Why attempts to stylise khadi for youth appeal or modern fashion sensibilities have fallen short

It was a breezy February morning. Shantanu Das and I were driving out of Kolkata towards Sonarundi. The sky was briefly lit in palash phool hues before turning flat and pale. Shantanu had promised to show me why hand-spun, hand-woven khadi was losing momentum in Bengal’s weaving clusters.

Strangely, khadi’s decline in rural practice is equal and opposite to its rise in urban policy and promotion. Over the past two decades, while actual weaving centres hollowed out, the Indian government doubled down on efforts to contemporise khadi. KVIC stores reported record annual turnovers. Artisan registration under khadi institutes led by MSME hit an eight-decade high. Artisan wages had improved. Design upgrades to the Ambar Charkha – including solar-powered innovations developed by IITs – deserved applause.

And yet, every attempt to stylise khadi for youth appeal or modern fashion sensibilities has fallen short. Designer-led branding efforts received press but showed no staying power. The clothes often looked derivative, some indistinguishable from mill-made textiles.

Even a quick walk through Khadi India’s central store in the Regal Building in Delhi’s Connaught Place makes this gap visible. On one end: the highest-grade khadi, priced at Rs 3,000 per metre. On the other: “trendy” ready-to-wear apparel that mimics Indian fast fashion. In between: racks of reliable staples – gamchhas, stoles embroidered with faded patterns from the 1980s, tussar and raw silk saris, salwar sets, bandis, khadi kurtas. The “fashionisation” KVIC promotes in ads and campaigns is nowhere to be found on the shelves.

This isn’t a lament. Nor is it a plea to preserve Gandhian ideals at the cost of employment or design relevance. Khadi, woven into the national flag and stitched into the Gandhi topi, still holds symbolic power. But as a wearable fabric, it resists reinvention. Khadi clings to its aura. When simplicity is revered, it radiates. When dressed up, it retreats.

Shantanu insisted I test this theory in Bengal’s khadi villages. Without seeing the grassroots unravel, he said, I wouldn’t grasp the larger story.

Shantanu is a designer with a Rabindranath-meets-Gandhi ethos. Gentle in manner, idealistic in speech, his Bengali accent lends his English a lilt. He speaks with empathy for spinners, for pit looms, for the dignity of vanishing crafts. He dropped out from an animation course at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, to find his calling in textiles, also at NID – a passion that keeps him throbbing with purpose and excitement till today.

Now 39, Shantanu runs Maku, a label that works with hand-woven khadi and other slow fabrics. His aesthetic – moody indigos, deliberate silhouettes – resists the Indian high street. He shows at trade events in Paris and Tokyo. His Indian clientele is niche. Filmmaker Payal Kapadia wore a Maku tunic-dress at Cannes in 2024 when she won the Grand Prix.

Maku – named after the shuttle of a pit loom in Bengali – is easy to pronounce. It is a deliberate choice. Indigo, Shantanu once thought, would be his exclusive medium. He loved its grammar, the moodiness it brought to cloth. His Instagram handle @myindigo_heart gives that away.

In his grey trousers, blue checked khadi shirt and walking shoes, Shantanu looks unbothered by fashion’s usual codes. His hair, newly cropped after his father’s funeral rites, is growing back. I had seen him touch his mother’s feet before we left for Sonarundi.

The drive was long – five hours along the Brahmaputra delta. He told me about his Chinese wife, Yijun Xiao – Amy – whom he met when an Australian design school visited his Kolkata studio. She modelled for Maku, fell in love and stayed in touch. He would reciprocate long after the professional relationship of model and designer had been concluded. Their relationship survived lockdowns, borders and familial resistance. Travel to China was particularly challenging during the pandemic, but the couple held on. Today, Shantanu visits Shanghai a lot more often than Amy comes to India to be with him. She is still learning to live with a Bengali joint family and its rituals, foods and fuss.

As we neared Sonarundi, we fell silent. Rice fields passed like thoughts. The air was still. No children waved. No overladen carts pulled by bullocks creaked by.

By the time we arrived, it was noon and the sun was sharp. The fields glowed with their noon light—ochre and yellow, blending into a softness only the sun can render.

