The land of Hand Weavers.

Pochampally is a small town in Nalgonda district 45Km from Hyderabad city.In Pochampally there are well built schools,shops,hospitals even cinema halls. Pochampally is mostly famous for hand weavers.There are close to 20 handloom weaving clusters in Andhra Pradesh. Nalgonda district has the highest number of villages which have formed into a cluster. There are 5 villages in this cluster which are Bongiri, Bhoodan Pochampally, Puttapaka, Koyalgudem,Chanduru. Pochampally is popularly called as Bhoodan Pochampally because this is the place where the Bhoodan movement was started by Acharya Vinoba Bhave. There is a rural tourism complex where there was an exhibit of the photos of the process involved in preparing till the final costume is obtained and also, the weavers machine used to weave the cloth.

The raw material that is used is mulberry silk.

The cloth is boiled in a wide tin with some chemicals also added in it.There are two colors of thread: ordinary and cream colored. For getting cream colored thread little cream colour is added in the tin.

Then the cloth is dried.

The threads are rotated on a charaka so that it will form like a spindle. This process is called yarn winding.

The warp preparation is done where all the threads are tied between two sticks and this is useful while weaving the final cloth. This is for creating the vertical threads present in the cloth.

Then another set of threads are tied on a weaving machine where on one side it has one long stick and on other side it has a lot number of sticks which are smaller in size in a one to many mapping. There is a rotating wheel on top of the weaving machine which will be rotating around the weaving machine from long stick to one of the smaller stick by pulling the thread fom the spindle.This way the thread is tied on all the small sticks. Multiple sets of threads are created in this process called weft preparation.

After that on the weft then the designs are marked.

Then the particular threads which are of the same colurs or same pattern are tied. This is called design tyeing.

The colurs which are required to be dyed are then boiled.

After this the rubbers are tied to the set of threads where only one particular colour has to be applied. Then that particular is applied and the threads will be coloured only on the places where rubbers are not tied.

Then the rubbers can be removed. In this way all the required colours and applied by tying rubbers to it appropriately.After the colours are applied the threads are dried.

Then the threads are winded on a bobbin which are useful as vertical threads during the final weaving of the cloth.So, both the horizontal and vertical threads are coloured and are ready for weaving the cloth.

Then the cloth is weaved on a weaving machine where the vertical threads are tied up. Then the horizontal threads are kept in a needle and this is moved left and right. Each time the thread moves left the thread has to be aligned and then the horizontal threads have to be moved so that an interlock happens between both of them. So the horizontal thread will be placed in between two vertical threads.Here hand movement, pedal movement and alignment all have to be done synchronously else the needle will be coming out. After weaving in this process for a lot number of times finally the cloth is prepared.

In Boodhan Pochampally silk sarees are weaved whereas in Koyalgudem which is at a distance of 5 Km from Boodhan Pochampally,cotton clothes are weaved.After such a lot of hard work also the weavers are getting very less wages.If a sample estimate is observed the following are the details:

Product on Weave : Silk Saree

Nature of Yarn : Mulberry Silk

Yarn Cost : Rs. 7500.00

Dyes and Chemicals : Rs. 500.00

Process Cost : Rs. 1100.00

Total Cost of sarees : Rs. 9100.00

Duration of weaving for

7 sarees : 45 days

Wages earned : Rs. 3375.00

Wages per day : Rs. 75.00

One historical reason why the town Pochampally was famous for is the Bhoodan movement. Acharya Vinoba Bhave, a great disciple of Mahatma Gandhi and first satyagrahi started his movement with the first Bhoodan gift from vedere RamaChandra Reddy in this town Pochampally.After India got independence, Vinobha started on his extraordinary and unprecedented in the history, the Bhoodan Movement. Over a period of twenty years, he walked through the length and breadth of India persuading Land owners and landlords to give a total of four million acres of land to the poor and downtrodden. This movement brought Vinobha to the international scene.

In coming to Hyderabad, Vinobha and other Gandhians were confronting a challenge and testing their faith in non-violence. They toured the communist infested areas of Telangana to spread the message of peace. With his efforts he made a landlord sanction 100 acres to Harijans in a village called Pochampalli. This incident was the very genesis of the Bhoodan movement which later on developed into a village gift or Gramdan movement. This movement passed through several stages in regard to both momentum and allied programmes. This reminded the Gandhi’s mass movements. The enthusiasm for the movement lasted till 1957 and thereafter it began to wane.

