Thirteen years ago, Goan designer Wendell Rodrigues propelled the traditional Goan handloom art of Kunbi to be the talking point of the fashion world by featuring a Kunbi-based design in his collection for the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week. Rodrigues’ design sparked a few sporadic, localised attempts at reviving the indigenous Goan fabric style.
Now, for over a year, 45 women of rural Goa, all first-generation weavers, have been taking the effort forward in a more systematic and organised way with government backing.
The women, working in four centres across Goa, have come together as a cooperative society—the Goa Handloom Weavers Cooperative Society Limited—to weave and sell Kunbi sarees and shawls, with the help of a Union government-funded incubator, FiiRE (Forum for Innovation Incubation Research and Entrepreneurship) and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development.
The aim is to find a sustainable market for Kunbi sarees and ultimately aim for a Geographical Indication (GI) tag, a name or sign given to certain products that relate to a specific geographical location. A GI tag is also seen as a certification that a particular product is being produced as per traditional methods and has a particular reputation because of its geographical origin. The society applied for a GI tag last month.
The saree
The Kunbi sarees is a traditional saree with a plain body and an intricately woven border and pallu, all dyed in natural colours. It was associated with Goa’s indigenous Kunbi tribe. The women would wear the saree, typically draped closer to the knee, while working in paddy fields. The art, however, faded away with time, officials at FiiRE said.
“If I ask you what you can carry home from Goa, there won’t be much that will come to your mind other than the stereotypical cashews, feni or port wine. That’s where we want to position Kunbi sarees. We have also been having discussions about having a piece of Kunbi handloom in normal clothing. Bringing it in fashion,” said Thejus Joseph, interim chief executive at FiiRE.
If I ask you what you can carry home from Goa, there won’t be much that will come to your mind other than the stereotypical cashews, feni or port wine. That’s where we want to position Kunbi sarees
— Thejus Joseph, interim chief executive, FiiRE
About two years ago, the Goa government decided to take it upon itself to revive the Kunbi saree. Officials went to villages and sought out women willing to get trained in the craft. The women who came forward to get trained helped recruit more women, who were eventually organised across four centres in Goa. Most of these are women were unemployed earlier and agreed to come only because the centre was right in their village.
“Women come because they get to earn without having to travel far, using the time that they would have otherwise spent at home, not doing too much,” said 37-year-old Neeta Deuskar, whose husband works as a supplier of sand to local construction companies. Most of the women are in the 35-37 age group.
“Every day, we weave about 3-4 metres of a typical six-metre saree without a blouse piece. We can also weave about 1.5-2 Kunbi shawls a day. We are supposed to work 9 am to 6 pm, but most of us have young children in school and the output goes up and down sometimes depending on school and exam schedules,” Deuskar said.
Helping hands
Defunct, non-functional schools and anganwadis were turned into factories for the cooperative’s work, and the Goa government gradually became a steady patron of their effort. Most dignitaries on an official visit to Goa are now presented with a handwoven Kunbi shawl, officials from FiiRE said.
FiiRE got associated with the initiative a year ago with funding from NABARD. Following this, the cooperative was registered in February 2023. FiiRE trained the weavers more intensively and has been making efforts to build a market for the products. They signed a three-year contract with the weavers. By the end of the three years, NABARD and FiiRE plan to get the cooperative on its feet and exit.
Tushar Sawant, a native Goan and Enterprise Development Manager at FiiRE, sounds almost poetic when he describes the Kunbi saree.
“Fresh out of the loom, the fabric is also so warm and soft to touch. The body can actually breathe in that fabric,” Sawant said. He spoke about the deep, rich, and all-natural colours with which the yarn is dyed and the fabric is woven.
“The fabric is also very tough and the colours remain intact though the sarees have traditionally known to undergo rough use with women of the Kunbi tribe wearing it while working in fields. We are also trying to give 100 per cent organic colours, not using any chemicals at all,” Sawant said.
Scaling the initiative
While the Goa government had given basic training to the women, Sawant talked about how FiiRE took it up by several notches, greatly improving the production efficiency.
The non-profit organisation had arranged for a master trainer from Kerala to come to Goa for about three months. The women involved in the cooperative said say, this trainer taught them the tricks of handloom settings and ways to increase speed.
“That training was really good. We were barely able to manage one metre of weaving a day. We didn’t really know the intricacies of the handloom. Now we can weave about four metres a day now. Earlier, one saree would take about six to eight days to complete. We can finish it in two days now,” said Sangeeta Harmalkar, a weaver at the Mandrem centre.
The heads of the centres were also taken to other traditional handlooms across the country for exposure.
The only qualm of these women is that the payment they get is not regular, and not enough.
“We earn about Rs 5,000 for our work, but we get it once in 2-3 months. We have been demanding a monthly payout. A lot of women have left our centre because of this,” Deuskar said.
The reasons for this, officials at FiiRE said, is that the cooperative is still very young, it is yet to build up a corpus, and all the payments to weavers are from the sales of the centres’ products.
“We are looking at various ways to boost sales. If we get the GI tag, it will further help. But beyond that, we have been asking the women to come up with solutions. It is their cooperative, after all, that they have to learn to manage. We are just facilitators,” Sawant said.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)