Traditional weaving in Assam

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Weaving a traditional cloth on the handloom in the North-eastern state of Assam in India. Indian handicrafts. A handloom in a room on stilts in the very green outdoors of Assam. A Woman weaves a mekhela in a typical handloom workshop in Assam.
Handloom weaving forms a cultural constituent of the woman of Assam. In earlier days most of the cloth required for the family was produced in the family itself. Now the scenes have changed totally in urban areas. Mill products are gradually replacing the homemade products. Home made cloths are Mekhla and Patani (lower garment of the women), chaddar (upper garment of the women), gamocha (towel), dhuti, bed sheet, eri (endi), etc. some of them have fly shuttle or throw shuttle and Assamese type loom. Throw shuttle loom antedates the fly shuttle loom. Villagers do generally not do spinning. They get mill-products yarn from the market. A few of them keep eri (endi) cocoons to produce eri (endi) cloth. The designs of the textiles are tradition of the Assamese culture and they are initiated at the base level by the Sipini (weaver women) of Assam.
The indigenous handicrafts that in other parts of the country are confined to professional castes were practiced as household industries in the valley of the Brahmaputra. In Assam proper, there is no dearth of raw materials. Indigenous manufacturers consisted of thread and fabrics, cotton textiles, brass utensils, oil extracted from mustard or til seeds gur or molasses, jewelleries, articles of ivory and agricultural implements. Every family in Assam proper had looms to meet the requirement of the household. The looms were infact the center of domestic economy, the only hope of salvation in an hour of distress or despair. Cotton manufactures- churias, chaddars, barkapors, khania kapor and gamochas- were entirely in the hands of women of all classes, although women of respectability and position usually prepared only the finest fabrics- asu or asuli poreah, gunnah, kotah, gai bonkara- resembling the muslins of Dacca.
Weaving was done with handlooms. There were of the plainest kind and none of the latest improvements had been introduced. The different local varieties of spinning and weaving had been used in different parts of the province and posted loom used in the plains were different from the hill tribes in which the warp was tied up in split bamboo to the ends of which were fastened a leather strap which passed across the weavers. Comparatively the Assamese looms were in an advanced stage and suitable for the production of finer quality of fabrics of all kinds. All manufactures were of course meant for the domestic consumption.
A loom is a device used to weave cloth. The basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads. The precise shape of the loom and its mechanics may vary, but the basic function is the same. A hand-loom on the other hand is a simple machine used for weaving.In a wooden vertical-shaft looms, the heddles are fixed in place in the shaft. The warp threads pass alternately through a heddle, and through a space between the heddles (the shed), so that raising the shaft raises half the threads (those passing through the heddles), and lowering the shaft lowers the same threads-the threads passing through the spaces between the heddles remain in place.
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