Anima Choudhury (45), a weaver in Choudhurypara locality of Amranga village in Assam’s Kamrup district is busy weaving a set of cushion-covers on her loom. She is taking extra care while weaving, as these products of her loom with a base colour in bright red and yellow motifs on it, are to be showcased under a new handloom brand- GrassLooms-created and promoted by the Rastriya Grameen Vikash Nidhi (RGVN).

She is also cautious about the quality of the finished products, as GrassLooms targets the contemporary global handloom garments and home furnishing textile market through Amazon online shopping. Amranga falls under Borihat area, 30 km off Guwahati, the capital city of Assam. GrassLooms showcases the products sourced from skilled weavers like Anima at its showroom located at Rajgarh in Guwahati.

From a traditional weaver to a skilled one to weave products for contemporary world market, Anima Choudhury has a long story to tell. A mother of three, she used to weave Eri silk and other household clothes. She, along with hundreds such weavers used to sell Eri silk products in the markets of Bijaynagar - a major commercial hub of Eri silk trading in southern part of Kamrup district.

However, massive slowdown of this Eri silk market during recent times made her to remain idle for couple of years, till a team of RGVN, contacted her to weave diversified products to tap contemporary global handloom market. The RGVN is a national level multi state development and support organisation primarily working in supporting rural women’s livelihood.

With the RGVN’s support, she is now capable of weaving wide-ranging garment and home-furnishing handloom products on her loom including Sarees, stoles, mats, cushion-covers, wrappers, kurtis, jackets, dining-table spread among others with finest quality and eco-friendly cotton thread.

Anima is happy that RGVN credits her remuneration directly to her bank account. She earns an average income of Rs.6000 a month from her four to five hours daily weaving.

The handloom brand GrassLooms is a unique concept of weavers’ value chain of RGVN. Weavers are trained to weave wide ranging products that have high demand in domestic and global handloom markets, says Dr. Amiya Kr. Sharma, Executive Director, RGVN.

RGVN has connected with over 75,000 rural weavers in Assam during its long journey since its inception in 1990. Of them, it has identified a few clusters in Kamrup, Sonitpur, Jorhat, Nalbari and Darrang districts. It has selected 100 weavers in Kamrup and 50 each in rest of the three clusters for the GrassLooms project. Following overwhelming responses from both the market and weavers, RGVN now plans to connect more weavers in different pockets with GrassLooms, Dr. Sharma adds.

Since its establishment in October 2018 GrassLooms has received rave responses among different section of buyers and transacted business of nearly Rs. 20 lakhs, Sharma says. With a reasonable price and quality, buyers are largely satisfied with garments as well as home-furnishing textile products, he claims and adds that the social media has been quite useful in connecting the buyers. GrassLooms also organised a pre-Bihu fair on April 5-12 on its premises to attract buyers.

Like Anima Choudhury, Siro Kalita, (50), another weaver of the village and mother of three, too is busy weaving a Saree on yellow colour cotton thread. The weaving takes four days and she is assured of Rs.800 as remuneration.

Geeta Kaibarta (20), a young girl connected to GrassLooms in Sikarhati village is busy weaving a traditional wrapper. She too weaves four to five hours daily and earns an average Rs 5000 a month. Inspired by the transformation from a traditional weaver to a skilled one, Geeta now plans to spend more time on her loom so that she can earn more. She has a widow mother and a young brother, who is a school dropout to support.

Anima, Geeta and Siro are among over 100 such weavers spread in number of villages including Sikarhati, Majkuchi, Dotkuchi villages of Rani Block in Borihat. Most of these weavers have visited GrassLooms showroom at Rajgarh to witness the showcasing of their products.

“The brand ‘GrassLooms’ is inspired from the weavers and their looms that exist at the grassroots. Although we have connected over 70,000 weavers through different livelihood schemes, we lacked a brand or a place to showcase our own weavers’ products till the idea of GrassLooms came up. We have formed a trust - Brahmaputra Community Development Trust for marketing the weaver’s products,” says Dr. Sharma.

Prior to GrassLooms, the RGVN could not establish a market support to sell its weavers products, which made the weavers to rely on middlemen to reach the market. With direct linkage with the domestic and global market these weavers are likely to have a steady and assured market, he hopes.

Dr. Sharma says RGVN has adopted colour and motifs from ethnic societies of north-eastern states for its handloom products.

Jayanta Kumar Das, a master trainer of RGVN, who underwent special training in dyeing, weaving and designing at Indian Institute of Handloom Technology, provides technical support to all the weavers of these clusters.

“It is important that proper measurement for each piece of cloth is maintained and there is uniformity in the smoothness while weaving” he says.

Das says RGVN has also been providing improvised handlooms in phase-wise for the weavers. A traditional handloom costs about Rs.15,000, while a specialised handloom costs around Rs 25,000, he says. So far around 15 such improvised looms have been distributed in Kamrup cluster, he says.

“We have started our activities with cotton thread, as most of them are home-based weavers. However, the success and responses have inspired us to introduce silk thread, particularly the Eri silk”, says Dhriti Gogoi, who looks after the GrassLooms project.

Dhriti says the RGVN is also planning to introduce natural dye with the objective of adding more value to weaving products.

With positive responses from both the buyers and weavers, RGVN is now all set to carry forward its mission of establishing more such showrooms, acquire the Geographical Indication tag, and taking the brand GrassLooms to the tune of brands like Fabindia, Dr Sharma says.

However, there are constraints. Most of the RGVN weavers put only a few hours in weaving activity, after completing all the household chores. They also go to paddy fields during crop season. Considering this, RGVN is planning to provide them solar light and improved spinning wheel so that they can increase weaving time apart from upgrading their skill.

Photo and video – Ratna Bharali Talukdar