Mashru: Distinctive play of warp and weft

WEAVERS' PRIDE

I look at myself, dressed in humble handloom cotton, and wonder if I have status enough to query him further on the yards of brilliance. I make a few unobtrusive attempts and noticing my interest in the technique of his art, the weaver finally opens up.

“Thankfully, these are times of revival,” he says, lowering his guard. “I was dejected enough to give up my ancestral trade and begin weaving items of modern demand. But such is the addictive challenge in creating mashru, I couldn’t give it up,” he smiles.
 
If India’s rich textile legacy is still spoken of with admiration, it’s weavers like Khatiri we need to be grateful to. They are the keepers of tradition. Unknown, hardly feted, they continue regardless, pursuing their passion.

Mashru weaving is one such art of weaving that’s survived the onslaught of changing times. Having seen a severe dip over the past few decades owing to the high cost of production, since a year or so it’s reappeared on the inventory of exclusive handloom and should see itself moving on to the popularity charts. Its exposure had been limited and, as a result, the demand was small. Multiple initiatives are infusing it with contemporary vocabulary in an effort to give it a fillip. 

The appeal of mashru lies in it being a singular blend of silk-cotton with a luxurious look. Its creation, supposedly, owes itself to a set of religious restrictions. Legend says Islamic traditions in the Arabic world disallowed pure silk to be worn on the skin. Cotton was their mandatory fabric; however, it lacked an opulence that the nobility desired to wear.

That’s when the weavers fashioned mashru — the word meaning ‘permitted’ in Arabic — a textile that had cotton on the inner side and silk on the outer side. It was hailed and worn with pride and soon travelled across the seas. One of the ports it docked at was Gujarat, in particular the towns of Patan and Mandvi, renowned for their weaving expertise. From here it spread across India and did well in all silk-weaving towns as Mysore, Varanasi, Hyderabad and Madras, but it’s only in Gujarat that the complex and painstaking art managed to survive, fading into oblivion in other regions.

It’s the play with warp and weft that gives mashru its distinctive appearance. To begin with, it has a silk warp and cotton weft. Next, it’s woven the way satin is, where the weft cotton passes over a single silken warp thread, omits the next few, before passing over another warp. This skip and pick weaving technique gives the fabric a delicate smoothness and alluring sheen. “We traditionally use seven/ eight silk taana (warp) and one cotton baana (weft),” says Khatiri.

The dominant colours used in the production are glowing shades of red, yellow, green and blue. The mush-seen patterns usually include stripes offset by pin-head dots. “In India, weavers continuously experimented and adopted techniques of other regions. A popular synthesis was using tie-dye yarn, much the way it’s done in ikkat weaving. The mashru patterns produced matched ikkat and the blend became a rage,” adds the ageing weaver, who hails from the hometown of mashru, Patan.

With the cost of silk having escalated, the fibre is increasingly being replaced by pocket-friendly rayon. This has also brought down its price from around Rs 300-plus per metre for a pure silk mashru to around Rs 150 per metre for its rayon variant. “It’s shot up our profits, but there’s a world of difference between wearing a rayon and silk. If you ask me, I’d recommend you to buy silk. It’s the real thing,” wraps up Khatiri. Next time you come across mashru, keep the weaver’s advice in mind and purchase the original weave. You will be investing in not just a fabric but an inheritance.