Gloom

TNIE spends a day at Balaramapuram, where traditional handloom weavers are concerned about preserving the 'endangered' craft

- Aparna Nair

The bustling locality of Balaramapuram holds a lot of emotions. Of being a historic place where trade joined hands with art, where communities merged to form civilisation, where handwoven creativity became costume that marked a culture.

It was hence called the 'heaven of handloom', set up around 200 years ago by the Travancore king Avittam Thirunal Bala Rama Varma. He had brought in five communities from Tamil Nadu to Travancore. One of them was the Shaliyas, who were tasked with weaving the traditional attire for temple-related purposes as well as for the royal family.

They took root here, in villages around the present-day Balaramapuram. And with them, the art of weaving flourished here.

Remnants of this culture can still be found around Shaliya Street, where the temples bear marks of a prompt Tamil lineage. Each house had a marked weaving history, and in fact, the houses too are structured to represent one fabric, woven together at the seams. Tamil, with a marked Malayali slang, could be heard inside the houses, from where waft the sound of handloom raw materials being made.

The difference, however, is the enormity of the sound. Until some decades ago, the sound was a soothing hum, now it is the bold clatter of the electric motor that runs the system which spins the yarn.

"I get ₹150 per day for work from 7am to 3pm," says Arumugam, 69, who learnt spinning from the time she got married into a household of handloom artisans.

The work is part of the stage that runs up to the final weaving, the preparatory being procurement of cotton and silk thread from Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, and then making yarn out of it which will then be woven together as the white fabric laced with the customary gold border.