I N D I A | Chennimalai Hand Loom Weavers

India’s textile heritage skills are some of the oldest in the world and are on the wane owing to a number of factors. Chennimalai, a small town near Erode is no exception to this trend, it's now a shadow of it's former self with the number of weavers having steadily declined from a high of over 100,000 to a mere 10,000 weavers in 2011. Chennimalai’s textile community’s failure to stay innovative with new product concepts and designs has been a contributing factor, the community has remained producing simple products that could easily be produced by the power loom units for a much lesser cost and time. To try re-establish and preserve these ancient textile traditions and show their true potential I was fortunate to be asked be my Indian counterparts to pull a team of Designers from Melbourne together for a R&D to India and identify new textile product possibilities that are niche, unique and contemporary. The main objective of this initiative is to build a business system that will facilitate the efforts of the stakeholders in protecting, preserving and promoting the textile traditions and heritage skills of the textile community in Chennimalai, Tamil Nadu, India. Here is the co-operative we – Chole Kerr, Cherry Collins, Jackie Moscovitch and myself and our Production 'expert' Palaniappa Ponnuswami, [a.k.a Ponn] will be working with. A massive thanks to Sampath Kasirajan and 'CD' from Hydra and URC respectively who are our Indian partners driving Stage 1 of the project, currently in pilot phase.