“I do not want my son to be a weaver. Nobody will marry him”
A father. A master weaver. Thirty years at the loom.
This stayed with us.
Not because it was shocking. But because of how quietly he said it. No anger, no resignation.
Just a man who had done the math, looked at the world clearly, and arrived at a conclusion he wished he hadn’t.
And then, like he was reassuring us more than himself - "என்ன பண்ண முடியும், இதுதான் வித.” (What can we do, this is just fate).
Handloom built this country’s textile industry.
Kanjivaram, Banarasi, Pochampally - these aren’t just fabrics.
They were once a weaver’s pride, their family’s legacy, and their community’s economy.
So how did we get here?
The loom doesn't run on a salary. It runs on festivals, on seasons, on whether this year people are in the mood to buy.
A slow wedding season means a quiet loom and a quieter kitchen.
And when the work does come, the price it fetches rarely reflects the hands behind it. No ladder, no title, no moment where a lifetime of mastering the craft is acknowledged.
The market sees a weaver at thirty years the same as one at thirty days.
And that invisibility has a cost.
Who respects you? Can your children lead a life of dignity doing what you do?
Here's what we don't say enough.
A weaver works both hands and both feet simultaneously. They hold complex geometric patterns in their head that would take the rest of us graph paper and hours to decode.
And this is not unskilled labour, this is a form of intelligence we've never bothered to name.
The next generation of weavers isn’t walking away from the craft.
They're walking toward dignity.
This is what we think about at Kodhai. We don't have all the answers.
But we think asking the right questions is where it starts.