The Gender Burden Behind India’s Handloom Revival is Written in Dye Stains and Unpaid Hours

In her recent video, travelling through the Bishnupur villages of West Bengal to document Baluchari saree-making, educational content creator Kavya Karnatac films that craft journalism rarely chooses to. A woman extracting silk threads using their bare thighs, skin against heat, hour after hour. A woman, at sixty years of age, walking thousands of steps each day just to prepare enough thread for one saree. A woman whose nails have been permanently stained with dye, whose forearms carry old burn scars from temperatures the dyeing process demands. 

The video does not dramatise any of this. It simply shows it, and a careful viewer cannot miss what it is quietly pointing at: that the most physically gruelling stages of textile production, the stages that make everything else possible, are almost entirely performed by women, and almost entirely absent from the story that gets told afterwards. 

What the video does not say, but what any observer of India’s craft exhibition circuit will recognise immediately, is the next step: that it is overwhelmingly men who are presented at craft fairs, heritage exhibitions, and government showcases as the face of these traditions. The physical labour of the first stages dissolves into the background. The glorified part begins. And the women who made it possible are folded back into the household.

It is a dynamic that repeats itself across the length and breadth of India’s handloom sector, and at the National Crafts Museum in New Delhi, it is visible in a single afternoon.

The Museum Floor and What It Quietly Tells You

On a weekday afternoon at the National Crafts Museum, of the thirteen to fifteen active demonstration stalls in the haat section, women occupy the majority. Urmila Devi from Bihar fills a stretch of cloth with Sujani embroidery, scenes of village life stitched in running thread. Sunita Devi and Masto Devi from Chamba in Himachal Pradesh work on a Chamba Rumal, their needle-painting of mythological scenes requiring a steadiness of hand that takes decades to acquire. Lakshmi Devi from Rajasthan assembles a patchwork panel in deep desert colours. Laxmi Gunakharsai from Srikalahasti in Andhra Pradesh prepares natural dye for a Kalamkari cloth, hands stained with indigo.

They are registered artisans. They are present. But ask a passing visitor which craft community they represent, and the name they will recall from any government brochure, heritage documentation, or craft fair catalogue will almost always belong to a man, the master weaver, the master block printer, the master dyer. Women are at most of the stalls. They are at almost none of the acknowledgement.

We spoke to several of them between demonstrations. Urmila Devi, who has been doing Sujani embroidery since she was a child in Madhubani, Bihar, described learning the craft the way most women in her village did, not as a class or a lesson, but by proximity. “My mother would stitch in the evenings after everything else was done. I just sat beside her and started doing the same. There was never a time someone sat me down and said, now I will teach you. You just absorb it, because it is always around you.” She paused, looking at the cloth in her hands. “People come here and take photographs. They say it is beautiful.”

Laxmi Gunakharsai, preparing her Kalamkari dye mixture nearby, was more direct. “Before I even begin to draw, there is so much preparation, washing the cloth, treating it, making the dye, testing it. Growing up, I watched the women in my family handle all of that. That knowledge, nobody gave us a certificate for it. But if we didn’t have it, there would be no Kalamkari. I learned by watching them, and even now I still follow the same methods they taught me.”

The Architecture of Invisibility

Approximately 72% of India’s handloom workers are women, over 25 lakh in registered surveys. The number exceeds 38 million when home-based, seasonal, and unregistered labour is counted, according to All Indian Handloom Census. A multi-state study by Centre for Handloom Information and Advocacy found that 55% of weaver families earn under Rs. 1,000 per month, with middlemen absorbing the majority of a textile’s retail value before wages reach the producer. 

Women, who typically perform the most time-intensive preparatory work, warping, dyeing, thread sorting, cocoon-reeling, embellishment, receive the smallest share. Meanwhile, studies find that women in weaving households work an average of 12 to 14 hours daily when craft labour is combined with domestic responsibilities, yet only the loom-hours are counted as productive work in official records.

Kriti Srivastava,Professor at NIFT Kangra, has said, “When we map labour in textile clusters, we find a consistent pattern, women perform the most time-intensive processes, yet they are classified as helpers rather than artisans. Because their work happens inside homes and outside markets, it is treated as cheap or invisible labour, even though production would collapse without them. In economic terms, they are the backbone; in social terms, they are erased.”

The data makes this visible in other ways too. A 2023 survey of GI-tagged textile clusters found that fewer than 18% of artisans registered as primary producers under GI certification were women, despite women constituting the majority of the labour force within those same clusters. Women are also significantly underrepresented in government handloom loans: studies indicate that male-headed weaving households are 2.3 times more likely to receive institutional credit than female-headed ones.

