Personal adornment is an obvious form of identity shaping, an ages old and universal phenomenon. It is not surprising therefore that garment fashion should be a popular form of self expression and tribal identifier used by the tribes of Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts.
In the Hill Tracts, traditional forms of dress and their unique designs identify different tribal groups. The women of the largest tribe of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the Chakma, wear untailored woven cloth wrapped around their waists. A horizontal strip of patterned design at the bottom as well as the top of the wrap identifies the Chakma from the dress of the Tripura tribe, also local to the Hill Tracts. A patterned strip of cloth, similar to a narrow shawl or wide scarf, is draped around the shoulders or wrapped around the chest. This dress is called the Penong Khadi.
I recently spent three months working with the Chakma community in the Chittagong Hill Tracts on a VSO development project creating tribal textile enterprises. As well as a creating jobs, this project is leveraging the commercialization of tribal textile production to propagate and help preserve waistloom weaving which has until recently been a dying art form.
The waistloom is tribal textile production in its original form. For the Chakma, weaving is very much considered to be a female only past-time and waistloom skills have traditionally been passed on from mother to daughter. By marriage a young woman will have produced a design piece displaying the different designs she has learned how to weave. The waistloom is painstaking work, however, and requires decades of practice in order to master it. The current generation of young Chakma women have little interest in learning and waistloom skills risk dying out.
Kochishona is a resident of the Chakma village my team worked in as well as a team host mother. She is considered one of the best weavers in her village. She learnt when she was 10 years old by watching her mother. When she sees a pattern she likes she can memorise it and recreate it in her weaving. She sums up the difference in the handloom and wasitloom in the amount of brainpower needed. Production of beautiful waistloom designs require a lifetime of practice and many generations of collective knowledge. Detailed planning and sustained attention is required to render a complete piece. A slip of concentration and one mistake will ruin a whole piece. Likewise, mistakes slash-down sales value.
In the Hill Tracts, traditional forms of dress and their unique designs identify different tribal groups. The women of the largest tribe of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the Chakma, wear untailored woven cloth wrapped around their waists. A horizontal strip of patterned design at the bottom as well as the top of the wrap identifies the Chakma from the dress of the Tripura tribe, also local to the Hill Tracts. A patterned strip of cloth, similar to a narrow shawl or wide scarf, is draped around the shoulders or wrapped around the chest. This dress is called the Penong Khadi.
I recently spent three months working with the Chakma community in the Chittagong Hill Tracts on a VSO development project creating tribal textile enterprises. As well as a creating jobs, this project is leveraging the commercialization of tribal textile production to propagate and help preserve waistloom weaving which has until recently been a dying art form.
The waistloom is tribal textile production in its original form. For the Chakma, weaving is very much considered to be a female only past-time and waistloom skills have traditionally been passed on from mother to daughter. By marriage a young woman will have produced a design piece displaying the different designs she has learned how to weave. The waistloom is painstaking work, however, and requires decades of practice in order to master it. The current generation of young Chakma women have little interest in learning and waistloom skills risk dying out.
Kochishona is a resident of the Chakma village my team worked in as well as a team host mother. She is considered one of the best weavers in her village. She learnt when she was 10 years old by watching her mother. When she sees a pattern she likes she can memorise it and recreate it in her weaving. She sums up the difference in the handloom and wasitloom in the amount of brainpower needed. Production of beautiful waistloom designs require a lifetime of practice and many generations of collective knowledge. Detailed planning and sustained attention is required to render a complete piece. A slip of concentration and one mistake will ruin a whole piece. Likewise, mistakes slash-down sales value.
The Penong Khadi is the main produce of the tribal textile industry. Once considered antiquated and unfashionable, the Penong Khadi has been resurrected as a special-event dress of choice for young women. At religious events, weddings and other celebrations, Penong Khadis are donned in a variety of different colours and designs.
The re-popularization of the Penong Khadi has meant that, despite waistloom production decreasing, demand for tribal textiles has increased. The introduction of the handloom to the Hill Tracts has meant that this demand can be met cheaply with industrial scale production. While it cannot compete with the waistloom in terms of quality of product, the handloom has allowed the Penong Khadi to become a popularly consumed fashion product.
Meanwhile, while waistloom was traditionally only for personal consumption, waistloom produce has undergone a renaissance as a luxury alternative to handloom products. Rangamati is the heart of the tribal textile industry and UNDP project officer Sukhesur (Polto) Chakma tentatively dates its weekly waistloom fabric market as being only a decade old. It is now a dynamic centre of tribal textile commercialism, and a hotspot for waistloom weaving women to network with the merchants who spread their goods across the Hill Tracts, across Bangladesh, and abroad.
As far as I am aware, there has not yet been a major concerted effort to preserve or teach this popular knowledge within the Chakma or other Chittagong Hill Tracts tribal communities. Yet waistloom woven products are becoming luxury goods with willing consumers in the Hill Tracts’ tribal communities. Tenzing Chakma is a Chakma fashion designer; with fashion house Sozpodor, Tenzing Chakma was the first to bring branding to Chakma textiles. He uses traditional waistloom products with innovative designs for his high-end fashion label. His pieces are in high demand from the Chakma community across the globe as well as from Chakma royalty.
For his fabric Tenzing Chakma commissions waistloom weavers from Rangapani - a satellite village of Rangamati town and major hub for waistloom weaving. Unlike with the handloom, waistloom weavers are not employees of textile mills but self employed entrepreneurs in their own right. Weaving takes place in the home and can be considered as less of a full time job but more of a way of life that fits around domestic responsibilities. The waistloom is also the daily practicing of ancestral heritage, weaving into their products intricate designs that have been passed down through generations of women for hundreds of years. For these women, the waistloom can both be understood as business and cultural practice.
The re-popularization of the Penong Khadi has meant that, despite waistloom production decreasing, demand for tribal textiles has increased. The introduction of the handloom to the Hill Tracts has meant that this demand can be met cheaply with industrial scale production. While it cannot compete with the waistloom in terms of quality of product, the handloom has allowed the Penong Khadi to become a popularly consumed fashion product.
Meanwhile, while waistloom was traditionally only for personal consumption, waistloom produce has undergone a renaissance as a luxury alternative to handloom products. Rangamati is the heart of the tribal textile industry and UNDP project officer Sukhesur (Polto) Chakma tentatively dates its weekly waistloom fabric market as being only a decade old. It is now a dynamic centre of tribal textile commercialism, and a hotspot for waistloom weaving women to network with the merchants who spread their goods across the Hill Tracts, across Bangladesh, and abroad.
As far as I am aware, there has not yet been a major concerted effort to preserve or teach this popular knowledge within the Chakma or other Chittagong Hill Tracts tribal communities. Yet waistloom woven products are becoming luxury goods with willing consumers in the Hill Tracts’ tribal communities. Tenzing Chakma is a Chakma fashion designer; with fashion house Sozpodor, Tenzing Chakma was the first to bring branding to Chakma textiles. He uses traditional waistloom products with innovative designs for his high-end fashion label. His pieces are in high demand from the Chakma community across the globe as well as from Chakma royalty.
For his fabric Tenzing Chakma commissions waistloom weavers from Rangapani - a satellite village of Rangamati town and major hub for waistloom weaving. Unlike with the handloom, waistloom weavers are not employees of textile mills but self employed entrepreneurs in their own right. Weaving takes place in the home and can be considered as less of a full time job but more of a way of life that fits around domestic responsibilities. The waistloom is also the daily practicing of ancestral heritage, weaving into their products intricate designs that have been passed down through generations of women for hundreds of years. For these women, the waistloom can both be understood as business and cultural practice.