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City’s poor connect to global fashion

Marginalised Muslim craftswomen and weavers in the capital are making an international connection with their work thanks to two projects by the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), one of the country’s oldest crafts and women’s empowerment organisations.

One project, ‘Ruaab: SEWA Artisans Producer Company’, is empowering nearly 1,500 Muslim women in the eastern fringes of the capital with full-time jobs as embroiderers and designers to international brands like Zara, Gap Inc-Banana Republic, Monsoon, nEXT, Newlook and Vero Moda.

The women work both at the SEWA centres and out of their homes. Their creations, mostly saris and yardage, are finding global platforms through the foreign missions like the German, American and Canadian embassies in India, the government’s Handloom Commission, Silk Mark and private organisations.

In April, hundreds of Muslim women weavers employed with SEWA created a range of embroidered home furnishings — mostly hand-beaded cushions - for  London-based designer Tracey Boyd’s Aboydbazaar — a show marking his return to the world of accessory and apparel design. Boyd was named the new British Designer Of The Year in 2000.

‘The cushions were embellished with ari thread embroidery and beadwork,’ SEWA designer Pallavi Yadav said at a showcase of Ruaab in the capital on Friday.

Yadav said: ‘The SEWA centres in east Delhi, which are Muslim-dominated, has more than 350 regular Muslim workers and over 700 home-based workers.’

Most of these workers are migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. The women have learnt the traditional ari thread work from their native villages in districts like Barielly and Bulandsahar.

The ari embroidery is a variation of the Kashmiri addawork — an intricate thread craft, Yadav said.

‘It is a common sight in the resettlement slums in east Delhi to find these women sitting outside their houses with a piece of fabric tied to a long adda, a wooden frame on which they embroider,’ Yadav said.

The organisation, which was set up in 1972 by Ela Bhatt in Gujarat, works in nine states across india.

The weavers are paid Rs 600 per sari against the Rs 500 paid by the government, and Rs 250 by middlemen.

For the illiterate and poor Muslim women, who have never been out of the confines of their homes, the formal engagement with SEWA has been socially and psychologically empowering.

They can now go out unescorted, speak to people. The core group of sample crafts people — who make samples for international brands — now have developed international fashion consciousness.

‘We took a few women to London a couple of years ago to show them the brand headquarters to which they supplied. They now suggest their own inputs for the designs,’ Yadav said.

Confidence shines like an armour in the faces and body language of Tabassum, Taslim and Zeenat — three full-time ari thread workers from Sundernagar near Noida in east Delhi. They say working for SEWA has taken the insecurity out of their lives.
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