Agra & Jaipur Durries: Flatweave Traditions
A royal carpet and rug karkhana set up in mid-nineteenth-century Jaipur by a modernising Maharaja, a very different kind of weaving shed that grew inside the walls of Agra Central Jail during the late British era, a southern Telangana town called Warangal whose punja-woven cotton rugs received their own Geographical Indication in 2018, and a young Rajasthani entrepreneur named Nand Kishore Chaudhary who in 1978 walked to nine newly set up hand looms in a village and began paying the weavers directly without a middleman, an experiment that has since grown into one of the largest direct-to-weaver rug networks in the world.
On a cool morning in early 1978, in a small town on the northern edge of Rajasthan, a young man in his mid-twenties named Nand Kishore Chaudhary walks to a row of nine wooden hand looms he has just set up with borrowed money. In front of each loom sits a weaver from one of the region's traditional marginalised weaver communities. Chaudhary's plan is unusual for its time. He will buy the finished cotton durries directly from the weavers at a fair price, without a middleman, and handle the design, the urban retail, and the export himself. His family thinks he is making a serious mistake. A few decades later, the experiment that begins at these nine looms will have grown into a network of tens of thousands of weavers across several Indian states, sold through a brand the world will know as Jaipur Rugs. The Jaipur Rugs story is only the most recent chapter in a much longer history. Long before Chaudhary set up his first nine looms, royal karkhana weavers in nineteenth-century Jaipur under Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II were producing some of the finest durries ever woven in India. On the banks of the Yamuna near Agra, a colonial-era prison workshop inside Agra Central Jail was turning out enormous cotton durries and carpets that covered the floors of government buildings across the British Indian Empire. And in Warangal, far to the south in Telangana, a separate punja-woven cotton durrie tradition was preparing the ground for its own 2018 Geographical Indication registration. This lesson walks through all four chapters of that story.
A Rajasthani Town, 1978
On a cool morning in early 1978, in a small Rajasthani town on the northern edge of the Thar Desert, a young man in his mid-twenties named Nand Kishore Chaudhary walks to a row of nine hand looms he has just set up with borrowed money. The looms are simple wooden frames, strung with taut white cotton warp threads. In front of each loom sits a weaver. Most of them are from the region's traditional marginalised weaver communities. All of them have, until now, earned a modest piece-rate from middlemen who collected the finished cotton durries at the end of each week and sold them in the towns for many times the weaver's cut.
Chaudhary has a different plan. He will buy the durries directly from the weavers at a fair price, without the middleman. He will handle the design, the quality control, the urban retail, and the export himself. His family thinks he is making a serious mistake. The caste politics of rural Rajasthan in 1978 do not easily accept a young man from a merchant family sitting down to work shoulder to shoulder with weavers from the region's marginalised communities. Chaudhary thinks his family is wrong.
A few decades later, the experiment that begins at these nine looms will have grown into a network of tens of thousands of weavers across several Indian states, and the company it becomes will be called Jaipur Rugs. The durries, the kilims, and the knotted pile carpets produced in the Jaipur Rugs network will be sold in urban Indian stores, in international home-goods retail, and through some of the best-known luxury home brands in the world. Chaudhary himself will later be recognised with the Padma Shri for his work in reviving the handmade Indian rug sector.