Ponduru is a coastal village in Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh — three hours northeast of Visakhapatnam if the road is dry. We drove there in May. The road was not dry.
The thing about Ponduru khadi is that nothing about how it is made has been written down. The cotton is hand-spun on a single-spindle wheel called the takli. The yarn is so fine — counts of 80 to 100 — that it can only be spun by hand. Power-spinning machines snap it. The women who spin in Ponduru learn the takli from their mothers, who learned from theirs. There are perhaps two hundred women in this village who can do this work to the count we ask for. Most of them are over forty.
We stayed with the family of one of the master weavers we work with — Ramana garu and his wife Lakshmi. Lakshmi spins. Ramana weaves. Their daughter spins on weekends and works in a textile shop in Vizag the rest of the time. She told us, without making a thing of it, that she does not plan to learn the loom. The math does not work for her generation. A finished Ponduru saree can take Ramana three weeks at the loom. Lakshmi spins for four weeks before that. When you divide what they earn by the days that go into it, the daily wage falls below what a tile-laying job pays in the next village.
We do not quote prices on this site that we cannot justify. The reason a Ponduru khadi here runs upwards of ₹30,000 is because it has to. Anything less and Ramana's daughter is right.
There is one other thing we noticed, on the third evening. Ramana's loom is in the front room of the house, by the door. The fan above it was broken. He weaves through the heat. When we asked, he said a new fan would cost him a day's wages, and a day at the loom is a day at the loom.
We had the fan replaced before we left. This is not philanthropy. It is the cost of a business that wants the looms to keep going for another generation. We have decided to do this — quietly, without telling anyone — for every weaver we work with, every time we visit. Lakshmi got a new spindle wheel last month.
If the saree on this site ages well, it is because the loom did.