The silk weavers of Peeli Kothi

Peeli Kothi is a lane you would miss if you were not looking for it. It runs off Madanpura, one of the older Muslim-majority quarters of the old city, and halfway down on the left there is a wooden door painted a colour that used to be green. There is no sign. There is no address board. The building above the door is three storeys, brick and lime plaster, with two small carved balconies that would once have been called jharokhas and that today mostly serve as places to hang laundry. Behind the wooden door, on a raised platform two steps up from the courtyard floor, Anwar bhai has been weaving Banarasi silk for forty-one years. His father wove it for fifty-three. His grandfather, who moved here from Azamgarh in 1922, wove it for the better part of six decades. There are three generations of the same family still living in the same house, and two of them still work the same loom.

The loom is a jaal loom a jacquard-style contraption that Anwar's grandfather bought second-hand in 1958 and has been repaired, part by part, ever since. If you had to guess, standing in the courtyard for the first time, at what the machine actually is, you would not get there. It is roughly ten feet long, seven feet high, built of teak and iron and rope, and rigged above it are two hundred and forty-eight punched cards narrow rectangles of thick paper with holes drilled through them in specific patterns hanging like paper prayer flags between the ceiling beams. Each card decides one row of the pattern being woven. The cards are laced together into a single continuous chain, and the loom advances one card at a time as the weaver throws the shuttle back and forth beneath them.

A single sari, on this loom, takes between fifteen days and four months to weave. The fifteen-day sari is a plain-body piece with a woven border and a moderately complex pallu the end panel that hangs over the shoulder. The four-month sari is a full jaal an all-over pattern of interlocking motifs, in some cases with three or four different colours of zari (metallic thread) simultaneously in the design. There are a few weavers in the city still doing six-month and even year-long saris, mostly on commission for weddings in families that can afford to commission a piece of art. Anwar has done three in his career. He talks about them the way a stonemason might talk about the small chapel windows he cut in a career otherwise made of ordinary house walls.

The silk itself comes from Bangalore, not Banaras. This is the first surprise for most visitors and it disappoints some of them. The mulberry silk is spun in Karnataka, dyed in bulk in the industrial estates around Mysore, and shipped north to Varanasi in reels that are then re-dyed here to the specific shades a given weaver wants. The zari the gold or silver thread that is the second essential ingredient of the Banarasi sari comes from Surat in Gujarat, where a small number of families still draw fine metal wire through a series of graduated diamond dies and wrap it, filament by filament, around a silk core. The design comes from Banaras. The weaver comes from Banaras. The loom comes from Banaras. That is the whole city in one sentence a place that has, for at least four hundred years, been very good at making a beautiful thing out of raw materials that came from somewhere else.

The design cards are the hidden art of the process. They are made by nakshabandh pattern-makers who work in a completely separate trade from the weavers, and there are perhaps twenty families in Varanasi who still practise it at a high level. A skilled nakshabandh takes a graph-paper drawing of a pattern and translates it, node by node, into the pattern of holes on the cards. A single all-over jaal design might need eight hundred to two thousand cards. The cards can be reused the same design can be woven multiple times, on multiple looms, as long as the family has kept the card set safely but if a set is lost, or destroyed in a monsoon flood (as many were in the 2016 flood), the design is often lost with it. There are perhaps a thousand traditional Banarasi designs on record. There are, by some estimates, five hundred more that have been lost in the last forty years.

Anwar sits at the loom cross-legged, on a folded cotton mat, with his feet resting on the treadles below. The treadles lift and lower the warp threads to open a shed the temporary gap between the upper and lower layers of thread through which the shuttle is thrown. The shuttle carries the weft. As it lands on the far side, the punched card at the top of the loom drops, sending a specific set of hooks down to lift specific warp threads for the next row's pattern. Anwar throws the shuttle back with his left hand, pulls the beater bar with his right to press the weft firm, and moves his feet on the treadles to open the next shed. It is one motion, and it is completed in about two seconds. Nine rows a minute. Roughly five hundred and forty rows an hour. Around four thousand rows in a working day, which produces two-thirds of an inch of finished sari.

