The Talking Textilesof Telangana

Rooted in the ancient textile traditions of the Deccan plateau, the handloom weaving communities of Huzurabad, Sircilla, and the wider Karimnagar district have produced cotton textiles for generations. This mosquito net is woven from hand-spun cotton, a fibre that connects the maker to the cloth from its very first thread. The community divides its labour: women spin the yarn and weave lighter-weight goods such as towels and fine cotton cloth, while men take on heavier weaves including bedsheets.

The open checkered pattern, achieved through a deliberately loose weave, is not merely decorative. Each square of the grid serves as a passage for air, allowing the sleeper beneath to breathe freely through the region's warm nights, protection and ventilation woven into one.

Weavers in Huzurabad and Karimnagar have long worked as a household industry, sustaining a craft that remains inseparable from daily life. This net is both a functional object and a quiet testament to a community's enduring skill.

The word telia derives from the Sanskrit word taila, meaning sesame oil. Rumal traces to the Persian rūy māl - literally "face wiper," a term that entered the subcontinent through centuries of trade and courtly exchange, coming to denote a square cloth. Together, the name describes both what this textile is and how it is made: an oil-treated cloth. The oil treatment is not merely preparatory — it is the source of the cloth's legendary durability. The treated fibre resists moisture and wear, allowing the textile to outlast ordinary cotton by generations.

Before a single thread meets the loom, the yarn is steeped in a bath of castor oil and alkaline solution, a process called teli treatment; which opens the fibre to receive dye with unusual depth and permanence. The cloth is then resist-dyed using the warp-ikat method, its geometric motifs - concentric borders, medallions, and angular interlocking forms, all encoded into the thread before weaving begins.

Telia Rumal was historically prized for its cooling properties against skin, a quality first recognised by fishing communities along the Coromandel Coast, who wore it as a head covering against the coastal heat. By the nineteenth century, it had become one of the region's most significant export textiles, carried along trading routes to the Gulf and West Asia, where it was worn as a headscarf and gifted as a mark of status.

The palette of Telia Rumal is deliberately restrained: deep madder red, dense lamp black, and ivory white, occasionally joined by indigo. These were not arbitrary choices. Red and black, derived from alizarin and iron-based dyes respectively, bond with the oil-treated fibre with exceptional tenacity, resisting fading across decades of use. The combination carried visual weight legible across cultures, bold enough to read as status in a West Asian market, familiar enough to travel. The motifs include the chowka or square, rosette medallions, and interlocking angular borders that echo tilework and carpet patterns from Persia to the Deccan, a visual grammar shaped as much by the markets this cloth was made for as by the hands that wove it.

Today, very few weavers retain command of the full process. This cloth is a technical document of the Coromandel's mercantile history, as much as it is a textile.

Narayanpet, a weaving town in Mahabubnagar district, Telangana, has produced its distinctive cotton-silk textiles for over three centuries. Community oral histories hold that the settlement's weaving lineages trace back to the 17th century, when Chhatrapati Shivaji passed through the Deccan region, weavers, it is said, settled here in the wake of that movement. Whether migration or slow accumulation, the tradition consolidated during the Nizam period, when royal patronage established a culture of refined domestic textiles woven for gifting and ceremonial use.

What distinguishes Narayanpet cloth is its structural clarity: cotton forms the ground, silk carries the border and pallu, and the contrast between the two gives the sari its characteristic weight and drape. This is not an accident of technique but a deliberate aesthetic, matte field against luminous edge.

The fabric is produced on pit looms, where the weaver sits below floor level, working the treadles with the body as much as the hands. The geometry of the borders, typically running checks or ruled stripes, is calculated before a single thread is stretched; once begun, there is no revision. The pattern is structural, not applied. It is woven in.

Motif

Rudraksha- The bead is the seed of Shiva, worn across Telangana as a mark of faith and protection. Woven into borders as a repeating spherical motif, it transforms a garment into something sacred.

Peacock- known as the nemali in Telugu appears in temple sculpture, classical dance, and textile borders as a symbol of grace, monsoon abundance, and Krishna. In handloom traditions, its spread tail remains a weaver's most demanding test of skill.

