Narayanpet Sarees

We went on a day trip to Narayanpet, a town famous for weaving handloom sarees. The aim of our trip was to get an overview of how these sarees were woven. Narayanpet is around 175km from Hyderabad and is known for the special kind of sarees available only at this place. These sarees were first developed in 1986 and the pattern of the sarees is very similar to Irkaal sarees made in Irkaal, Karnataka. These sarees are  typically woven with a contrast border and in the body have self colored checks and contrast colored checks. The sarees are made from cotton, mixing cotton with silk and pure silk and have traditional borders and pallus.

We have some of our relatives stay in Narayanpet and luckily there was a maggam (Telugu for place where the whole weaving action takes place) right behind their house. We could overhear the rythmic sounds that came out from the maggam from their place.The owner of the place was kind and patient enough to show us the entire process of how its done.

The yarn that is bought from Vijayawada, AP, is spun into bobbin cases using a spinning wheel as shown in the picture below. They spin almost 150 such bobbin cases in order to get to the next stage.




A bobbin case after being spun would typically look like this.




The bobbin cases are then assembled onto a rustic looking setup from where all the yarn is spun uniformly onto a log shaped part of the weaving instrument.















There is a pattern scale that decides where every thread goes to obtain the desired design and depending on this the thread is meticulously passed through coils and rods and the tension of the thread needs to remain intact failing which the saree loses its continuity.




To obtain the vertical lines in the saree there is another bobbin case that goes back and forth during the weaving process.





With a combination of hand and feet movement, the weaver starts weaving the saree. The whole process looks very tedious and takes almost 2 days for each saree and the yeild from the whole setup is around 70 sarees depending on how much yarn has been spun initially.

A weaver proudly shows off his labor of love

These particular sarees were priced at Rs 300. After looking at the labour intensive process it seemed unjust that the weavers got pittens for their effort but some sarees go as high as Rs 5000 too depending on the quality of the thread and the thread count. The trip came to an end and was well worth the time and energy.