An Archive From The Dawn of The 21st century

The document published along with the entire exhibition and collection of facets that embellished and gave a better understanding of the world of khadi had a simple, austere, and yet highly aesthetic cover printed on hand-made paper.

A closer look at the half-title page brings the reader closer to the unique textures found in khadi fabric.

Of the 70 pages of the book, some offer detailed descriptions of the composition, structure and physical properties of cotton fibre.

Details given of the nature of cotton fibre are seldom described in such scientific terms as in this paper.

Cotton ginning is the process of preparing yarn from extracting it from the cotton seed to preparing it to go on the spindle.

Cotton fluff coming from each seed is teased out and cleaned with a comb made of fish bone.

Fluffed cotton is gathered together and rolled like dough into larger handfuls.

A variety of instruments used for ginning are shown in with hand drawn sketches.

The simple carding process described and illustrated here is exactly what was seen still happening in Andhra Pradesh twenty years later.

The flattened cotton strips are passed on to be fluffed and cleaned further.

Hand held spindles called takli or the spinning wheel called a charkha are the most ancient ways of turning a sliver of cotton into twisted thread.

The author of this chapter goes into an intricate description of how yarn is spun on a charkha.

The spun yarn is wound on a square frame and turned by hand. To make a normal hank the yarn has to be wound around 1000 times.

Small efforts at mechanization were encouraged by Mahatma Gandhi to increase output. Many believe Gandhi was against mechanized production but he never objected to machines reducing drudgery or increasing production as long as the human being was not displaced in the process.

Continuing the journey of modernization, illustrations and technical processes of the New Model Charkha (NMC) tell the story of the charkha moving forward.

Information in the document moves to a comparison of different types of yarn and how they affect the nature and properties of the fabric.

Khadi yarn stretched out to its full length, and a hank of yarn dyed a deep madder red left casually on it at one end.

Weaving is the final process in the laborious production of khadi cloth. Stretching and warping are just some of them.

All these are carried out in areas where communities of handloom and khadi weavers reside, all over India.

Inside a home, the mother weaves while her young daughter sits beside the loom making a garland of flowers.

The author provides details of techniques employed to obtain different types of weaves.

The chapter ends with descriptions of different farming methods to grow cotton and the slow return to the growing of organic cotton.

Some of the colours achieved through natural dyeing with plant material.

On the very last page is a reproduction of what is captioned as the earliest known depiction of hand-spinning and weaving in the Indian sub-continent. It dates back to 1st century B.C.

Read more about khadi weaving here:
-Khadi spinning and weaving: An age-old journey
-Ponduru - spinning and weaving 20 years later