The dhurrie in Warangal carries within it a history that moves between court, colony, and everyday life. Its present form is often traced to the patronage networks of the Mughal period, when skilled weavers migrated and settled in regions that could sustain large-scale production. Warangal, with its abundant cotton and established weaving communities, became one such centre. Here, the loom met raw material with ease, and a durable, utilitarian textile began to take shape.

The earliest iterations of the dhurrie are closely tied to prayer mat weaving. Flat-woven, lightweight, and reversible, they were designed for portability and use across spaces, mosques, homes, and courts. Over time, the dhurries became more than their function, they became prized for their form. Because dhurries are flat-woven and reversible, the dyes needed to be deeply absorbed and durable, rather than surface-level. The emphasis was less on vibrancy and more on longevity and stability, especially given their use as floor coverings. Traditionally dyes from Indigo, madder, aal, pomegranate rind and iron based solutions were used.

By the late 19th century, Warangal dhurries had entered global circuits. Exhibited in London, they drew attention for their unusually high weave density and clarity of pattern, qualities that distinguished them from other flat weaves. In colonial records, they were at times referred to alongside prized Indian exports, sharing a stage with objects taken from this land by the empire like the Koh-i-Noor.

To meet colonial demand, the British pushed production extended into prisons, driving the cost of production down. This system disrupted traditional weaving economies. Independent weavers, working from homes or small workshops, could not compete with the low-cost, regimented labour of prisons.

Today, Warangal dhurries are woven for both domestic use and export, with demand from European markets shaping scale and palette. What endures is their quality, the textile remains grounded in cotton, geometry and bold colors.

The word Himroo derives from the Persian hum-ruh, meaning "similar to" or "a substitute for"; an etymology that contains its entire history. It was created as an accessible alternative to Kimkhwab (meaning “a little dream” ); the dense gold-and-silver brocade woven for Mughal courts. Pure silk warps interlaced with zari in complex supplementary weft structures that demanded extraordinary time, skill, and bullion. Himroo simplified this architecture deliberately: cotton replaced silk in the warp, reducing cost and loom tension, while the supplementary weft- the thread that carries the pattern- retained silk or finer cotton. The result preserved the visual density of brocade at a fraction of the expense.

In traditional brocade, pattern threads must be individually manipulated across the full width of the cloth at every pass, often requiring a drawloom and a second weaver to lift the correct warp threads. Himroo uses a handloom with a dobby or jacquard attachment, encoding the repeat mechanically.

The motifs on Himroo include- boteh (the teardrop form that later became the paisley), kalga, arabesque floral scrolls, and geometric lattices. These arrive directly from Persian court textile traditions, carried into the Deccan through the Bahmani Sultanate and later consolidated under the Nizams of Hyderabad. The same workshops that served Hyderabad's court extended their craft to Aurangabad under Mughal patronage, embedding the textile in both regions simultaneously.

Today, Himroo holds Protected Geographical Indication status in both Maharashtra and Telangana.. These days Himroo faces quiet erosion: the jacquard cards that hold its patterns are rarely reproduced, and with each card lost, a motif disappears. What survives is not merely cloth. It is a record of democratization and innovation.

Among the Lambadi, also known as Banjara or Lambani, embroidery is not ornamentation alone; it is biography, belief, and protection stitched into cloth. The Lambadi are a community whose migrational history traces from Afghanistan through Rajasthan and Gujarat, spreading across the Deccan plateau as semi-nomadic traders who transported salt and goods across the subcontinent. The craft travelled with them, portable, identity-bearing, and essential.

The mirrors stitched onto garments served a practical function in forest camps: their specular reflections scared away wild animals, while also helping identify Lambadi women to other community members across distance. Beyond the physical, mirrors are believed to deflect the nazar, the evil eye, turning the gaze of harm back upon itself. Cowrie shells and coins are stitched onto fabric as symbols of prosperity, and the community, traditionally avoiding cash as traders, embedded wealth directly into women's dress.

Lambani embroidery employs fourteen named stitch types — Kilan, Vele, Bakkya, Maki, Suryakanti Maki, Kans, Tera Dora, Kaudi, Relo, Gadri, Bhuriya, Pote, Jollya, and Nakra — most following strict geometric logic: squares, circles, triangles, rectangles, diagonal and parallel lines arrayed in dense, repeating sequence. The Suryakanti Maki — sunflower seed stitch — gestures toward the flower through its spiralling structure; the Nakra builds a small crocodilian diamond from four straight lines; the Kans evokes the dense reed grass of riverbanks in its fine, parallel rows.

