NAGA TEXTILE GRAMMAR: Pochury women demonstrate cotton processing & weaving

Category: HOME TEXTILES

Country: India

4th December 2022
Kisama @ morungexpress.com

Visitors are thronging to ‘Craftscape’ at World War II Museum Compound, Kisama to get glimpse of Naga artisans at work there.

Along with other artisans, the traditional Naga textile grammar is being demonstrated by members of the Self Help Group (SHG) weavers of the Pochury Naga community who continue to sustain cotton production in Meluri.

Before the introduction of mill spun cloth and yarn, the Nagas had abundantly cultivated cotton to weave cloth. Women were initiated into the craft of weaving at a tender age.

Weaving was an inherited skill passed down from mother to daughter, often serving as a marker of her eligibility.

Every community was self sufficient until the introduction of coloured staple yarn around the early 20th century.

In the textile grammar of the Nagas, cotton is processed manually from harvest, seeded, carded, spun and reeled to thread from cotton bolls and woven to cloth since time immemorial.

Over time when mill spun commercial yarn entered the region, Naga communities having access to outside markets were the early ones to shift to staple yarn gradually losing their dependency on home grown cotton and natural colourants.

Today, the Nagas no longer grow cotton abundantly and the tradition has all but languished in the wake of easy availability of coloured mill-spun yarns and readymade apparels.

With the resurgence of cultural pride in the celebration of heritage and community festivities, the demand for cultural textiles has revived fading textile traditions and forgotten practices, if not for anything but the inter-generational transmission of knowledge to pass down to the younger lot.

Courtesy: https://morungexpress.com/naga-textile-grammar-pochury-women-demonstrate-cotton-processing-weaving