Indian Sari Weaver Creates Sustainable Cloth Out Of Banana Fibre

An idea a weaver came up with 2 decades ago, saris produced sustainably from banana fibre have revived a tradition on the suburb of Anakaputhur in Chennai, India. This tradition that stretches back again 90 years was threatened in the 1960s when Nigeria commenced banning textile imports, which translated in massive losses for Anakaputhur’s weavers. 

In the 1970s, the suburb was filled up with as much as 5,000 handlooms. Relating to C. Sekhar, the President of the Anakaputhur Jute Weavers Association, each home used to have at least 5 looms. This is a starkly different photo from the 100, almost all of whom are women, who constitute Anakaputhur’s weaving population today. 

Determined to keep carefully the three-generation long tradition alive, Sekhar considered a new way to create handlooms popular again. “We make yarn from banana fibres, extracted from banana stems. In the South of India, that is available in abundance. Over the years we have marketed a huge selection of these saris,” explained Sekhar in a chat with The Better India.

While banana stems are plentiful in your community, the process involved in making sustainable banana fibre saris is labour-intensive and time-consuming. It requires fibres to end up being manually extracted from dried and scraped banana stems to make yarn. Once this is done, it takes two weavers around two times to total a sari before normal dyes such as for example turmeric and indigo are being used to give its fabric a colourful splash. 

And it doesn’t end there: each product is treated in herbs and spices for their good-for-the-skin anti-bacterial properties. “We likewise use medicinal herbal remedies like Tulsi and mint to ensure that epidermis allergies of all kinds are in bay,” said Sekhar. 

As special just as banana saris sound, Sekhar has also developed different natural and eco-friendly plant fibres such as for example bamboo and aloe vera. In total, he has produce 25 different types of fibre and also weaved one sari using each one of these 25 fibres to create it in to the Limca Book of Information in 2011. 

Sekhar hopes that more people will get to know the story behind these sustainable saris and support the handloom weavers which may have kept the decades-long tradition alive.