They started closing down slowly, one or two at a time," remembers Munni Devi, who lives in Gaurakala village, once home to about 100 handlooms.

Now there are only two still running.

Many of the others have been trashed for firewood. The trenches dug in the floors of their homes to house the looms' pedals now resemble shallow graves.

Before, the families once earned so much they could build sturdy two-storey homes, grand by Indian village standards.

These days, the once proud artisans now slowly sell off ornaments for money and rent land to farm.

WAITING FOR HELP

Dr Lenin Raghuvanshi of local advocacy group PVCHR points out that almost all weavers are either low-caste Hindus or from India's Muslim minority -- communities that have often been marginalized -- and are mostly illiterate.