In India, Women Work to Preserve The Craft of Lace
In India, Women Work to Preserve The Craft of Lace
Even With Low-Cost Labor, Making It by Hand Is a Difficult Business
By ELLEN BYRON
February 14, 2006; Page A1
The Wall Street Journal
KANYAKUMARI, India -- In a small town at the country's southern tip, 10 women sit on wooden benches, bowed over their sewing work. Dressed in brightly colored saris, most of them pin jasmine blossoms in their hair each day before coming to work. Shutters are kept closed to prevent the strong ocean breeze from blowing dust into the carefully swept room.
Their work requires a particularly difficult technique, following a fine pattern by pulling needle and thread through layers of cloth. When the design is finished, the pattern and cloth are pulled away, leaving a delicate piece of lace. One 45-centimeter piece of needle lace takes the women here about 200 hours to create. They earn as much as 3,000 rupees, or $68, a month.
Here in southern India, the historic craft of lace is making an unlikely last stand. Centuries after its heyday in Europe, lacemaking is all but over as commercial handiwork, done only in few developing countries and by a handful of European artisans.
Though lace has little to do with Indian customs and isn't usually found in Indian homes, lacemaking is a livelihood for hundreds of women here. The craft has been handed down since the mid-19th century, when missionary nuns from Belgium and elsewhere in Europe brought lace here.
"Everything else is made by machines, which is why we must sure this art survives," says Aruna Seth, a 60-year-old exporter who is working with Indian lacemakers to keep their tradition alive.
For generations, handmade lace was a flourishing industry in Europe, employing hundreds of thousands of workers. From the 16th century through the 18th century, lace was a coveted luxury, rivaling fine jewelry. Many royal coffers nearly went bankrupt satisfying kings' and queens' appetite for it. Lacemakers spied on rivals' new designs, and governments implemented bans on lace imports to protect their industries.
Though long an aristocratic indulgence, lace filtered down to a wider populace through the Victorian Age, where it became an aspirational symbol of a new middle class. It appeared on shawls, tablecloths, wedding garb, sleeve ruffles, underwear and nightclothes, according to lace historian Santina Levey. Lace also spread through the U.S., with settlers who imported it from England, then later produced it on their own.
But as lacemaking machines became increasingly sophisticated in the Industrial Age, handmade work became more rare in the West.
India's lacemaking tradition started as a way to help young women earn a living, when nuns from Europe began arriving in India as missionaries. Lace had long been a form of sustenance for women of the church and charity institutions: It was wholesome toil at a time when women were discouraged from working outside the home. There were no costly materials involved -- just thread, bobbins and needles. Moreover, making lace requires extremely hygienic conditions; dirt or dust is ruinous. So the occupation was thought to promote cleanliness, virtue and good health.
The nuns in India taught poor women -- though only unmarried or widowed ones -- to make lace and other fine embroideries that would be shipped overseas. Even as the popularity of lace declined throughout the 20th century, lacemaking continued to provide women with a livelihood in rural pockets of India.
Ms. Seth, a college-educated native of Calcutta, wants to keep that going. The bulk of her export business, based in Chennai, India's fourth-largest city, is in selling brightly colored silk tablecloths, pillow covers and napkins with embroidery. Ms. Seth, who has been in business for around 20 years, has sales of about $16,000 a year. She now spends most of her time pursuing lace opportunities, hoping to see the craft endure.
She first learned of India's lace heritage 15 years ago, when a client asked whether she could supply some pieces. While she says she was skeptical whether anyone in India could match the sophistication of European handiwork, she began searching and stumbled upon a life-changing discovery: a handful of convents where women had been making lace for generations.
Ms. Seth says she was stunned by the ability of the lacemakers she met -- and saw an opportunity in the fact that only unmarried women were allowed to work at the convents. Realizing there was a wealth of trained lacemakers in the area, out of work only because they had married, she decided to put them back in a job.
Today, Ms. Seth draws on the skill of about 120 women in this rural region, both inside convents and in four units she founded, which employ women regardless of marital status. The tip of India is ideal for lacemaking, she says, because it experiences two monsoon seasons a year -- guaranteeing plenty of dust-free months. It also gives the women a way to earn money when the heavy rain prevents other family members from doing field work, working in rice paddies or picking mangoes, jackfruit, coconut and bananas.
