A weaver's morning in Banaras

It is 5:30 am when Mohammed Ashraf sits at his loom. The light is grey-pink. The Ganges is a quarter-mile away through the alleys of the old city. The household is asleep. He has two hours before the children wake up and the day begins properly.

This is when most of the weaving gets done. Banarasi handloom is intricate enough that you cannot do it with conversation in the room. The morning hours are for the pallu — the densely-worked decorative end of the saree — and the rest of the day is for the body, where the work is faster but still by hand.

What the loom is doing

A Banarasi handloom has somewhere between 800 and 5,000 jacquard punch cards loaded at the start of a piece. Each card represents one row of the saree. The weaver pulls a thread, the cards advance, the pattern emerges row by row.

On the heaviest pallus, one weaver in eight hours of work weaves roughly four inches of length. A saree pallu is one to two feet. So a heirloom-weight pallu is two to four weeks of one weaver's mornings. The body is faster — six to eight weeks total per saree.

The zari

Real zari is silver wire, plated with gold, drawn fine enough to wind around a silk core. The weaver weaves it directly into the saree like any other thread, but heavier — an heirloom saree may carry over a kilogram of silver in the pallu alone. This is why a real Banarasi feels different when you hold it. It is partly the weight you are feeling.

The economics

We pay our Banarasi cluster per saree, at rates that work out to roughly twice the regional median for equivalent work. Even at those rates, a weaver's hourly earning is modest by global standards. The economics of handloom silk are unforgiving and the future of the craft depends on customers being willing to pay what the work is worth.

When you hold a real Banarasi, you are holding six weeks of someone's mornings.

Mohammed Ashraf has been weaving since he was sixteen. His father did, and his grandfather did. His son is doing computer science at a university in Lucknow. That is fine. The cluster will continue, but probably smaller, and probably made by fewer people doing more of it. We are paying attention.