How a Selvedge naturally-coloured cotton garment travels the cycle from raw to finished

For Yali’s creative director Kshitija Mruthyunjaya, 32, working on this project yielded useful lessons on casting new narratives to make largely-unknown brown cotton commercially viable. Her background in architecture came handy, she thinks. “Architecture and textiles are both context and research-based interventions. It’s about how a building or a fabric affects its surrounding and the system at large.” 

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She proposes a value-driven supply chain that connects seed to skin. A financial partnership with Udaanta helped her grasp the behaviour of the cotton variant. “They [Udaanta] did most of the preliminary research into the farming of brown cotton, and restarted the backend chain of spinners, ginners and slivering for the yarn.” This, she says, was followed by working with the weavers at Janapada Trust, and Yash Sanhotra, Yali’s former in-house textile designer responsible for developing striped yardages for Selvedge. 

A hand-woven Kandu textile with a selvedge border of alizarin, catechu and kora. Pic courtesy/Udaanta

“The system is broken. [There is] a disconnect between the past and present,” she says. With Yali’s projects, she is trying to figure out how she can use her knowledge in design as regenerative action to create conscious and inclusive communities. “Like brown cotton, we will continue exploring other indigenous handspun, hand-woven textiles, with a focus on areas where the skill set can be improved,” she adds, admitting she hadn’t heard of brown cotton before this project came along. She is not alone. A dozen Indian designers we approached for this article were unaware of its existence. 

It seems timely that naturally-coloured cotton is seeing a renaissance. The currently employed techniques of white cotton cultivation and processing are famously high maintenance, plagued by less-than-promised harvests, and farmers who lack access to quality seeds and are struggling with climate fluctuations and unreliable markets. Trapped in a cycle of debt, they have made repeated headlines over the last few years. Meanwhile, processing involves environment-unfriendly bleaching and dyeing. The crop is also notoriously thirsty for water and energy. Cotton is an environmental nightmare.

Kshitija Mruthyunjaya and Priyanka Jayanth

But, its pedigreed cousin—the coloured variant—is environmentally favourable; its earthy claims based on the fact that it is a wholly rain-fed, pest and drought-resistant crop, and does not need to be dyed using toxic chemicals. A metre of cloth made with this cotton uses less than a litre of water, that too only at the starching stage; much unlike a T-shirt made of white cotton requiring 2,000 litres of water. “So, one is actually looking at this cotton as a response to climate change,” says Ravi Kiran of the label Metaphor Racha, and trustee at Udaanta. 

Ravi Kiran co-founded the Bengaluru-based public trust with architect Chitra Vishwanath and filmmaker Sushma Veerappa in 2018. “It was in 2015 that one read and participated in handloom satyagrahas called by activists like Uzramma and Prasanna. Uzramma [veteran handloom activist] talked about the threat to the handloom industry because of the collapse of the linkages between land and loom,” Veerappa says, apropos the birth of Kandu, an initiative which is not merely Udaanta’s marketing arm but also its brand. 

Uzramma’s land-to-loom logic is inextricably intertwined in Kandu’s fiber, one that attempts to ensure that all those working in the value chain, including the farmer, earn fair wages. “But we soon learned that textile is actually a by-product, a natural culmination of our work with the cotton farmer,” she adds. Presently one farmer, Chennabasappa Masuti (he is popularly called “Chairman” by the locals) grows the cotton variant in a village in North Karnataka. This offered Kandu an opportunity to shift focus to an alternative journey for cotton, to see if scaling up to more farmers/acreage can happen in parallel with sustainable farming practices. They are also looking into machines that can spin the variety as all other industrial spinning machines are designed for longer staple yarns that cater to fast fashion. “Can there be a collective of brown cotton farmers who will demand the right procurement price for their cotton? The game-changer comes when there is so much more of brown cotton that machines are adapted to spin it, so that the yarn is more pliable for more handloom weavers to use it,” says Ravi Kiran.

The medium staple length brown cotton lends itself beautifully to the 32-count ambar charkha spun yarn, an ideal weight for garmenting purpose. The colour being neutral is perfect for home furnishings too. Ravi Kiran adds: “More than the beauty of colour, the goodness of brown cotton is in the coming together of a vast number of people to make a piece of cloth, which is sustainable on all fronts.” As of now, Kandu does not have plans to introduce garments. The brand instead invites designers, small brands and consumers to be a part of this value chain, where they are involved in garment making.   

Coloured cotton also sits peacefully with plant-based fibers like bamboo, linen, hemp and even stinging nettles as an alternative to the white gold that is cotton. According to a report by environmental news service Mongabay-India, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research plans to introduce a variety of coloured, desi cotton this year. 

“We all need to ask what is the true cost of a metre of textile that we purchase. In terms of what the farmer earns and what in today’s parlance goes as ecological cost. The textile we make is produced with maximum ecological and economic responsibility. What is the price a consumer will pay for it?” Ravi Kiran wonders.

1metre/1 litre
Amount of water brown cotton uses (starching stage) 

vs 

2,000 litre
Amount of water T-shirt made of white cotton requires