Movie

Ulaṭbānsi / Zigzagging

How to speak without words? How to follow zigzags of the shuttle? How to tune a loom? How to seek the teacher inside yourself? Weaving is known but not spoken. Kabir, the weaver/poet/saint from the 15th century turned language on its head, to point to this impossibility of speaking weaving, which he also connected to the search for the spiritual within oneself. This film zig zags between the weaving and musical practice of weavers in Kachchh, Gujarat, and the one lone weaver in Chirala, Andhra Pradesh, who holds the memory of a time before the Jacquard loom robbed them of the language of handloom.