presents,
Field to Fabric: The story of India's Cotton
a talk by,
Uzramma
(founder of Dastkar Andhra)
Date/Time : Tuesday, Sept. 12th at 6:30 p.m.
Venue : Room 25, Hubert H. Humphrey Center, Univ of Minnesota, Minneapolis (West bank) Campus
301, 19th Avenue S, Minneapolis, MN 55455
(map, and parking information)
Contact : Dwiji... 612.803.0296, aidmnDELETE@THIStc.umn.edu
Uzramma is the founder of Dastkar Andhra, an organization working with artisans across the state of Andhra Pradesh. Started in 1988 Dastkar Andhra worked extensively with three craft communities: the carpet weavers of Eluru, West Godavari, the Kalamkari printers of Kalahasti, Chittoor and the cotton weavers of Chinnur, Adilabad. Since 1996 the emphasis of Dastkar Andhra's activities shifted to involvement with cotton handloom producers, focused on the various aspects and issues facing the household cotton textile production industry of Andhra Pradesh.
The cotton handloom industry of India is one of the great manufacturing institutions of the world. Beginning with fragments of woven cotton material found in the ruins of Mohenjodaro, going on to supply the world with cotton fabrics from at least the time of the Roman Empire, and from then up to the end of the 18th century, there are testaments to the quantity, quality and variety of Indian cotton fabrics scattered through written records. Pliny, the Roman historian of the 1st century AD calculates the value of the cotton fabric trade between India and Rome at 100 million sesterces (equal then to 15 million rupees) every year, and complains that India is draining Rome of her gold.
It seems important to remember this history of quality and quantity when today Indian fabrics hold a mere 2.5% of world textile trade, behind China, Pakistan and Turkey, and the main item of export is the cheapest ‘grey sheeting’, made on powerlooms, and in which we are competitive only on account of the low wages we pay. And since textiles still provide about a third of our exports, in order to maintain even this undistinguished presence in the world, we now need to import textile machinery from Japan and Switzerland. Is this really the best that we can do; is this the direction that we have chosen in the 21st century for the once- famed cotton textile industry of this country?Rethinking Handloom - a talk from 2003
An interview from June 2006
A profile