I encounter a stack of cycles that I assume belong to the weavers who travel from different locations to work here. I am at the entrance of a Banarasi saree karkhana in Banaras, to be specific, the Ramnagar region on the eastern side of the Ganga, which cuts across the city. The city comprises a major part of the urban area and is the district headquarters in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi district. To note here, Banaras has many
names: Varanasi, Kashi, Benaras, Banaras. While in government records it is Varanasi, HKV uses Benaras in their trade name. In my writing, ‘Banaras’ appears again and again
(Eck 1998: 347-356). Over the years, as the city has grown and transformed, my intimacy with Banaras has evolved as well. Banaras has seen some shifts in its power, people, materials and demand. However, its weavers have been concentrating on Banarasi textile’s production by adapting new mechanisms, materials and owners. 

Here, I propose my fieldwork experiences at HKV Benaras Pvt. Ltd., Varanasi, as I have worked closely with the weavers, and studied their gestural enactments within the process of production. The image below (Fig. 1) showsthe entrance of the karkhana of HKV Benaras Pvt. Ltd. A narrow passage on the left side with a green gate made of iron bar, lies open. At the very right side of the foreground, stuffed with a heap of punched cards, is the main framework of the ‘naksha’or design that must be performed in the process of creating patterns under the artisans’ somatic instruction at a functional loom. The infrastructure is big, containing many workers: 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 sharing gossip, chitchats, tea; I would not identify this as noise. So far where do I find the silence, in voices or choice?

Anatomy of Silence

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’ (Popova 2015).

The aestheticization of silence is anyway romanticised as a sophisticated and 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 on stage. In other places, silencing could be an erasure, or an exploitation. Even though there are differences in being silent and silencing (making others silent), sometimes these two silences overalp. Being silent is a sugarcoated way of talking about many compulsive silences. Though it looks like a decisive silence, it might not be. Susan Sontag points out, “”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” (Sontag 2002). 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, and by compulsion. This essay presents text and images of the site, the city, the people, and the hands, which may not be always be in confluence with each other, however, they hold a dichotomy of chaos and silence within them. These are not connected to auditory mechanisms in our body, but to the somatic and moral.The hall of the karkhana is full of functional looms and bodies of artisans in contact and under contract, creating sounds that must establish a new critical theory of silence. It is an experience, a realisation, and a conversation. 

Theory of Noise

I’m penning down my down from my visit last year. I remember reading Nita Kumar’s work on Banaras, from her fieldwork in the city in the 1980s, where she gave a detailed account on two weavers’ families (Kumar 1988: 14). Almost forty years have passed since. I consider my every visit to Banaras strikingly different in its  purpose, yet each one eventually leads to another visit. This appears to be because of the obvious intricacies of the pluralism that Banaras holds.. Banaras has the capacity to sustain all the desired interventions that the modern Indian population can impose. It has to be,  being historically appreciated and threatened at the same time, functioning both, as a site of pilgrimage and as a crafts production centre. The only constant here the Ganga:  a calm witness to an ever evolving settlement. A wide range of extravagant architectural erections stand within a network of steps thatlead to the mighty river. Highness of those architectural walls and steps situate Banaras on a height. In the crowd I notice particular gestures that have been acquired for specific occupations, which address the pleasures of making, or crafting things for a purpose. People who make, who repair, are the core culture builders. They could be the repairers of the city or a nation too. The river and the ephemeral moments along its bank, the central attraction of the city, leads into a chaotic street, full of humans, nonhumans, a voluptuous material affection, lights, foods, and garments. I see a series of shops selling Banarasi sarees, often overwhelmed by their claim of selling ‘authentic’ products. I line up for the product,  while acknowledging the silence of the makers of these ‘authentic’ products. Where are those ‘authentic’ voices I am looking for? I go back to the minute details that Kumar has narrated in her writings, which immerse us into the everyday expenditures of a weaver family that depends on the few functional looms it owns. What about those looms now, which drive with authentic gestures silently?

The Genesis

“Handmade”, the term speaks for itself. But who made this? And with whose hand?

As HKV Benaras Pvt. Ltd. seems to have taken a step forward, they have incorporated the idea of pitching their products as being “handmade”, by putting the ‘hand’ owners’ name on their products. Even as I use such a strong word as ‘owner’, the knowledge actually resides in genealogical processes or within a community . Those hands are not mere hands, but have been absorbed in a rich vocabulary of knowledge, thought and innovation for thousands of years. Redundant, repression, compulsion accustomed to resilience, those hands are still functioning. Then what about the voices of those makers’ who drive the production? How much softer could their voices be? Even more than the finest silk yarns that are tremendously vulnerable? I notice the master weaver, who was joining two series of yarns, using 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 the hands hold, as  seen in the  image above (Fig. 3.). 

So far, on this visit my location of stay is on the other side of the river, where the main city has flourished. Every time I visit the karkhana, I have to cross the river through the high running bridge over the Ganga. A  distant view of the smooth curves of ghats that the river runs along is smoggy, almost like Hodges’ paintings and  Edward Lear’s 1873 drawings of Banaras. Paintings that eventually identified Banaras as synonymous with its river banks and crowds, rituals and gatherings. Since then the city has transformed in many ways. I am staying at my didi’s place, in 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 cannot see how high it is, a grown bayan tree covers its top. Also you won’t get the time to stand and look at it, as a curious group of small monkeys will invariably knock you over, and make you feel scared. A lonely lane with many people who visit the multispeciality hospital beside my place. For obvious reasons, the apartment I am staying in, on the first floor, is an ex-pathological center, revived into a residential building. Our small balcony still carries the center’s illuminated hoarding hanging outside, but we keep its light off to avoid  confusion among the nearby hospital-goers. There is a brilliant hotel with limited entertainment just in front of our place, as we can place an order for dinner just by calling out from our balcony. The hotel actually attracts the same hospital goers, who have water, tea or lunch here or are looking to kill time, from their long waiting hours to meet a doctor. All this happens everyday, in a rhythmic, repetitive way. Sennette might have thought about it. Artisans’ repetition, rhythmic physical gestures in their looms, transforms into a recurring everyday social practice. 