Bengal, Odisha and the Hidden Gendered Prelude to Weaving

Saira Bibi, a Jamdani silk artisan from Nadia district in West Bengal talked to us via a call telling us the realities. The UNESCO-protected Jamdani tradition can require several hundred hours of cumulative labour per saree. Men sit at the handloom; women handle thread preparation, winding, warping, and dyeing, often for hours before the weaving day formally begins.

“In our house, weaving is just part of daily life. The loom is my husband’s work, but before he even sits there, I’ve already spent hours getting the threads ready. I’d say most of the effort in making one sari happens before weaving even starts, and that part is usually done by women. People praise the final piece, but they don’t really know how many hands prepared it. I don’t mind the work, I just wish people understood that we are part of it too.”

In Odisha, the divide replicates itself across both cotton and silk. Animesh Nandi, a Maniabandha ikat weaver from Cuttack district, and his wife Kunti Nandi, who manages the thread-dyeing and resist-tying that precede their Karuna silk double-ikat work, were both reached over phone. Animesh was candid about the labour hierarchy but not about its implications. “What Kunti does to prepare the threads before I begin: measuring, tying, dyeing in sequence, that is the more patient work. If she makes a mistake, I cannot correct it at the loom. The whole cloth is already decided before I weave a single row.” 

When asked whether Kunti is recognised as a co-producer of their work, whether her name appears on any label, certificate, or scheme registration alongside his, he paused. “That is not really how it works. The weaver is the weaver.” Kunti, asked directly, said simply, “I don’t go to the market with him. I don’t get asked about the work when buyers come. But I know every piece.”

Gujarat and the Rabari Girls Who Embroider Their Childhood Away

Gujarat’s Rabari community illustrates how a girl’s craft skill can be extracted across the entire length of her childhood. Among the Rabari, a semi-nomadic pastoral community spread across the Rann of Kutch and parts of Rajasthan, young girls begin embroidering as early as five or six years old. Every piece they make forms part of their dowry, produced over eight to twelve years of girlhood and handed over entirely to the husband’s family on the day of the wedding. The girl walks into her new home carrying a chest of her finest work. None of it remains hers.

Sitalaben Rabari, an embroidery artisan from Kutch, who was contacted via a phone call, described the custom without sentimentality. “From the time I was very small, I was taught that this work was for my dij. Every piece I made, I knew I would give it away one day. My mother did the same. I was proud of the work, I still am, but looking back, all those years of embroidery went into someone else’s house. Now I see my granddaughter learning and I wonder if it will be different for her. Maybe a little. But the habit is old.”

The pieces that leave Rabari households via dowry and later enter secondary markets sell in urban craft boutiques for several thousand rupees. The girl who produced them across a decade of evenings receives nothing. In Kutch’s bandhani tradition, a parallel dynamic operates at the wage level: even skilled bandhani artisans earn around Rs. 80 per day for work that sells at many times that value in retail.

The System Is Rotten, Not Just a Flaw in It

Some structural response is arriving. In 2025, the Odisha government signed MoUs integrating women-led self-help groups into handloom clusters, aiming explicitly at building what officials called “a sustainable women-led textile ecosystem.” Organisations like Dastkar, REHWA, SEWA and others, have demonstrated that organised, market-linked women’s collectives produce real income gains. Yet analysts note these remain islands, and that schemes without enforced wage floors and gender-disaggregated data ultimately reproduce the inequity they claim to correct.

The next generation is unambiguous about what they observe. Ananya Mishra, a textile design student at KIIT School of Fashion Technology in Bhubaneswar who grew up near to a handloom cluster in Sambalpur, has watched this dynamic her entire life. “I feel like a large part of what keeps these crafts alive comes from women’s everyday effort. It’s not in textbooks, it’s something you notice only if you’ve seen it closely since childhood. And the glory, the awards, the exhibitions, that comes to the craft. It just doesn’t seem to reach the women who are actually sustaining it.”

Sarah Chuimila, a fashion student from Nagaland whose family weaves wool clothes as part of the Thangkul Naga tradition, studying in NIFT Delhi, pointed to something that cuts even deeper. “Back home, a lot of the young men have moved to towns or cities for better income. The women stay back in the villages and keep the weaving going, because there is no other option, and because no one else will do it. The tradition survives because of them. But survival and recognition are very different things, and so are survival and a living income. They carry the craft and the house both. The glory is for the craft. The exhaustion is for them.”

That gap, between the glory and the exhaustion, between the loom and the woman who made it ready, is the actual story of India’s handloom revival. It is not a design flaw in the system. It is the system. True conservation of a textile tradition means more than preserving a weave structure. It means naming, paying, and protecting every hand that carries it forward, including the ones stained with dye, scarred from heat, and waking before dawn to prepare the threads before the loom is even lit.