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Figure from:Innovation in Indian Handloom Weaving

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through “a progressive conversion of handlooms to powerlooms, over a period of 15-20 years.”*° They advised the government that the weaver must move into the mechanized power loom sector. Initially, the state’s position towards handloom weaving, since independence and through the 1950s and 1960s, had been founded on the importance that Gandhi had attributed to villages and small-scale cottage industries for India’s develop- ment. Parliament accepted “the socialistic pattern of society as the objective of social and economic policy.””” But post liberalization policies of the 1990s tended to separate the two agendas of growth and welfare, stressing pro- ductivity and efficiency in textile production rather than employment. Thus the political rhetoric shifted further to modernization: one of the promises to the handloom sector in the New Textile Policy of 1985 was “moderniza- tion of looms to improve handloom productivity and quality.””* — Figure 6 through “a progressive conversion of handlooms to powerlooms, over a period of 15-20 years.”*° They advised the government that the weaver must move into the mechanized power loom sector. Initially, the state’s position towards handloom weaving, since independence and through the 1950s and 1960s, had been founded on the importance that Gandhi had attributed to villages and small-scale cottage industries for India’s develop- ment. Parliament accepted “the socialistic pattern of society as the objective of social and economic policy.””” But post liberalization policies of the 1990s tended to separate the two agendas of growth and welfare, stressing pro- ductivity and efficiency in textile production rather than employment. Thus the political rhetoric shifted further to modernization: one of the promises to the handloom sector in the New Textile Policy of 1985 was “moderniza- tion of looms to improve handloom productivity and quality.””*

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allows the weaving of finely shaped motifs (fig. 3). By convention, saree types in handloom typically carry the name of the place in which they are made.’ As the product gains identity in the market, the name is associated with a particular aesthetic to the discerning customer. This aesthetic iden- tity is constituted by material, surface pattern repertoire, and technique of weave. When more than one technique is used in the same weaving cluster of villages, or when more than one weaving cluster uses the same tech- nique, the technique is appended to the name of the place—in this case “Uppada Jamdani” (fig. 4).

FIG. 2 Top: Lifting the yarn to insert a shuttle for jamdani. Bottom: Producing floral motifs with jamdani. (Sources: Photos by Yasoda Ramesh.)

FIG. 3 Top: Painting of Goddess Saraswati by Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906), with a jamdani border. (Source: Photo is in public domain.) Bottom: Jamdar on silk from Banaras, c.1880, in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. (Source: Author photo.)

FIG. 4 A model in Uppada jamdani saree, walking the ramp in the Bangalore fashion week of 2015 for the designer Gaurang. (Source: Photo is in public domain.)

place. Uppada Jamdani was now an invented tradition, through implying continuity to “a suitable historical past.”?? His intervention in introducing the skill of jamdani weaving to weavers in Uppada, and giving it a tradi- tional past, linked the value that traditional jamdani had as technique in his- tory and cultural memory, to Uppada the place, and resulted in a new kind of textile that, as we shall show later, weavers could innovate on.”4

FIG. 6 Top: Paisley motif in jamdani on silk from Banaras, c.1880, in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Bottom: Paisley motif with leaves in jamdani on silk from East Godavari, c.2011 (Weaver Vellasavaram). (Sources: Author photos.) MAMIDIPUDI and BUKER | Indian Handloom Weaving

FIG. 8 The “a” points to the line in this pattern with the maximum number of spindles that would have to “bend.” In this case, seven spindles would have to be inserted into the weft to make the pattern. (Source: Drawing and photo by Yasoda Ramesh.)

FIG. 9 Top left: A single end flower. Top right: A flower woven with two ends bunched together with three picks. Bottom left: A flower woven with three ends bunched together with three picks. Bottom right: A flower woven with six ends bunched together with three picks. Notice how the pattern turns into a lower resolution version of itself with the decision to reduce labor. (Source: Drawings by Yasoda Ramesh.)

FIG. 10 Top: Making a printout of the pattern to be repeated for setting the loom. Bottom: Smoothing out the pattern for ease of weaving on the graph. (Source: Photos by Yasoda Ramesh.) MAMIDIPUDI and BUKER | Indian Handloom Weaving

nology recalled to the weaver the programmability of the loom, as in the case of the master-weaver who decreed that his motif was worth “3 bends and 100 turns” in order to tailor labor to price. Instead of competing with each other, as is generally the case between technologies deemed “high-tech” and “low-tech,” in this case, as a result of the understanding of the underlying principles of digitization in computer programming that the weaver ac- quired, as well as the understanding of the loom that the computer pro- grammer acquired, both weaver and programmer worked together to pro- duce an innovation that stabilized livelihoods in the handloom ensemble.

FIG. 12 Two views of the loom. Top: The gold warp is wound on one side and the graph is pasted above. The bottom view is from the perspective of where the weaver sits. The graph is visible at eye level on the other side, for ease of weaving. (Source: Photos by Yasoda Ramesh.) MAMIDIPUDI and BUKER | Indian Handloom Weaving

FUNCTIONS IN THE WEAVING ENSEMBLE AND How THE COMPUTER AFFECTS THEIR EXECUTION SPEED

FIG. 13 The socio-technical ensemble of jamdani with the loom, mobile phone, and computer. The figure represents the sustained circulation of material in the socio-technical ensemble of handloom weaving: yarn to colored yarn, to sized and warped yarn, which is woven into fabric, aggregated, and dispersed again to customers, where it is transformed to capital that in turn finances input costs, in this case yarn.

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