Handloom Livelihoods / Women of the Loom / PART II Feature

Spotlight: Women of the Loom

Saving a Handmade Textile Means Rebuilding the Buyers Who Once Prized It

Himroo, a centuries-old silk-and-cotton weave from the city now called Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar, had fallen from thousands of handlooms to none still working. Arushi Chowdhury Khanna, who founded the social enterprise LoomKatha, argues that reviving such a craft depends less on preserving skill than on rebuilding the market and the visibility that sustain it, not on the loom alone.

Subir Ghosh

11 August 2026

6 minutes

Long Story, Cut Short

Himroo's near-extinction stemmed from a collapsed market rather than lost skill, so its revival begins with rebuilding demand and visibility.
A discerning luxury clientele, made more aware by social media, now pays for authentic Himroo over cheaper powerloom imitations.
Renewed demand has outrun supply, making patient six-month training and patron funding the next constraint on the craft's survival.

By returning more of a product's value to its maker, the revival model roughly doubled artisan incomes within two years and drew younger women toward the loom.

Wage Factor By returning more of a product's value to its maker, the revival model roughly doubled artisan incomes within two years and drew younger women toward the loom. Loom Katha

When LoomKatha first set out to revive Himroo in the city that had woven it for centuries, it could not find a single working loom, the frame on which the whole craft turns. The craft that once ran to some 2,500 handlooms had all but died out. What killed it was not the loss of the skill, which a few families still held, but the loss of the market that had paid for it.

The trade had not simply vanished; it had been undercut. Powerloom cloth crowds the shops, much of it passed off as handwoven to an untrained eye, so the buyer who wants the real thing must first be taught to tell it apart. The weave did not lose to a better machine. It lost to a cheaper copy that borrowed its name.

Arushi Chowdhury Khanna, the founder of LoomKatha, reads that collapse as a lesson about markets rather than looms. Asked whether visibility now matters as much as income, she puts the two in sequence rather than opposition. "Yes, it does. Because income generation is dependent on a stable, growing market for the product, one of the key drivers of which is increased visibility of the craft form itself," she says. The market comes first. Only then the wage.

She comes to the argument with a record. After training at NIFT she spent three months among weavers rather than take a corporate internship, and later turned a fading Mubarakpur handloom into a UNESCO case study.

Himroo had not always been so easy to fake. Born in the Mughal courts and worked on a pit-and-paga loom by two weavers at once, it took its name from the Persian hum-ruh, or "similar," an affordable echo of gold-and-silver Kimkhab brocade. Aurangzeb prized it and the Nizams commissioned it for their sherwanis and robes. Royal patronage ended after 1948, and no commercial trade rose to replace it. The count of genuine handlooms in the city has since fallen to four, of which two still work.

Khanna's wager is that a discerning buyer can be rebuilt faster than the last looms fall silent. Preserving the technique keeps a few frames turning; rebuilding the demand around them decides whether the cloth has anywhere to go. The recovery now turns on a prior question, one the powerlooms answered for a generation: whether enough people can be brought to want the real thing, and to pay what it costs.

How a Lost Market Killed Himroo

A weaver's livelihood, and the survival of the skill with it, rests on demand for what the loom makes, and that demand had been the first thing to go.

There is a general reluctance to enter the craft. Himroo was badly hit by competition from powerloom products within Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar (Aurangabad) itself in the 90s, and from over a hundred operational looms the numbers dwindled to zero by the time LoomKatha began working with Himroo in 2019.

Himroo had been given up for dead before. In Hyderabad the trade was all but gone by the 1970s, and Suraiya Hasan Bose, returning in 1972, found barely a dozen looms.

The trade that survived the collapse was a counterfeit one. Retailers stocked Himroo-branded cloth that had never touched an Aurangabad loom, even as the city's own star hotels kept up a captive demand for the genuine article, and the supply chain that should have connected the two had broken in the middle. Demand existed. It simply never reached the loom.

What LoomKatha set out to prove was that the demand could be redirected, and the instrument was visibility. Over the past few years, Khanna has found, the spread of social media has given customers a keener sense of how handwoven cloth is actually made, and a growing number of luxury buyers now prize the handmade process over machine-made bling. Knowledge, in other words, has begun to reorganise the trade. The powerloom had won on price alone; once the buyer could see what price concealed, that advantage began to erode. Legibility is what the buyer now pays for.

The proof shows up in what the work now pays. Across its crafts, LoomKatha's model routes more of the end-product value back to the producer, and within two years it had roughly doubled artisan incomes, from seventy to a hundred and fifty dollars a month. Himroo itself has travelled further than the city, reaching as far as the red carpet at Cannes. Visibility, once it takes hold, pays.

