One of the cities we visited in India was Kannur at the northern edge of Kerala. It's known as the 'land of looms and lore,' and we visited two weaving co-ops while we were there. (Please excuse the poor cell-phone images: we didn't bring a digital camera and it was too dark inside for our film cameras!)
The first was the Lokanath Weavers. It's a big and busy co-op full of people making handwoven cloth.
As you can see, the wooden, mostly two-harness looms were end-to-end inside. Most of the weavers were men, while the bobbin-winders, dyers and other helpers were women.
They make home furnishings and well as yardage for sewing (I think I was too overwhelmed, because I didn't buy any!?). They made a lot of bedsheets and pillowcases - that is a king-sized bedsheet in the image.
We also visited another co-op called the Kousayla Weavers - a much less busy, much more dusty co-op with only four or five weavers at work. It was darker inside and rather depressing - so I didn't take any pictures. If I had, all you would have seen were decaying looms (both two and four harness as well the wonderfully antidiluvian jacard looms that looked roughly hand-made) in an even bigger barn-like warehouse. They make almost exclusively textiles for the home, and I bought quite a bit of yardage from them - including the wonderful plaid at the top of this post.
The fellows in the office piled high with hand written account books told us that nobody is interested in weaving anymore, which is why they had so few weavers working and so many looms becoming dust. It's possibly because many of the residents of Kannur work overseas in places like Saudi Arabia, and send their wages (which I can only imagine are much higher than those of a weaver) home - you can see their big, gaily coloured mansions lining the highway (#38) from Kozhikode.
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