Timbaktu - In the lap of mother Nature

A view of Timbaktu

Timbaktu, an NGO located at a distance of 50Km from Anantpur and later this place itself became popular with the name as Timbaktu. This organisation mainly works on activities such as providing basic education to children from surrounding villages, mobilizing farmers to take up organic farming, creating women groups to name a few. All the activities reflect the deep holistic vision of the group and the fundamental belief that people have the strength and ability to address their problems and live in harmony collectively without entirely depending on an external agency like government for creating social order. More often than not the social order proclaimed to be created by such external agencies (like government)lack holistic vision and have meagre people participation. In Timbaktu Badi (Badi means school), the education is provided to children from standard 1 to standard 10 and the children after completing their tenth standard were sent to colleges in Anantapur district depending on the kind of studies they want to go for. Here all the students who are below tenth standard have both boarding and lodging facilities. The students are being taught in the classrooms where they have opportunity of learning the education while enjoying the nature as if it is in case of gurukulas in the olden days. The classrooms are constructed in such a way that they are at different places and the students are being taught at different locations everytime depending on the nature and the type of learning activity or topic. One such type of classroom is like an amphitheatre where they have a blackboard on one of the wall and a stage like environment. The children are being taught in creative methods and the teachers are also creating methods so that the children can learn practically even the minute detail. There are almost 70 children from 350 villages who are in Timbaktu Badi. There are 2 kitchens and the students, teachers and the staff members all of them have their food in any of the kitchen. Nearly 100 persons can have their food in the kitchen at a single time. The food is cooked mostly using firewood and the mud kiln is made in such a way that smoke goes out of the exhaust pipe. Few Timbaktu members also stay in the houses provided there. All the houses have roof made from locally available wood from inside and on the outside the roof is covered with a special type of grass found in Timbaktu lands, which makes the house very cool. You can just feel as if u are living in a house with an AC, so it is that much cool and fresh air circulating inside the house. Anantapur area even though very dry, has very good wind flow and these houses are built to take advantage of the local geographic conditions. The facilities do not have any electricity coming from the electricity board, instead they use electricity generated from the solar energy which is useful for the minimum lighting during nights, running communication equipment, laptops and also one small water pump. Most of the area is covered with a lot of trees so there is a fresh breeze surrounding everywhere in the place. They have a organically grown kitchen garden where few fruits and vegetables are grown. Since the land in Timbaktu premises doesn't have enough ground water it cannot support any farming. The drip irrigation system is used for watering the plants. Brinjal, beans, mirchi, bottle guard, bitter gourd, tomato , custard apple, papaya, gongura are the vegetables and fruits grown. There are few hens and a peacock which came there on its own and living there. He is called Sundarayya (man of beauty). One of the most amazing thing is Sundarayya, dancing every morning and evening exactly at 5:00 clock. Even we people also do not know the time so exactly by seeing the climate outside. It widens its feathers and dances so beautifully. Sundarayya seems to have developed friendship with the hens and he entertains and plays with the hens. He expresses his joy to the hens by way of opening his feathers and dancing everyday. He moves along with the hens in a desperate attempt to impress the hens. There are also large number of snakes around the area as the area has wilderness. Dinesh, another member of Timbaktu has a natural love and instinct for snakes. He can sense their presence, catch them, live with them - Amazing skill that he got very naturally. If one goes on trekking the nearby hills surrounding Timbaktu there are even bears and foxes. Subba, who is living in Timbaktu for past 14 years says, it is actually much easier and peaceful to live in the vicinity of wild animals than it is thought. The snakes for example bite people in villages as they cannot escape. The villages do not have wilderness preserved and hence the snakes cannot escape easily. Whereas in Timbaktu the snakes are occasionally seen but they never interfere with human life. Snakes need very less food and prefer sleeping most of the time. They are very peaceful beings, infact Subba refers to them as meditators. Some of us who visited Timbaktu that day wanted to invest in organic farming. We thought it is one easy way to take part in Timbaktu's activites. Another one expressed interest in forming an informal network in hyderabad to collectively buy Timbaktu products. We want to visit Timbaktu again for atleast a week and learn from the children in Timbaktu Badi and ofcourse rest in the lap of mother Nature. So wonderful and peaceful is Timbaktu !