An Ancient Indian Craft Left in Tatters

In her village just outside Varanasi, Khatoon said customers stopped buying handmade saris several years ago. She had to sell the gold she received at her wedding, the Indian equivalent of hocking a diamond engagement ring. Soon after, she married off her two oldest daughters "just so that they could be fed somewhere else," she said.

Her husband, Mohammad Ismail, 50, became more and more distressed as profits from weaving continued to dwindle. He also had contracted tuberculosis and was unable to pay for the medicines needed to treat the disease.

"The saris he wove were meant for queens and princesses," she said. "But everything changed. He started to wish he taught his sons more useful skills."

Ismail died in July 2006, Khatoon said. Traumatized by her grief and her new financial pressures, she sat with his body through the night, as her children hugged her.

"I was afraid of the future," whispered Khatoon, 45, red-eyed as she recalled Ismail's death. "Then everything got worse."

Early this May, her pretty 20-year-old daughter, Ruksana, also died of tuberculosis. Now the disease is set to claim her 16-year-old daughter, Salma, who rests limply on a straw mat outside her family's shanty.

What makes the deaths of Ismail and his daughter so surprising is that the weaver's family was always self-sufficient.

Likewise, Ramzam Ali, 32, is the first weaver in five generations to have trouble feeding his family. "I rush every morning to find work as a rickshaw driver or as a day laborer, but there are already so many people already doing those things," Ali said. "If I can't manage to even feed my children, how will I mange to educate them in a different trade?"

Part of the problem is that Ali has a fifth-grade education and no other skills. His father taught him how to weave intricate patterns of lotus flowers and animal motifs onto silk. That's all he ever thought he would need. Now, he joins more than 370 million other Indians in the informal jobs sector, many of them illiterate, unskilled and in dire need of work, according to government studies.

Aid workers trying to help the weavers say the industry desperately needs a marketing campaign. They are talking to Bollywood stars about showcasing handmade Varanasi saris on film while also trying to market the handmade sari to the middle and upper classes as the "little black dress of India" in fashion magazines.

But the campaign has been slow, partly because of greater interest in Western fashion.

In the new Indian metropolis, casual, machine-made cotton kurtas, or shirts, have become the preferred attire of the young; long and colorful, the shirts can be worn over jeans. But as India's markets open, Western fashion outlets like United Colors of Benetton are being flooded by India's young middle class, eager to show the urbane hipness that distinguishes them from their parents.

Despite the boom in many information technology hubs in southern Indian cities, Varanasi's weaver quarters look like a ghetto, with men sleeping under broken-down looms strung with cobwebs, rutted streets with trash fuming at every turn and donkeys hauling in water for cooking and bathing, tugged along by barefoot urchins.

"I hardly care about booming India when I have no food or money," said Poochland Dash, 60, a white-haired grandfather and a once-wealthy weaver who said through tears that he is considering suicide. He is trying to sell the house he built during the golden years of the sari-weaving industry, with his saris featuring embroidery of men atop animals in rich indigos and reds.

"If a buyer insults me with a too-low price, I swear I will kill myself," Dash said.

Listening nearby, his wife started crying. "If he takes his life, I will take my life, too," she said, staring at the ground.

Special correspondent Indrani Ghosh Nangia contributed to this report.