Bommie Isaac, 24 years old, smiles when her supervisor calls her the best lacemaker at the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent in the town of Kanyakumari. Ms. Isaac, who has been making lace since she was 15, helps support her mother, three brothers and two sisters still living at home. Her father died of rheumatism 13 years ago.
Ms. Isaac is frustrated that work shelling and roasting cashews at a nearby factory pays more than lacemaking. "I feel such a rare skill should be worth more money," she says. "I know that not everyone can make this lace."
Maintaining a steady stream of business has become increasingly difficult. Despite a global boom in the luxury market, Ms. Seth says consumers seem ambivalent about the value of handmade craftsmanship. Even though lace has come back in fashion -- last month's Vogue listed lace as one of the top trends for spring -- she worries more than ever that she is up against the same foe that toppled handmade lacemaking across Europe a century ago: machines.
David Forster, owner of Léron Inc., a couture linen boutique on New York's Madison Avenue, says his lace business is half what it was 10 years ago. The hassle of hand washing and ironing delicate handmade lace doesn't appeal to modern households, he says.
His shop, which has carried Ms. Seth's lace for about 12 years, still carries a few pieces from her lacemakers, which he says are among the finest quality in the world. His inventory of Ms. Seth's lace includes a linen guest towel trimmed with lace that retails for $75, a set of six cocktail napkins with lace trim priced at $325 and a lace luncheon set, which includes 12 placemats and 12 napkins, for $3,400.
Despite the workmanship, "the days of handmade lace are numbered," says Mr. Forster. "It's hard for people in our culture to understand the level of skill and dedication it takes to make something like this."
In the global economy, Ms. Seth faces competition. Most of her products are sold to retailers, who usually more than double the wholesale prices she charges, which range from $14 to $74, depending on the piece. She says clients have told her they can get handmade lace less expensively from places such as China and Vietnam. She says she won't cut her workers' wages, but continues to tout what she sees as the higher quality of their craftsmanship and materials.
Lace is still made by hand in other countries. Rose Delahaye has lived for years throughout Asia with her husband, a Belgian diplomat. During her travels, she has seen handmade lace sold in China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Sri Lanka, among other locales.
During trips home to her native Belgium, she saw European-made lace being sold in tourist shops. But for the most part, she says, "now people in Europe only make lace as a hobby."
Herself a skilled lacemaker, Ms. Delahaye concedes that even she has found it sometimes difficult to distinguish lace made by machine. "If I can't tell the difference, how can a tourist who knows nothing about lace?"
Last year, Ms. Seth enlisted the help of Victoria D'Angelo, a U.S.-based specialist in home-textile marketing. They have been developing variations on classic lace designs, including lace as framed art, table decorations with beading, satin and silk, and items aimed at the Christian market, such as Bible covers, bookmarks and lace crosses.
"The challenge is finding a market for handmade lace -- it's shrinking, but it exists," says Ms. Seth. "We just have to find it."
The December 2004 tsunami redoubled her efforts. Waves washed away one of her lacemaking units, located in a beachfront building in the village of Colachal. Because the waves hit on a Sunday, the women weren't at work, but Ms. Seth still had rebuilding to do. Last spring, she founded a charitable trust to build a permanent, self-sustaining lacemaking center that would also provide training.
Using about $14,000 of her own money, Ms. Seth bought a building site in a southern village called Kalluvilai, so women from five nearby villages could easily travel there. The land, about 200 meters back from the main road, means the women and their lace will have limited dust and noise exposure, and its lush vegetation will help shield the building from the sun. A nearby bank will allow women to deposit earnings rather than take it back to family members who may misuse it, a common problem for poor women who earn their own money, Ms. Seth says.
Mary Angel Maria Arputham is one of the lacemakers who worked in the center destroyed by the tsunami. When her husband suffered a paralyzing fall seven years ago at his job picking coconuts, she needed a way to support her five children. For the mostly poor, uneducated women in the region, the options were few: making brooms from coconut husks and selling them along the road, or working in hot, smoke-filled cashew factories.
Instead, Ms. Arputham turned to lacemaking. After a year of training, she mastered the designs made by her unit. Her monthly wage of about $18 formed the main source of her family's income.