The economics of this are, to put it very mildly, not good. A hand-loomed Banarasi silk sari with a full jaal pattern, worked over three months at eight to nine hours a day, sells wholesale for roughly forty to fifty thousand rupees. Out of that, the raw silk is about ten thousand, the zari is about eight, the nakshabandh's card set (if new) is another five to eight thousand, and the master weaver's assistants Anwar has two, both cousins need to be paid. What Anwar keeps at the end of three months' work is, in a good year, around fifteen thousand rupees. That is about a hundred and eighty US dollars for three months of skilled labour. This is why the young men of the family, including two of Anwar's four sons, no longer weave. One drives an Uber. One has a small mobile-phone repair shop in Godowlia. The third works in a bank in Lucknow. The fourth, at nineteen, has just started sitting at the loom in the afternoons.

The competition the reason the price cannot rise is the powerloom. In and around Varanasi, there are perhaps forty thousand powerlooms producing what is sold, legally in most cases, as Banarasi silk. A powerloom running three shifts can produce ten to fifteen saris a day. The pattern is programmed into a computer, the yarn is a blend of silk and viscose, the zari is often plastic-coated rather than metal-core, and the finished piece can retail for as little as two thousand rupees. To the untrained eye, side by side at a distance, they look similar. To anyone who has picked up both, the difference is immediate the hand-loomed piece is denser, heavier, has a specific dry rustle when you crush it in the hand, and shows the tiny irregularities that mean a human made every row of it. But the untrained eye is most of the market, and most of the market cannot tell the difference until it has been shown, which is more or less the whole problem.

There are a few things being done about this. A Geographical Indication tag was granted to Banarasi silk in 2009, which in principle means that a sari sold as 'Banarasi' has to have been woven in one of six districts around Varanasi. In practice, enforcement is thin, and the tag does not distinguish between hand-loomed and powerloom pieces. A number of small cooperatives a few in Madanpura, a few in Alaipur, and a well-run one in Sarai Mohana are trying to build direct-to-buyer sales channels that cut out the wholesale market. Anwar's family is part of one of these, and about a quarter of their annual output now sells through a small online store run by a designer in Bombay who spends two weeks a year in Varanasi curating pieces. The margins are better; the volume is small.

If you want to visit a working loom and we strongly recommend that you do, at least once, on a longer trip our hosts will arrange it. There is no fee to visit; Anwar and the weavers we work with will happily talk to you for as long as you have questions, and they will happily let you sit at the loom for a few minutes and try throwing the shuttle yourself, which is much harder than it looks. What we ask is that if you can, you buy something small before you leave. A stole, a runner, a small piece of fabric for a cushion. Even a two-thousand-rupee purchase, made directly, is meaningful in a way the same money spent at a downtown showroom is not.

On what to buy: a full sari is a significant purchase and one we suggest you make only if you have some knowledge of what you are looking at. Ask about the fabric composition (a real katan silk should be pure mulberry, no viscose), about the zari (real zari should have a matte, warm gold rather than a bright yellow gleam), about the loom (ask to see the loom the specific piece was woven on if possible), and about the design (ask whether the nakshabandh who made the cards is still working, and if so where a small detail that separates a serious seller from a middleman). For a first-time buyer, a stole or a dupatta in a single-colour body with a woven border is a much better first purchase than a full jaal sari; the piece is more manageable to wear, the price is more manageable to spend, and the craft is entirely visible.

On price: a hand-loomed silk stole from a working loom, sold directly by the weaver, runs between three thousand five hundred and eight thousand rupees depending on the border complexity. A full plain-body sari with a woven border and a modest pallu runs between twenty and thirty thousand. A full jaal is between fifty thousand and a couple of lakhs. These prices are, if you compare them to what Banarasi silk sells for in Delhi or Bombay boutiques, extremely reasonable. Compared to what a powerloom copy costs, they are expensive. Compared to what the weaver's labour is worth, they are cheap. You are paying for the middle of that spectrum.

On authenticity certificates: the government's Silk Mark scheme provides tags for verified pure silk pieces, and the Handloom Mark provides tags for verified hand-loomed pieces. A piece that has both is what you want. Not every genuine piece has them the paperwork is a burden for small weavers and many skip it but if a shop is offering to sell you a certified Banarasi silk without either tag and with a hard sell, be politely sceptical.

On the afternoon we spent at the loom: it was hotter than we had planned for, the courtyard fan was broken, and Anwar's grandson brought us glasses of nimbu paani three times over four hours. Anwar wove about an inch and a half of a red-and-gold pallu, which is roughly what he had committed to for the day. We did not, in the end, buy the sari he was working on it was already commissioned by a family in Meerut but we bought two stoles from a piece his cousin had finished the week before, and one of them is on the back of the chair I am writing this from. It has a specific rustle when you shake it out that a powerloom stole does not have. It is worth the whole afternoon just to know what that sound is.