We Who Wove with Lotus Thread by Aarti Kawlra

 by Shrutee K/DNS

Chennai: ORIENT BLACKSWAN has launched Aarti Kawlra book, We Who Wove with Lotus Thread: Summoning Community in South India, at the Roja Muthiah Research Library. The book explores handloom weaving in the light of the different regime of value—craft aesthetic, traditional technology, cottage industry and embodied work—that circumscribe its lived reality in south India.

On releasing the book Aarti Kawlra said, “We Who Wove captures a twentieth century moment marking the growth and expansion of Padma Saliyar constituencies in the material, social and symbolic spheres in the pre-liberalization era, Tamil Nadu. Community biography is the analytical field and scope of my inquiry. I have focused on what community members do and, say they do as a group or a collective.

The Marxian insistence on a singular labour history has tended to isolate ‘culture’ from material activity, disassociating subjective ideas from objective conditions of production. I have used an expanded notion of production in this book, one that goes beyond the narrow generation of wealth and creation of discrete objects to the production of community. Embodying the tension between those who create, accumulate and sustain value and those who clamor to gain access, the ‘work’ of community, I believe, is a legitimate arena of investigation.

We Who Wove with Lotus Thread is the first in-depth ethnographic study of the Telugu-speaking Padma Saliyars of Tamil Nadu, who claim a high status among hereditary weaving castes. The Padma Saliyars consider themselves ‘on par’ with Brahmins, claiming difference through their ‘thread’ and the divinely ordained work of weaving. Their origin myth as recorded in the Bhavanarishi Puranam pronounces weaving as a divine boon, referring to their long-standing recognition and status as those who wove with lotus thread.

Approaching community, not as a closed and unchanging world, but as a dynamic one, the study contributes to the growing scholarship on re-articulations of caste in South Asia. Using methods of both history and ethnography, it reveals the ‘hidden histories’ of artisan caste affirmation and community belonging in mobilising for production. 

The author beautifully reconstructs the organisation of the weaver household and the meticulous work that goes into producing a Kanchipuram silk sari, highlighting the unity of the work, the loom and the weaver. She also addresses the need for a new approach to the subject of artisans in India, given the lack of critical anthropological and historical works on the subject. 

About the Author

Aarti Kawlra is a social anthropologist trained at the Department of Sociology, Delhi University, and Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. She is currently affiliated to the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), Chennai, under the ICSSR Project ‘Discourses and Experiments in Craft-based Education in 20th Century South India’. Prior to this, she was a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi. Her primary affiliation is with the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden, The Netherlands, where she is an Academic Director of the programme, ‘Humanities across Borders: Asia and Africa in the World’ (HaB) (www.humanitiesacrossborders.blog). HaB is an educational programme engaged in creating spaces of academia-society dialogue for curricula development and pedagogy beyond the classroom. 

Her research interrogates narratives of culture and economy in post-colonial societies from the vantage of diverse subject positions. She is especially interested in the place attributed to artisanal practice in the hierarchy of knowledge in global capitalist modernity. 

About Orient BlackSwan

Orient BlackSwan is one of India's best known and most respected academic publishing houses. Incorporated in 1948, the consistent emphasis of our publishing has been on quality. Our 13 offices coupled with a distribution network of over 1,500 booksellers ensure easy availability of our books throughout India.