Yelahanka is known as the Manchester of Bangalore. All the weaving units from the time of Tipu Sultan were in Yelahanka. Our assignment was to understand the process of how silk is extracted from silk worms and then transformed into cloth. We were also asked to observe how the introduction of powerlooms affected the livelihood of the handloom weavers, and then we were to make an installation on our experience when we were back.

 

These weavers lived in an area known Vijayapura. Vijayapura is an incredible place, the entire process of extracting silk from a silk worm to making a silk saree was carried out there. Our first stop was the silk worm market. The silk worm cocoons were stacked up, and sold in bulk, there were sold like peanuts, for 100 rupees per kilogram.

The cocoons were bought by different families in the village. They would extract the silk from the silk worms, and spin out silk in its rawest form

We asked some of the members of this family, if they enjoyed their profession, they all remarked that there was not much money in what they did, and that they wished for their children to grow up and become educated.

 

After this basic process, the silk was dyed and then given to the handloom and poweloom industries in the village. We first visited the powerlooms, they were very noisy, and lacked the beautiful rythym we observed later with the handlooms. However, they were able to quickly mass produce sarees which the handlooms were unable to do.

When we visited the handloom houses, we met the owner, and he said that that handloom silks were dying and that in the next ten years they would become completely obsloete, this made us all sink a little inside. The weavers got only about one fourth of the actual sale price of the sarees, they were horribly underpaid, the man in the picture below was weaving a saree intricately with his hands, he spun the thread through the saree with a rythym! It was very interesting to watch :)

After I got back from the village, I started reflecting about my experience and I realized that the handloom weavers are a perfect metaphor for the silk worms. They are used for what they are good at making and then they are simply disregarded. Handloom textiles are dying out, and so are these weavers. They find the powerlooms too noisy and most of them would never want to work on a power loom. At the village, we were told this by the weavers themselves. 

 

I decided to make an installation based on this concept. I decided to call it "watching water boil" as all I could do was stand by and watch while the silk worms were being boiled off to get silk, same as the handloom weaver being exploited to make silk sarees. There was no way I could intervene. I stuck white moths on a white wall and projected boiling water on them. The reason I used moths instead cocoons were because these weavers had escaped their first death, when the British tried to crush the textile industry in India, before the independence. However, they will never fully escape from the fact that they will die out eventually.