I would encounter a stack of cycles, that I assume of the weavers who travel from different locations to work here. As I am at the entrance of a Banarasi saree karkhana at Banaras, to be specific Ramnagar region on the eastern side of the River Ganges cutting across the city. The City comprises the major part of the urban area and is the district headquarters of the Varanasi District in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. It has been a long time since my intimacy with Banaras has evolved in many ways, the ways the city has transformed. There have been some shifts in power, people, material and demand. However, weavers have been concentrating on Banarasi textile’s production by adapting new mechanisms, materials and owners. Here I propose my field work experiences at HKV Benaras Pvt. Ltd., Varanasi,[1] as I have worked closely with the weavers, the gestural enactment within the process of production. The Image proposed here (Fig. 1) as a backward gaze toward the entrance of the karkhana of HKV Benaras Pvt. Ltd. As I looked back, it was obvious. A narrow passage at the left side with a green gate made of iron bar, that is opened. At the very right side of the foreground, stuffed with the hip of punched cards, is the main framework of the ‘naksha’/ design that must be performed in the process of creating patterns under artisans’ somatic instruction at a functional loom. The quite big infrastructure containing this much worker, visitors must be confused about how ‘I’ entered inside. Instead of putting such adjectives as ‘wonderful’, I would rather let you experience a space that is full of sounds and life. A maximum crowd having gossips, chitchats, teas, I would not identify it as noise. So far where did I find the silence, in voices or choice?
As Goodman writes: ‘Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.’ The Aestheticization of Silence is anyway romanticized, sophisticated, an elite gesture in art and literary interpretations. It is such a privilege to say ‘learn to be silent’, I have received this advice multiple times in my arts tenure. Where and how to be silent is an aesthetic resonance in a gallery or a stage, it could be. While otherwise silencing is an erasure, an exploitation. Even though there are differences in being silent and silencing (making others silent), sometimes these two silence overalps. Being silent is a sugarcoat of many compulsive silence. Though it looks like a decisive silence, it might not be. Susan Sontag points ‘”Silence” never ceases to imply its opposite and to demand on its presence. Just as there can’t be “up” without “down” or “left” without “right,” so one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize silence.’[3] Sontag’s notes again address the existence of silence and noise simultaneously and its aesthetic interdependence. Bringing these within the dynamics of silence, I would add an element of silence that is socially driven, under repression, compulsion. This essay presents text and images of the site, the city, the people, the hands, which may not be fluent with each other, however, holds a dichotomy of chaos and silence. That could not be connected to auditory mechanisms in our body, however to the somatic and moral. As the hall is full of functional looms and bodies of artisans in contact and contract, creating sounds that must establish a new critical theory of silence. It is an experience, realisation, conversation.
The Genesis
Handmade, the term speaks for itself. Who made? whose hand?
As HKV Benaras Pvt. Ltd. seems to have made a step forward, they have incorporated an idea of pitching ‘handmade’ by putting the ‘hand’ owners’ name in the particular ‘handmade’ product. Even if I am using such a strong word ‘owner’, that actually resides in genealogical or community ownership. Those hands are not mere hands, for thousands of years that have been absorbed in a rich vocabulary of knowledge, thinking and innovations. Redundant, repression, compulsion accustomed in resilience, hands are still functioning. Then what about the voices of those makers’ who drive. How much soft their voices could be even more than the finest silk yarns tremendously vulnerable? The master weaver, who was joining two series of yarns, the process called ‘tani jorh’ to ensure two different colours in one piece of saree. The ‘embodiment’ of gestural skills, limited effort and pressure and finger movements that hands hold if I may refer to the image (Fig. 3.).
So far, on this visit my location of staying is on the other side of the river, where the main city has flourished. Every time I visited the Karkhana, I had to cross the river through the high running bridge over the Ganges. A clear distant view of smooth curves and ghats that the river is perceiving is actually smoggy, almost I was assuming the Hodges’s paintings and Edward Lear’s 1873 drawings of Banaras. That eventually identifies Banaras with its river banks and crowds, rituals and gatherings. Since then the city has transformed in many ways. I am staying in my didi’s place, Mahmoorganj, which is quite near to the most popular pilgrimage center here. A residential building as high as it should be in a middle class locality. Even though you can not look at its highness, a grown up standing bayan tree has covered its top up. Also you won’t get time to stand and see, as a curious group of small monkeys will knock you, you may feel scared. A lonely lane with so many people who come here to the multispeciality hospital beside my place. For obvious reasons, this apartment I am staying on the first floor is an ex-pathological center, revived as a residential place now. The small balcony it has, still having the illuminated hoarding hanging outside, we keep its light off to avoid obvious confusion for nearby hospital comers. There is a brilliant hotel with limited entertainment just in front of our place, as we can place a dinner by calling from the balcony. This hotel actually attracts the same hospital comers, who would have water, tea or lunch or an empty gap from their long waiting for the doctor’s call. all these are happening everyday in a rhythmic, repetitive way, Sennette might have thought about it. As artisan’s repetition, rhythmic physical gestures in their looms transform into the recurring everyday social practice.