Swapan Kundu, the mahajan and elder of the family, was waiting outside his home. He looked slightly dishevelled – crumpled cropped pants, a greying T-shirt, uncombed hair. He smiled and greeted us with folded hands. His young brother-in-law, Milan, had come by motorcycle to escort us to the house in one of the inner lanes.

When we paused to take photos of nearby mud huts – one of them ringed with pumpkin vines – he looked impatient. In this village, a trader’s respect rests on his pucca house. He wanted us to see his house instead of being distracted by the symbol of backwardness. Painted in ochre, maroon, teal blue and black, his two-storey house was his calling card. A personal palette of success. Our curiosity about a modest mud hut confused him.

Inside, the household was warm and welcoming. Three couples lived together, their young children flitting in and out of rooms. The women ushered us into an air-cooled sitting area with a single sofa. On the blue wall behind it, yellow butterflies were painted in large, vivid strokes. A fridge, voltage stabiliser, washbasin and shoe rack shared the room, which was entered through a carved wooden door adorned with Goddess Durga.

The women wore mill-made cotton saris – orange, maroon, printed in bold repeats. Their patterns echoed the decor. I felt more gaudy than giddy. Even the staircase was painted with giant flowers. Colour wasn’t an accent here. It was the atmosphere. Maa Durga had company.

Tea and snacks arrived on a tray, heaped with nolen gur sandesh. Milan dada, the youngest in the family, had recently married. His blushing bride moved swiftly around the room, her waist-length hair tied in a tight ponytail. Milan joined Kundu to take us through the village.

In some lanes, other pucca homes bloomed in similar technicolour – rainbow kitsch as the new emblem of prosperity. We passed a kirana store, a chattering group of uniformed schoolchildren and ponds glinting with algae and mosquitoes. “There are fish,” the men said with pride. “We will treat you to excellent, tasty fish when we return home, but not from these ponds,” they said.

Later, they promised to show us the Sonarundi Rajbari – a crumbling palace in the woods, with antique rooms and rumours of secrets. But for now, we turned into the narrow lanes leading to the homes of the “khadi weavers”.

As we walked through the village, I hesitated to tell Shantanu that I was experiencing déjà vu. Perhaps it was the unnerving quiet, perhaps something else.

There was a familiarity in these khadi clusters. Over the years, I had visited several. Each with different prosperity markers, but similar silences.

In Ponduru, a village in Andhra Pradesh’s Srikakulam district – famed for its almond-hued khadi with a uniquely roughened texture – there were no rainbow-coloured houses like Sonarundi’s. Yet, each small hut had its own charkha, often placed on the veranda. I had reported from there years earlier for the Indian Express.

Women worked quietly – humming as they spun, carding cotton with fish bones, their knuckles stained with maroon henna. The cotton came from nearby fields; the seeds were pounded in local homes. It was a tightly knit, self-reliant ecosystem. Rural. Rhythmic. Unhurried.

That cultural worship for process gave textile designer Gaurang Shah the confidence to propose something unusual. Along with master craftsman Annaji Rao, Gaurang identified a group of female vegetable vendors from the region and trained them to weave khadi Jamdani saris.

Under Rao’s guidance, they recreated Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings – on sari pallus – through hand-spun, hand-woven cloth. The designs were developed by Gaurang, but the skill lay in collective labour: twenty looms, sixty weavers, 200 kilos of yarn, 600 shades – muga, tussar, matka and raw silk, dyed in organic colours.

Thirty-one saris emerged from the project. Each one woven in 150-count khadi: the higher the count, the finer the fabric. They carried plain fields with slim temple borders in gold or silver zari. The palette moved from mustard and lime to azure, vermilion and onion pink.

The collection was shown in New Delhi just before the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of Swar Santati, an arts and culture exhibition curated by Lavina Baldota, a Hospet-based conservationist. Gaurang, a textile designer and often called a sari pundit in fashion circles, was careful not to ‘fashionise’ the saris. Their power came from honouring the core.

Excerpted with permission from Stories We Wear: Status, Spectacle and the Politics of Appearance, Shefalee Vasudev, Westland.