The reversal has been sharp enough to create the opposite problem. "However, as we at LoomKatha have been able to prove, there is a discerning customer who prefers to buy authentic, well-made Himroo products over powerloom items. Due to the growing market interest for this craft we presently have an excess of demand over supply," Khanna says. The constraint has moved. Where the difficulty once lay in selling the cloth, it now lies in making enough of it, and that shifts the whole question of recovery from the shop to the loom, and to the far slower business of who is left to work it.

Arushi Chowdhury Khanna

Founder

LoomKatha

Not every artisan is an entrepreneur. There are vast numbers of exceptionally skilled artisans who simply do not have the bandwidth to create social media content, handle complex paperwork or the financial acumen required to run a business. Yet, they are very talented and their work is refined and beautiful. In this category, are artisans who are senior in age, women artisans who juggle traditional gender roles with their work and those who would not be considered literate by conventional definition.

Training the Weavers the Market Wants

Demand came back faster than the weavers. Preserving the skill, it turns out, needs far more than guarding a technique: people willing to learn it, and the means to keep them while they do. Neither is quickly built. It was never skill that ran short here; time and money were.

The interest is real, and so is the cost that comes with it. The existing weavers have seen sustained year-on-year growth in their income, and for that reason interested young women are now coming to be trained in the craft. The long training period of six months entails continuous financial support to the trainees during this period, and LoomKatha is always looking to expand the number of trainees through support from interested patrons. A weaver cannot be produced in a quarter. Six months is the floor, and someone has to pay for them.

LoomKatha has done the arithmetic the hard way. Starting from a city with no working looms, it revived two defunct looms, built four new ones and trained a group of community weavers to produce a refined Himroo, before COVID-19 stopped the work. That is the true measure of what recovery costs: not a campaign but years of frames rebuilt one at a time, each weaver taught by hand.

A gifted weaver is not a gifted businessperson, and the revival has to carry the difference. "Not every artisan is an entrepreneur. There are vast numbers of exceptionally skilled artisans who simply do not have the bandwidth to create social media content, handle complex paperwork or the financial acumen required to run a business," Khanna says. The skill is not in question; the access is. The market answers to whoever can sell, and most of these makers cannot.

Who those artisans are shapes what the revival must provide. "In this category, are artisans who are senior in age, women artisans who juggle traditional gender roles with their work and those who would not be considered literate by conventional definition. While there is certainly no space for the sweatshops and indentured labour models of the last century, social businesses with a double bottomline approach are definitely required to discover, sustain, promote and grow skilled artisan networks," Khanna says.

The durability of the craft, then, rests on a bridge between the loom and the buyer: funded training on one side, social-business intermediation on the other. Neither substitutes for the other, and neither is yet built to last.

A Revival Racing Against Its Weavers

Whether artisans will still need intermediaries once they can reach buyers directly is the question Khanna leaves open. "This is a very interesting question and one that I personally have been pondering over. My sense is that there is space for both," she says. The market is no longer the hard part; the workforce is. Two looms turn today where LoomKatha once found none, and a handful of ageing weavers hold the rest. Whether the young women now training can replace those hands is the whole of it.

Craft Origins

Weavers carried the craft to the Deccan in the fourteenth century after the court moved its capital toward Daulatabad.
Estimates of Himroo's peak vary widely, from over two thousand handlooms to several hundred looms in the Nawabpura quarter alone.
Only a handful of old quarters, among them Nawabpura and Himayat Bagh, still hold any Himroo looms.
The city itself was renamed Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, approved by the central government in early 2023 and formalised months later.
The surviving handloom tradition now rests heavily on the Qureshi family's continued custodianship of the craft.

The Organisation

LoomKatha began in late 2016, its name a play on Lok Katha, meaning folk tale, when fabrics travelled from Churu.
Beyond Himroo, the enterprise works with weaves including Jamdani and Tasar across West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Its Himroo Revival Project is managed by Mandar Shahane, who earlier ran skills training programmes in Sholapur.
Co-founder Sidhika Lillaney leads product design, bringing experience across luxury export and bespoke bridalwear to the workshop.
In early 2026 the enterprise was named one of the Ibu Movement's Global Champions for reviving heritage craft.

Subir Ghosh

SUBIR GHOSH is a Kolkata-based independent journalist-writer-researcher who writes about environment, corruption, crony capitalism, conflict, wildlife, and cinema. He is the author of two books, and has co-authored two more with others. He writes, edits, reports and designs. He is also a professionally trained and qualified photographer.

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