‘Weaving Fairy Tales’: The Mahila Samitis and the Sipini Bhoral

Abstract Chapter 4, ‘Weaving Fairy Tales’: The Mahila Samitis and the Sipini Bhoral, concentrates on the mahila samitis’ institutionalization of women’s customary practice of weaving through several sipini bhorals (weaver’s stores/co-operatives) established in different parts of Assam from 1928 onwards. This initiative connects women’s everyday domestic labour to larger discourse of Swadeshi and Gandhian khadi. Weaving runs across tribe, caste, and class; hills and plains, in the northeastern region in India and is the single thread that symbolically connects women across this geographical landscape. This chapter argues that the mahila samitis’ privileging of this space acquires immense significance at a time when identity markers of tribe–caste formulations were beginning to acquire political colours in early twentieth-century Assam. While Gandhi’s call for khadi helped to institutionalize women’s domestic labour of weaving in a wider context of market economy and patriotic nationalism, the mahila samitis were eager to invoke the weaving tradition by women in Assam for a more meaningful participation within the nation. The chapter explores the weaving tradition as opposed to agricultural or plantation labour, because weaving was the site through which the mahila samitis articulated their politics and poetics of nation-building and emphasized women’s role therein. The chapter outlines some of the links between women, labour, production, and the imagining of a new nation.