The uniqueness of Ponduru khadi lies in the fibre – produced mainly from short staple hill variety cotton that is so pest resistant, it allows for chemical free farming!
Ponduru is famed for its complete hand spinning process. Normally most cotton in India is machine carded, that means the fibres are combed and mechanically separated from the seeds and rendered into fluffy bats for the hand spinners. In Ponduru, every step is still done by hand. Between carding, spinning and weaving it takes 3 weeks for one sari. 1,000,000 yards of hand spun yarn is required for a 6-yard sari. The finest examples are 120 x 120 counts per inch. That means the wide 52" saris have 6240 ends to tie up on the loom, and 26,000 weft threads to weave. The weaving itself of a simpler sari takes a week. The Khadi spun in Ponduru is locally known as ‘Patnulu’.
As far as the machine-made ones are concerned, they can make 15 or so per day. The yarn is not as fine as what can be made by hand and lacks the texture and absorbency of pure handspun but it can also produce beautiful 70 - 80 counts cloth.
The production of fine Ponduru Khadi is no less than an art involving a long sequence of meticulous processes, all performed by human hands, to fashion cotton into cloth. Khadi cloth or Khaddar is fabric which is both hand spun and hand woven. The uniqueness about this fabric is the fibre. It is produced from a special variety of cotton called Punas cotton, hill white cotton and red cotton. The cotton is of very short staple length produced in Srikakulum area.
The second uniqueness about this fabric is the method of spinning.
The raw seeded cotton is ginned with the help of Valuga fish jawbone. This fish is only found in that area. Then it is fluffed and smoothed with the help of fine sticks which also remove the waste. The upper and lower jaws of the Valugu sea fish is removed and the resulting bone is thoroughly cleaned. Then it is dried in the sun. It is broken into four pieces, before being used as the tool to clean the cotton. To hold it conveniently it is tied to a stick and placed in such a manner so that it does not move. Then it is used to remove the cotton from the seed and cleaned. With this, cotton is not only cleaned thoroughly it also gets a shine that does not fade. Slivering is done with a bow and carding is done with the help of a wooden machine. The slivers are handmade and kept in a dried banana stem.
This is one of the only places where single spindle charkha is still used for spinning. Yarn upto 120s count can be spun in white cotton while upto 60s can be spun with red cotton.
Originally, special varieties of indigenous organic cotton, namely Punasa cotton and Hill cotton (both white and red) were used. These varieties, supplied to them by local farmers, were of a short staple length. It is reported that two indigenous cotton varieties, kondapatti and errapatti, have been sustained because of the hand-spinning of cotton in Ponduru and the surrounding regions. These two varieties are ideal for the Gandhi charkha. The rest of the types of indigenous cotton died out under duress from the hybrid cotton varieties now grown in Andhra Pradesh. The hybrid BT Cotton is suited for the Amber charka, which is a mechanised version of the charkha.
So famed was the quality of this fabric that Mahatma Gandhi himself visited the village and preferred to wear this specific Khadi. Tragically, despite the existence of a good market for Ponduru Khadi, this ancient craft form, which survived the colonial onslaught, now faces an uncertain future. Without a transformative approach to the very policies that are at the heart of the matter, it might very well be that the Charkha will no longer ply in Ponduru in the years to come.
