Ritu Kumar writes: How Chinese imports ruin our traditional textiles

In India, textiles comprise the second-largest sector after agriculture. Its potential for creating wealth is enormous. India has a living tradition of handicrafts, practised on an everyday basis. All India’s crafts are inherited through guilds which have a long history, and this is their inherent intellectual property. This specialisation offers employment to an estimated 16 million people in the country.

When the pandemic hit Europe, Italy, Spain and France were among the countries affected. But think of another element they had in common. The relentless growth of fashion empires, and their diversification into billion-dollar licensing arrangements made fashion in Europe very powerful, early on in the game. They began to dictate the terms of the luxury goods trade through very effective marketing, and new products. These companies dominated global markets. They soon started producing their prime goods elsewhere, and to better their margins, began hiring Chinese tailors, off the books, and gave them licence to manufacture copies of their garments, cheaper and faster. In the process, they were willing to teach them the secrets of family-owned businesses and enhance their capability to produce couture garments — sometimes giving them the patterns to do so to buy them at a fraction of the cost of European manufactured goods.

The Chinese learned the craft swiftly and, very soon, they were a force to be recognised, as they used “Made in France” labels on much cheaper copies. In Italy, the hub of luxury good manufacturers, too, their numbers proliferated and they displaced traditional Italian family enterprises. One of the major production areas, incidentally, is in and around the city of Wuhan, a textile hub of low-end garments for the world. The Western world, in its pursuit for cheap merchandise, has still not recognised that selling their know-how created adverse long-term consequences, and perhaps not just in fashion.

This story has repeated itself elsewhere. Uzbekistan is at the heart of a complex nomadic and oasis culture in Central Asia and is a significant stretch of the famous Silk Road route. The cities down the historic road were the most prolific in their textile language and produce, as caravans, traded their textile ikats and embroideries with the world down the ages. A few years ago, I went there on a trip to study their traditional ikats. The Fergana valley, the birth place of Babar, was supposed to be the richest in terms of traditional crafts. But, barring a few exceptions, the genius of textiles that I was looking for was elusive. The women, unfortunately, were clad in velvet and synthetic kaftans, looking quite alien from their surroundings. They were all wearing kaftans, manufactured and printed in China, using copies of patterns from traditional ikats. The only place today where genuine textiles still exist is India.

India is as prone to losing its textile crafts to another country as the others. It only needs to look at its past. The British brought down India’s share in textile exports to the world from 25% to 2%, taking over the production of Indian-inspired cloth from the 18th to the 20th century. By a miracle, Indian textiles have survived through the efforts of revivalists in the post-Independence era, such as Kamala Devi Chattopdhyaya and Pupul Jayakar.