Lambadi women make these textiles primarily for their own traditional dress and for giving to their daughters at marriage. The trousseau is not purchased, it is accumulated, stitch by stitch, across years. A mother teaches a daughter; the daughter carries the knowledge, and eventually the cloth, into her own household. Young girls are assigned simpler lines and designs, learning from their mothers by working on small sampler pieces, while the more intricate detailing is entrusted to older, experienced women.

This is a textile that has crossed deserts, forest camps, and centuries — and has not yet stopped moving.

The word tussar traces to the Sanskrit tasara, meaning the weaver's shuttle, also known as kosa, or wild silk. Tussar fibres are harvested from silkworms of the moth genus Antheraea, which feed on Arjun and sal trees rather than mulberry. The resulting silk is three to four times stronger than mulberry silk , yet carries a rougher, more textured hand and is dull gold and earthy.

Traditionally, reeling tussar was an entirely manual process: threads, extracted by pulling and rubbing cocoons against the thigh or on a kharpa ( a clay tile) a method undertaken exclusively by women of the community. The yarn is then wound onto a charkha, dyed, stretched on a wooden frame, and brushed repeatedly with a natural starch gruel to strengthen it before it meets the loom.

Mahadevpur sits in the forested northeast of Telangana, near Kaleshwaram, and its weaving colony exists precisely because the forest does. The silkworms thrive on the leaves of trees in the surrounding forests, and cocoons are harvested once a year by forest-dwelling tribal communities, who supply them directly to the weavers. Implements used in processing are carved from the wood of the Tendu tree, which grows abundantly in the region, the forest not merely as backdrop, but as infrastructure.

Traditionally, weavers coloured the naturally ivory-hued silk using vegetable dyes derived from turmeric, alum, dried flowers, fruit peels, lac, and indigo. A single saree can take fifty hours to complete. The cloth that results is not precious in the way of ornament, it is also precious in the way of patience.

Mr. Gajam Govardhana grew up in Puttapaka surrounded by looms and thread, learning the craft alongside his father before weaving independently by the age of fifteen. The textile he would dedicate his life to was not yet his own. In 1975, while working for the Ministry of Textiles, he visited Chirala, where the Telia Rumal had nearly vanished; he resolved to bring it back.

The name carries its method within it: tel, oil; rumal, square cloth. Before dyeing begins, the yarn is treated with castor ash, sesame oil, and sheep dung, lending the finished cloth its characteristic texture, fragrance, and cooling properties. What follows is double ikat- both warp and weft independently bound, dyed, then aligned on the pit loom so that pattern converges precisely at interlacement.

When Mr. Govardhana began his revival, fewer than twenty families still practised the craft. He trained over 800 artisans, eventually employing 500 weavers and expanding the tradition into sarees, wall hangings, and carpets.

His 100-motif cloth, vast in scale, uncompromising in precision, is considered a modern masterpiece of Indian textile design. He received both the Padma Shri and the Shilp Guru Award from the President of India. UNESCO recognised his contributions to handicrafts, and in 2020, the Puttapaka Telia Rumal received its Geographical Indication tag.

Ms. Gajam Narmada founded M/s Narendra Handlooms in 2013, building her enterprise from the ground up in Kothapet, Hyderabad. Where many in the handloom sector struggle to stay afloat, she has grown steadily, the firm's sales turnover has climbed year on year since 2020-21, and sustains employment for 300 handloom weavers across Telangana.

Her work centres on Pochampally Ikat silk sarees, both single and double ikat, produced in the weaving villages of Puttapaka, Ghatuppal, and Chandur in the districts of Yadadri Bhuvanagiri and Nalgonda. What sets her apart is the balance she strikes: honouring the structural rigour of ikat while responding to contemporary taste, introducing new colour combinations and design sensibilities that speak to younger buyers without loosening the craft's technical demands.

In double ikat, both warp and weft are independently resist-dyed before weaving; the pattern only resolves when the two align precisely on the loom. That Narmada manages this at scale, across hundreds of weavers, is itself a form of mastery.

In 2024, the Ministry of Textiles recognised her with the National Handloom Award in 2024 she won the Sant Kabir National Handloom Award.