Enactments

Richard Sennette in his 2012 book Together, theorizes the physical gestures associated with the process of making in craft production as social interrogation. Extendedly, he calls it an act of grasping certain skills in a sensory way. Skills transform across places. It is a right fit for the weavers working at the Banarasi saree karkhana under their daily wage system. In Sennett’s words, “how the rhythms of physical labour become embodied in ritual; how physical gestures give life to informal social relations; how the artisan’s work with physical resistance illuminates the challenge of dealing with social resistances and differences” (Sennett 2012: 199). Going back to the stack of cycles, where I started the essay, by extending Sennette’s note I would argue that the cycles are also a part of that ritual. The weavers ride their cycles tocome to weave. They expend substantial physical labour to keep the loom functional and that extends to a larger social level. In between a conversation with an artisan, I was curious about how far he comes  from, and where he lives. He got silent for a few seconds. He was weaving a vibrant pink butidaar saree with the assistance of a helper. The rapid blows of sound of frictional wooden bars, that Sennette might have pointed out as rhythm and rituals, were trying to cover the sudden dialogic void up. Eventually he said, “it is better to come here and work”. Not only skills, but memory too transmits within communities. If I would take note of the past two hundred years, I would even find a reluctance in his voice. Where does that come from? Is that what I mean by silence? The silent genesis, since the genesis of a craft is in continuous flow, but the voices of its makers are muted. If this is the “better”, then what is the worse? I must not have thought about all these things, as Susmita ji, the manager of the karkhana was introducing to  each and every section, using vocabulary that could be understood by a mere visitor with a tourist’s curiosity. Susmita Ji is a trained professional in the field of textile manufacturing, well-versed with its mechanisms, processes and terminologies.

 Susmita ii’s  illustrious narration could pass as enthusiasm for such textiles, with “handmade” as the label for an entire textile craft industry in Banaras, which is supposed to be a ‘smart city’. She proudly mentioned the HKV’s inclusion of digital technologies to create a modern, ‘smart’ consumer experience, which helps identify products that are ‘handmade’ and ‘authentic’. There are sarkari trademarks such as silk marks, which serve the function of material authentication, and GI Tags for the purposes of geographical authentication,  all to ensure the delivery of an ‘authentic’ product. Though a use of the digital is to build a ‘smart’ way of textile authentication in public, incorporating the artisan’s name, material details, have redeveloped upon the practice of buying craft directly from artisans. There are multiple organisations and NGOs working to put this together. Beyond this, HKV Benaras Pvt. Ltd. has included into into the digital AI based authentication service proposed as HastKala Pramanak, which has also been  termed as D2C (direct to customer). As mentioned on their website, “HastKala Pramanak is an end to end solution for objective verification of handmade products leveraging blockchain and artificial intelligence”. 

Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence will provide and impose a digital identity to “handloom” or “handcrafted” products. Artisanal genesis transforms into mechanical synthesis as the mercantile agency transforms too. This is to note that 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 production’s compulsive transformative nature. In eighteenth century India, colonial administrators had already sought to reframe Indian labor to address European economic interests, resulting from an expansion of European political influence over the subcontinent. Thus, I put in effort to analyze the negotiated authority over technology and material knowledge at 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 the 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. We must understand that mechanical advancement happened for some very particular reasons, which in turn too altered the market agency of the craft, its artisans, its entrepreneurs and everything in-between.

To Rest

There is no conclusion, no certain solution, I can just watch. So far I identify a changing condition of the artisan’s socio-economic agency in a large-scale setup and market within the contemporary context. Whether it was the solution to a ‘problem’ or a revivalist attitude toward artisanal production as altered philanthropy,  making and marketing are in exchange and there is demand for a negotiation between artisanal skill and the authorized market. Impact of design schools and craft management courses/institutions leads to such entrepreneurship, and on a larger scale, boosts the global market of crafts through digital marketing of these ‘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, however, would be joined again by the artisans themselves, and not by outsiders. Though everyday deposits something new, this phenomenon must be observed. It is not a problem solving expedition, but an attempt to hear the voices in, to be there, to be a silent witness of a silent genesis. 

Sontag, Susan. Aesthetics of Silence,  Styles of Radical Will. 2002.

Homepage of HastKala Pramanak. 2024. Available online at: https://hastkalapramanak.in/home (Last accessed on 13 February 2024).

What is blockchain technology? Amazon Web Services. 2024. Available online at: 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).

Nelson, Laura K. ‘The Sociological Take on AI: Unpacking Current Debates.’ Department of Sociology. University of British Columbia. 2023. Available online at: https://sociology.ubc.ca/news/the-sociological-take-on-ai-unpacking-current-debates/ (Last accessed on 13 February 2024). 

Popova, Maria on Paul Goodman on the nine kinds of silence, The marginalian, 2015. Available online at:  https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/01/13/paul-goodman-silence/ (Last accessed on 23 March 2024).