Eventually, it took her just a few days of quickly weaving and braiding nearly 100 long, fine threads wound on bobbins to make enough lace trim for a linen handkerchief. "Every time it feels good to finish a piece," she says. "You feel proud and happy -- I never thought I could do this, but now I can."
Since the tsunami hit, Ms. Arputham makes lace from her home and says she is grateful for a job. The local fishing industry was slowed by locals' unwillingness to eat fish for many weeks after the tsunami, believing fish were feeding on people who were washed away. Prawns were also shunned. About an hour before the wave hit, locals say the beach was covered with prawns scrambling from the water. The sight attracted hordes of village children, who hoped to snatch extra food for their families. They were among the first victims of the catastrophic waves, locals say.
After seven years of lacemaking, the 48-year-old Ms. Arputham says her eyes are weakening, so she usually works outdoors where the light is best. Keeping the snow-white thread looking pristine is difficult: She must shoo roaming chickens from beneath her work table, and every time she senses a strong breeze she stops to cover her lace with a wool cloth to protect it from dust. Not once has she delivered flawed or soiled lace, says Mohan Perinpa Muthu, Ms. Seth's local manager.
When Sister Deleela Gnanamma arrived at the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent five years ago, 45 young women made needle lace there. Now just 10 remain. She wants to employ more, but she doesn't have enough orders from Ms. Seth and other clients to do so: Her last order was fulfilled last March.
This worries her, not just because so many women need jobs, but also because she has been frequently told by clients that the 10 women she employs are the only women left in India still making this type of needle lace. "It's become a beautiful tradition here, and it should continue," she says.
Rosemary Yeshudas, 57, teaches lacemaking to newcomers at Ms. Seth's units. Over the 46 years she has been making lace, she has never seen the number of orders dwindle this much, she says. As she watched one day from the center of the workroom, 13 women, seated around the periphery, worked in quiet concentration. The only noise aside from the occasional call of a rooster is the patter of hundreds of bobbins falling softly against pillowed work surfaces.
"Before, if you could learn lace you would have a skill, and job, for the rest of your life," says Ms. Yesudhas. "But if the orders keep decreasing, this art, and job, will die."
Write to Ellen Byron at ellen.byron@wsj.com
Even With Low-Cost Labor, Making It by Hand Is a Difficult Business
By ELLEN BYRON
February 14, 2006; Page A1
The Wall Street Journal
KANYAKUMARI, India -- In a small town at the country's southern tip, 10 women sit on wooden benches, bowed over their sewing work. Dressed in brightly colored saris, most of them pin jasmine blossoms in their hair each day before coming to work. Shutters are kept closed to prevent the strong ocean breeze from blowing dust into the carefully swept room.
Their work requires a particularly difficult technique, following a fine pattern by pulling needle and thread through layers of cloth. When the design is finished, the pattern and cloth are pulled away, leaving a delicate piece of lace. One 45-centimeter piece of needle lace takes the women here about 200 hours to create. They earn as much as 3,000 rupees, or $68, a month.
Here in southern India, the historic craft of lace is making an unlikely last stand. Centuries after its heyday in Europe, lacemaking is all but over as commercial handiwork, done only in few developing countries and by a handful of European artisans.
Though lace has little to do with Indian customs and isn't usually found in Indian homes, lacemaking is a livelihood for hundreds of women here. The craft has been handed down since the mid-19th century, when missionary nuns from Belgium and elsewhere in Europe brought lace here.
"Everything else is made by machines, which is why we must sure this art survives," says Aruna Seth, a 60-year-old exporter who is working with Indian lacemakers to keep their tradition alive.
For generations, handmade lace was a flourishing industry in Europe, employing hundreds of thousands of workers. From the 16th century through the 18th century, lace was a coveted luxury, rivaling fine jewelry. Many royal coffers nearly went bankrupt satisfying kings' and queens' appetite for it. Lacemakers spied on rivals' new designs, and governments implemented bans on lace imports to protect their industries.
Though long an aristocratic indulgence, lace filtered down to a wider populace through the Victorian Age, where it became an aspirational symbol of a new middle class. It appeared on shawls, tablecloths, wedding garb, sleeve ruffles, underwear and nightclothes, according to lace historian Santina Levey. Lace also spread through the U.S., with settlers who imported it from England, then later produced it on their own.
