Pochampally & Sambalpuri: Eastern Ikat Traditions
From Vinoba Bhave's 1951 walk into Pochampally to the Bhulia weavers of Bargarh, the story of Indian ikat and the thousands of coconut-fibre knots that hold a saree together before it exists.
On 18 April 1951, an old man in a white dhoti walked into a Telugu weaver village called Pochampally and began India's Bhoodan land-gift movement. Eight hundred years earlier, in a different century and a different language, a king named Ramai Dev of Patnagarh invited Bhulia weavers from the Raipur region to settle in western Odisha. From those two separate origins, two of India's great ikat traditions were born. This lesson walks into a Barpali courtyard where a Bhulia weaver is tying fifteen thousand coconut-fibre knots on the yarn for a Sambalpuri wedding saree, and asks what ikat actually is: a pattern that already exists in the yarn before the cloth does, held temporarily in negative by thousands of tiny knots.
Five in the Morning in Barpali
It is five in the morning in Barpali, a weaving town in the Bargarh district of western Odisha. The sun is still behind the mango trees. In a mud-walled courtyard at the end of a narrow lane, a weaver we can call Kamalakanta Meher, a composite drawn from the old Bhulia master weavers who still live and work in this town, is kneeling in front of a long wooden frame. The frame holds a sheet of two thousand four hundred cotton warp threads stretched tight from one end to the other. His wife Gouri is working at a second frame across the courtyard, with a shorter bundle of weft threads. His daughter Sushama, twelve years old, is cutting small pieces of coconut-fibre string at a low stool and passing them up to him one by one.
Kamalakanta is not weaving yet. He will not weave for another three weeks. What he is doing this morning is tying knots. The two thousand four hundred warp threads have to be bundled into groups of four. Each group has to be tied at precise points along its length with a tight coconut-fibre knot. There is a grid paper tacked to the wall. The grid shows a saktapar pattern, the chessboard weave, commissioned for a wedding six weeks away in Bhubaneswar. Each small square on the grid corresponds to one coconut-fibre knot on the yarn. Two thousand four hundred warp threads. Several thousand weft threads. Maybe fifteen thousand knots to tie in total, and later all to be untied. One misplaced knot will push the pattern off by a row, and the entire saree will come out crooked.
Why tie knots in the yarn before the weaving has even begun? Why not just weave the pattern into the cloth the way an embroiderer does, motif by motif? The answer is the whole secret of ikat. In an ikat saree, the pattern does not live in the weave. It lives in the yarn. The yarn is dyed before it touches the loom. Wherever the coconut-fibre knot was tight, the dye cannot reach. When the knots are untied and the yarn is dried and strung onto the loom, the undyed sections line up in space to form the pattern. The weaver is not drawing the pattern with the shuttle. He is assembling a pattern that already exists, dot by dot, in the yarn itself.