LIVING BY THE LOOM

Pune Mirror | Updated: Apr 26, 2015, 02.30 AM IST

Om Puri stars in ‘Susman’

By: Trisha Gupta

Shyam Benegal's 'Susman' offers a portrait of the handloom weaver's predicament,

sadly relevant even today.

At one point in Shyam Benegal's Susman (1987), two ikat weavers are walking back from a meeting
with an agent and a city-based buyer. "Why didn't you ask the buyer for an advance?" says the
younger brother, Laxmayya (Annu Kapoor). "Apne munh se paisa maang ke kaahe apne ko chhota
banayein? (Should I have demeaned myself by asking for money with my own mouth?)" responds the
elder brother, Ramulu (Om Puri). "Would have been better not to take the order."

Susman is one of Shyam Benegal's lesswatched films. It is part of his clutch of issue-defined films
commissioned by government bodies or cooperatives. It has its limitations: Benegal's regular stable
of "alternative" actors can feel a little too starry. Watching Shabana Azmi and Om Puri and Pankaj
Kapur play impoverished Pochampally weavers speaking in Dakkhani can feel like a stretch — Azmi,
in particular, looks and acts far too urbane. But, Benegal has always had the ability to craft fictions
that offer a nuanced, thoughtful picture of the situation he has chosen to depict, and Susmanis a
good example.

It is a film that deserves to be watched this week as the central government contemplates a policy
shift that might endanger the very existence of the handloom weaving sector. Scroll.in reported on
Friday that "the Ministry of Textiles is looking into a memorandum submitted by power loom owners
to ease provisions in the Handloom Reservation Act of 1985 that allow only handloom weavers to
make certain textile products". Over the years, the 22 handloom-only items originally listed by the
Act has already been reduced to 11. Also, it is well-known that power loom weavers manufacture
these reserved products, passing them off as handloom. Further de-reservation is likely to price
handloom goods out of the market and threaten the survival of what is the world's most stunningly
diverse, skilled range of handcrafted textiles.
Benegal seeks to draw in the middle class viewer with a display of handloom weaves, each sari
covering the screen as we hear the unmistakeable voice of Neena Gupta applaud the particular
finesse of each to a less-knowledgeable, but terribly opinionated man. When we finally cut away from
the saris to Gupta, she turns out to be a designer called Mandira: the handloom sari-wearing,
bigbindi- ed figure we all know, directing some sort of sari-based fashion show.

Mandira is hard to please, and when she clicks her tongue at some of the work that master weaver
Narasimha (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) brings her from Pochampally, Narasimha suggests that she
explain her demands to the weavers herself. So, it is that our English-speaking designer,
accompanied by her even more English-speaking boyfriend, Jayant Kripalani, encounters Ramulu
and his household.

It is after this slightly ham-handed beginning that the film comes into its own. Benegal cleverly uses
the household's particular situation as illustrative of a larger socio-economic reality. In Ramulu's
perfectionism as a craftsman, in his inability to bargain with agents, in his silent resentment of his
situation but his fatalistic approach to dealing with it, we see the tragic predicament of the handloom
weaver who doesn't have a head for the market. And, while Ramulu is profoundly attached to the
work he does, he displays what little realism he has in refusing to let his little son sit at the loom.

Because the financial pressures upon him are such that Ramulu has begun to see his attachment to
his work as a form of bondage. "Ukhaad ke phenk doonga isko ek din. Yeh kargha nahi jail hai jail.
Ismein bandh karke daal diya hum ko," shouts Om Puri in one moving scene. And, as we watch him,
framed behind the long horizontal bar of his loom, it feels as if he is indeed boxed into acorner of the
world.

"Roti deti so cheez ko aisa nahi bolte (Don't say such things about the thing that feeds you)," says his
wife Gouramma (Azmi) worriedly. But the film makes clear that weaving is failing to fill stomachs.
The cooperative societies set up to save weavers from the clutches of agents and touts have quickly
been corrupted from within, beholden to the powerful. Big orders don't come to the co-op because
they require deposition of advance money, funds the co-op can't risk. The co-op secretary loans the
Society's supply of silk thread to Narasimha on the sly and is bribed to sell off discounted saris in
bulk to Laxmayya, who intends to resell them in Hyderabad and set himself up as an agent.

Through Ramulu's prospective son-in-law, Nageshwar, we also see the new workspaces created by
the power loom. The village of individual homes in which weavers work at their own pace, often in
conjunction with other family members, is replaced by a cramped all-male factory space, and the
regular thak-thak of the handloom by the raging sound of the power loom. In the factory, warns
Nageshwar, a man cannot leave his machine. Benegal doesn't say it, but it's clear why: because the
machine isn't his anymore. It owns him, rather than the other way around.

But while Benegal's leanings are apparent, he is clear-eyed about how unsustainable it has become
for even its most skilled practitioners. The tragic irony of a weaver having to steal thread in order to
weave a silk sari for a daughter's wedding is a powerful one, one which recurs in Priyadarshan's
Tamil film Kanchivaram (2007). Kripalani's computer-type boyfriend also represents the view
against handloom, demanding of Mandira how long the artificial "sahara" of government loans and
the "sentimentality" of people like her will keep it alive.

The film manages to end on an upbeat note. But the government's answers to these questions, asked
nearly twenty years ago, remain as tragically short-sighted. Handloom can thrive and grow, if we
only do right by it. As Ashoke Chatterjee, exhead of the Crafts Council of India, asked recently: "Why
are power loom lobbyists so eager for their fabric to appear handmade if demand is falling?"