Enactments
Susmita Ji’s exiting illustrious narration could embark some passing enthusiasm for such textiles, ‘handmade’ as the toppings of a whole textile craft industry in Banaras, supposed to be the ‘smart city’. She has proudly mentioned the HKV’s addition of a digital technology to give a more modern, ‘smart’ consumer experience to identify ‘handmade’ and ‘authentic’. There are ‘sarkari’ trade marks such as silk marks as material authentication, GI Tag as geographical authentication by the Indian government to ensure the ‘authentic’. Though digital is to build the parameter of a more ‘smart’ way of textile authentication in public, incorporating artisans name, material details, that also redeveloped upon the practice of buying craft directly from the artisans. There are multiple organizations and NGOs working to put it together. Beyond all that HKV Benaras Pvt. Ltd. included themselves into the digital AI based authentication service proposed as HastKala Pramanak as they termed it as D2C(direct to customer). As mentioned in their website, ‘HastKala Pramanak is an end to end solution for objective verification of handmade products leveraging blockchain and artificial intelligence’.[7] So far, what is blockchain and artificial intelligence we shall explore now, most importantly it will provide/impose a digital identity/beneficiary to the ‘handloom’ or ‘handcrafted’ products. The way artisanal genesis transforms into mechanical synthesis as the mercantile agency transforms too. This is to note between the course of industrialisation and gradual technological refashioning in craft production literally refers to the artisanal voices as my argument is built upon the Banarasi textiles productions compulsive transformative nature. In eighteenth century India, colonial administrators had already sought to reframe Indian labor to address European economic interests as a result of expansion of European political influence over the subcontinent. Putting effort to analyze the negotiated authority over technology and material knowledge in a moment when technical authority was increasingly grasped by the colonial state and the middle class. I am taking this account to address the digital visibility of craft economy to critically assess the twenty-first century phenomena of craft production and dissemination that is built upon the lineage of industrialisation in Europe. The digital, mechanical authorship has many fronts, in craft merchandise it will again establish the capital control and a susceptible management that excludes margins. To understand that the mechanical advancement happened for some particular reasons, that too altered the market agency of craft, artisans, entrepreneurs and in-between.
To Rest
There is no conclusion, no certain solution, I can just watch. So far I identify a changing condition of artisan’s socio-economic agency in a large-scale setup and market in contemporary context. Whether it was the solution of the ‘problem’ or a revivalist attitude toward artisanal production as altered philanthropy, however it is where making and marketing is in exchange and demand of negotiation between artisanal skill and authorized market. Impact of design schools and craft management courses/institutions which leads to such entrepreneurship and on a larger scale that boosts the global market of crafts also through digital marketing of the ‘authentic’ craft. Whatever the gains are, whoever the gainers, the skill is getting sold by someone else, not by the artisans, where the term ‘authentic’ remains completely paradoxical.
The historians, sociologists and anthropologists have addressed a lot within the cultural and artisanal negotiations in the region of Banaras. All those loose ends that would be joined again by the artisans themselves, not by any outsiders. Though everyday depositing something new, must be observed. It is not a problem solving expedition, to hear the voices in, to be there, to be a silent witness of a silent genesis.
Notes:
[1] Banaras has many names, Varanasi, Kashi, Benaras, Banaras, as in Government record it is Varanasi, HKV is using Benaras in their trade name. In my writing ‘Banaras’ appears again and again. See Eck, Diana L. 1998. Banaras: City of Light. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, Page: 347-356.
[2]See Popova, Maria on Paul Goodman on the nine kinds of silence, Available online at: https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/01/13/paul-goodman-silence/
[3]See Sontag, Susan. Aesthetics of Silence, Styles of Radical Will. 2002, Susan Sontag’s second collection of essays.
[4]Liu, F., Jiang, S., Kang, J. et al. On the definition of noise. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9, 406. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01431-x
[5]See Kumar, Nita. Artisans of Banaras. pp. 14.
[6]See Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, pp-199.
[7]See the Homepage of HastKala Pramanak. https://hastkalapramanak.in/home (Last accessed on 13 February 2024).
See What is blockchain technology?. 2024. Amazon Web Services.
https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/blockchain/?aws-products-all.sort-by=item.additionalFields.productNameLowercase&aws-products-all.sort-order=asc (Last accessed on 17 February 2024).
See Nelson, Laura K. 2023, November. ‘The Sociological Take on AI: Unpacking Current Debates.’ Department of Sociology. University of British. Columbia.https://sociology.ubc.ca/news/the-sociological-take-on-ai-unpacking-current-debates/ (Last accessed on 13 February 2024).
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