But as lacemaking machines became increasingly sophisticated in the Industrial Age, handmade work became more rare in the West.
India's lacemaking tradition started as a way to help young women earn a living, when nuns from Europe began arriving in India as missionaries. Lace had long been a form of sustenance for women of the church and charity institutions: It was wholesome toil at a time when women were discouraged from working outside the home. There were no costly materials involved -- just thread, bobbins and needles. Moreover, making lace requires extremely hygienic conditions; dirt or dust is ruinous. So the occupation was thought to promote cleanliness, virtue and good health.
The nuns in India taught poor women -- though only unmarried or widowed ones -- to make lace and other fine embroideries that would be shipped overseas. Even as the popularity of lace declined throughout the 20th century, lacemaking continued to provide women with a livelihood in rural pockets of India.
Ms. Seth, a college-educated native of Calcutta, wants to keep that going. The bulk of her export business, based in Chennai, India's fourth-largest city, is in selling brightly colored silk tablecloths, pillow covers and napkins with embroidery. Ms. Seth, who has been in business for around 20 years, has sales of about $16,000 a year. She now spends most of her time pursuing lace opportunities, hoping to see the craft endure.
She first learned of India's lace heritage 15 years ago, when a client asked whether she could supply some pieces. While she says she was skeptical whether anyone in India could match the sophistication of European handiwork, she began searching and stumbled upon a life-changing discovery: a handful of convents where women had been making lace for generations.
Ms. Seth says she was stunned by the ability of the lacemakers she met -- and saw an opportunity in the fact that only unmarried women were allowed to work at the convents. Realizing there was a wealth of trained lacemakers in the area, out of work only because they had married, she decided to put them back in a job.
Today, Ms. Seth draws on the skill of about 120 women in this rural region, both inside convents and in four units she founded, which employ women regardless of marital status. The tip of India is ideal for lacemaking, she says, because it experiences two monsoon seasons a year -- guaranteeing plenty of dust-free months. It also gives the women a way to earn money when the heavy rain prevents other family members from doing field work, working in rice paddies or picking mangoes, jackfruit, coconut and bananas.
Bommie Isaac, 24 years old, smiles when her supervisor calls her the best lacemaker at the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent in the town of Kanyakumari. Ms. Isaac, who has been making lace since she was 15, helps support her mother, three brothers and two sisters still living at home. Her father died of rheumatism 13 years ago.
Ms. Isaac is frustrated that work shelling and roasting cashews at a nearby factory pays more than lacemaking. "I feel such a rare skill should be worth more money," she says. "I know that not everyone can make this lace."
Maintaining a steady stream of business has become increasingly difficult. Despite a global boom in the luxury market, Ms. Seth says consumers seem ambivalent about the value of handmade craftsmanship. Even though lace has come back in fashion -- last month's Vogue listed lace as one of the top trends for spring -- she worries more than ever that she is up against the same foe that toppled handmade lacemaking across Europe a century ago: machines.
David Forster, owner of Léron Inc., a couture linen boutique on New York's Madison Avenue, says his lace business is half what it was 10 years ago. The hassle of hand washing and ironing delicate handmade lace doesn't appeal to modern households, he says.
His shop, which has carried Ms. Seth's lace for about 12 years, still carries a few pieces from her lacemakers, which he says are among the finest quality in the world. His inventory of Ms. Seth's lace includes a linen guest towel trimmed with lace that retails for $75, a set of six cocktail napkins with lace trim priced at $325 and a lace luncheon set, which includes 12 placemats and 12 napkins, for $3,400.
Despite the workmanship, "the days of handmade lace are numbered," says Mr. Forster. "It's hard for people in our culture to understand the level of skill and dedication it takes to make something like this."
In the global economy, Ms. Seth faces competition. Most of her products are sold to retailers, who usually more than double the wholesale prices she charges, which range from $14 to $74, depending on the piece. She says clients have told her they can get handmade lace less expensively from places such as China and Vietnam. She says she won't cut her workers' wages, but continues to tout what she sees as the higher quality of their craftsmanship and materials.
Lace is still made by hand in other countries. Rose Delahaye has lived for years throughout Asia with her husband, a Belgian diplomat. During her travels, she has seen handmade lace sold in China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Sri Lanka, among other locales.
