The story of a towel: How a Chennimalai weaver created bath towels inspired by a fabric his grandfather owned

A weaver at Chennimalai in Erode has woven a line of bath towels using his grandfather’s 20-year-old towel as the inspiration

The bright red towel gradually lost its sheen. It was omnipresent at the Saptha Rishi household at Musiri in Tiruchy district. A Balasubramani saw his grandfather use it every day. It faded over two decades of usage; the edges turned a little scruffy due to wear and tear. But it was still there at home, an everyday object they didn’t want to get rid of. It was a typical Kutralam bath towel, a variety in fine cotton that easily absorbed water, as well as dried fast. “It was handwoven, but I do not know who wove it or where it was woven,” recalls Balasubramani, a weaver himself. When the 27-year-old was tasked with weaving towels, he knew what the inspiration would be.

“I decided to use my grandfather’s towel’s design and colours,” he explains. “But I wanted to tweak it to suit the present times.” And so he sat at his loom with the threads and got to work. The towels were for Nurpu, a venture that IT-professional-turned-entrepreneur C Sivagurunathan started, to revive the handloom tradition of Chennimalai in Erode.

“The original towel had broad stripes,” says Balasubramani, speaking over phone from Nurpu’s centre at Chennimalai where he works. “I wove fine lines in off-white, these resemble strung pearls; the name of the pattern takes after this attribute,” he adds.

Balasubramani also gave the towels borders in off-white. “To be honest, both of us did not expect this output,” says 36-year old Sivagurunathan. “We wanted something trendy, but also which, in essence was Balu’s grandfather’s towel,” he adds. The towels are of two-ply cotton, and measure 1.6 metres in length. Sivagurunathan says that they will be priced at around ₹280 each. “We will put them up for sale today,” he adds. Balasubramani has woven 30 pieces, each taking him three hours to make.

Chennimalai is a cotton bedsheets and towels hub. “Most towels from the region bear broad stripes or checks and have a honeycomb texture,” points out Sivagurunathan, who quit his IT job in Chennai to start Nurpu in 2016. He started out with the aim of encouraging weavers at 1010 Colony in the region, many of whom took up other jobs, to start weaving again. Today, he has over 20 weavers at Chennimalai and Musiri working for Nurpu — they weave dothis, saris, cradle cloths, towels, and running fabrics, that Sivaguru sells on his website.  

This summer, he is waiting to receive school students at his centre, where he will train them to weave. “I hope to show them how a length of cloth takes shape from a spool of thread,” he says.

For details, visit https://www.nurpu.in/