Arti Bali
New Delhi, April 18 (UNI) "They are not just mere decorative cloth. They are living archives and we are running out of time to save them." Spoken at a Delhi exhibition hall, carries the weight of an emergency most of India has not yet registered.
"Threaded Heritage: Symbolism, Ritual and Memory in North East Textiles," curated by Sentila T. Yanger, brought to the capital something the national conversation on handlooms almost never includes: the extraordinary woven civilisations of Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, Sikkim and Mizoram, traditions that encode warrior ethics, bridal covenants and entire cosmologies in cotton and silk. And it did so at precisely the moment those traditions are closest to disappearing. India's handloom sector is under sustained pressure.
The flood of affordable power-loom and imported fabrics has hollowed out everyday demand. Weavers across Varanasi, Pochampally and Sualkuchi report falling incomes and children abandoning the loom for the city. The government's own data confirms the number of active handloom weavers has been shrinking for over a decade. Yet policy attention consistently circles the same narrow canon — Banarasi silk, Chanderi, Kanjivaram, Jamdani — magnificent traditions, but a fraction of what India actually holds.
The Northeast alone contains dozens of distinct textile systems, each with its own visual language and social logic. Consider the Ao Naga warrior shawl: the rooster woven into its border signals vigilance and truth; the tiger, ferocity in battle; the elephant, mightiness; metal triangles, wealth traded from Ahom plains because Nagas had no smelting tradition.
Stars and moon ask the wearer to bring brightness to every deed. This is not decoration. It is a full moral code pressed into cloth. Or the bridal bodyskirt of the Romai Naga of Manipur — tassels ending in dried wild orchid stems announcing the bride's family affluence; the white shawl she hands her groom communicating, wordlessly, that she comes to him unblemished. Red, dominant in most Naga textiles, was historically reserved for the wealthy because the natural dyeing process was so laborious. Colour itself is biography.
"We intend to keep these textiles very close to our heart as heirlooms — because of the work they entail, the visible loss of skills, the very few weavers still making them. All of that adds value to the end product,” Sentila T. Yanger said.
Concerned over the non reach of the northeastern textiles, she said, “ The crisis is not one of quality. It is one of invisibility. Banarasi sarees appear on every awards carpet. Kanjivarams feature in every bridal editorial. Northeastern textiles remain confined to occasional government trade fairs and niche exhibition circuits, creating a self-reinforcing obscurity.”
The lack of demand of the fabric in questions as designers are unaware from where to source them, brands don't know to champion them. Meanwhile, the weavers — primarily women, for whom the loom was once the measure of marriageability — have rightly moved into education and professional careers.
She said that the loom-to-daughter inheritance chain is broken. What remains is a generation of elderly master weavers whose knowledge, if not documented immediately, will not survive them.
Solutions are not all complex as the most immediate lever is visibility — and in India, visibility runs through Mumbai. Bollywood celebrities and fashion designers, if they chose to, could transform the fortunes of Northeastern textiles overnight.
The argument extends to international pageants and fashion weeks in Paris and Milan, where, as one speaker noted, designers bring colours and fabrics but lack the real motifs — the creative depth imbibed in the fabric of history. A Manipuri Inafi stole or an Ao Naga shawl on such a stage would communicate something no European luxury house can manufacture: authentic depth.
"Sensitisation to Northeastern textiles needs to be at the top of the list — awareness about the narratives behind them, promoting them as a loaded textile heritage, every bit as much as a Banarasi saree,"the curator said.
What is needed is urgent and specific: emergency documentation of master weavers before their knowledge is lost; dedicated promotion budgets ring-fenced from generic handicraft allocations; GI tag fast-tracking for unregistered community designs; design residencies pairing established fashion names with Northeastern weaver communities — not to extract motifs, but to co-create with full credit and revenue transparency.
Muga silk, produced exclusively in Assam with a natural golden sheen that deepens with age and has no equivalent anywhere on earth, is commercially ready for global elevation today. Eri silk, the peace silk, which does not require killing the silkworm, is a ready-made story for the ethical fashion era. Neither has received the sustained international campaign that has taken Darjeeling tea or Alphonso mangoes into global premium consciousness.
The Delhi exhibition will close. The shawls will be folded back into muslin and returned to Nagaland and Manipur and Sikkim. But the living archives still exist. The knowledge has not entirely gone. What they need urgently, before another generation passes is the assassitance from all sections of the society not to be discovered by the world, but to be introduced to it.
UNI AAB PRS