During trips home to her native Belgium, she saw European-made lace being sold in tourist shops. But for the most part, she says, "now people in Europe only make lace as a hobby."
Herself a skilled lacemaker, Ms. Delahaye concedes that even she has found it sometimes difficult to distinguish lace made by machine. "If I can't tell the difference, how can a tourist who knows nothing about lace?"
Last year, Ms. Seth enlisted the help of Victoria D'Angelo, a U.S.-based specialist in home-textile marketing. They have been developing variations on classic lace designs, including lace as framed art, table decorations with beading, satin and silk, and items aimed at the Christian market, such as Bible covers, bookmarks and lace crosses.
"The challenge is finding a market for handmade lace -- it's shrinking, but it exists," says Ms. Seth. "We just have to find it."
The December 2004 tsunami redoubled her efforts. Waves washed away one of her lacemaking units, located in a beachfront building in the village of Colachal. Because the waves hit on a Sunday, the women weren't at work, but Ms. Seth still had rebuilding to do. Last spring, she founded a charitable trust to build a permanent, self-sustaining lacemaking center that would also provide training.
Using about $14,000 of her own money, Ms. Seth bought a building site in a southern village called Kalluvilai, so women from five nearby villages could easily travel there. The land, about 200 meters back from the main road, means the women and their lace will have limited dust and noise exposure, and its lush vegetation will help shield the building from the sun. A nearby bank will allow women to deposit earnings rather than take it back to family members who may misuse it, a common problem for poor women who earn their own money, Ms. Seth says.
Mary Angel Maria Arputham is one of the lacemakers who worked in the center destroyed by the tsunami. When her husband suffered a paralyzing fall seven years ago at his job picking coconuts, she needed a way to support her five children. For the mostly poor, uneducated women in the region, the options were few: making brooms from coconut husks and selling them along the road, or working in hot, smoke-filled cashew factories.
Instead, Ms. Arputham turned to lacemaking. After a year of training, she mastered the designs made by her unit. Her monthly wage of about $18 formed the main source of her family's income.
Eventually, it took her just a few days of quickly weaving and braiding nearly 100 long, fine threads wound on bobbins to make enough lace trim for a linen handkerchief. "Every time it feels good to finish a piece," she says. "You feel proud and happy -- I never thought I could do this, but now I can."
Since the tsunami hit, Ms. Arputham makes lace from her home and says she is grateful for a job. The local fishing industry was slowed by locals' unwillingness to eat fish for many weeks after the tsunami, believing fish were feeding on people who were washed away. Prawns were also shunned. About an hour before the wave hit, locals say the beach was covered with prawns scrambling from the water. The sight attracted hordes of village children, who hoped to snatch extra food for their families. They were among the first victims of the catastrophic waves, locals say.
After seven years of lacemaking, the 48-year-old Ms. Arputham says her eyes are weakening, so she usually works outdoors where the light is best. Keeping the snow-white thread looking pristine is difficult: She must shoo roaming chickens from beneath her work table, and every time she senses a strong breeze she stops to cover her lace with a wool cloth to protect it from dust. Not once has she delivered flawed or soiled lace, says Mohan Perinpa Muthu, Ms. Seth's local manager.
When Sister Deleela Gnanamma arrived at the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent five years ago, 45 young women made needle lace there. Now just 10 remain. She wants to employ more, but she doesn't have enough orders from Ms. Seth and other clients to do so: Her last order was fulfilled last March.
This worries her, not just because so many women need jobs, but also because she has been frequently told by clients that the 10 women she employs are the only women left in India still making this type of needle lace. "It's become a beautiful tradition here, and it should continue," she says.
Rosemary Yeshudas, 57, teaches lacemaking to newcomers at Ms. Seth's units. Over the 46 years she has been making lace, she has never seen the number of orders dwindle this much, she says. As she watched one day from the center of the workroom, 13 women, seated around the periphery, worked in quiet concentration. The only noise aside from the occasional call of a rooster is the patter of hundreds of bobbins falling softly against pillowed work surfaces.
"Before, if you could learn lace you would have a skill, and job, for the rest of your life," says Ms. Yesudhas. "But if the orders keep decreasing, this art, and job, will die."
Write to Ellen Byron at ellen.byron@wsj.com
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