You love the rustle of silk, that sheen of a fabric for which kings were once ready to barter their fiefdoms. So precious was silk that the Chinese guarded the secret for centuries until an impish princess stealthily hid a silkworm in her coiffeur before heading to the home of her betrothed.

Exquisite fabric. Intriguing story. However, somewhere between the sheen and the grace, you missed the sweat of a silkworm. The tiny silkworm that relentlessly spins a cocoon for itself out of gossamer thread. But before the worm breaks the chrysalis to turn into a moth, it gets thrown in boiling water and dies a painful death. For a ‘fashionable’ reason – so that we get the best silk. Nearly 15 silkworms are killed to get one gram of silk; imagine how many get killed to make that long chic silk skirt and that shimmering trousseau. Perhaps a thousand. Perhaps thousands.

For centuries that is how silk has been produced. Few cried hoarse about the cruelty against the silkworms. No laws were enacted, no campaigns launched. Times changed, technology upgraded, but the fate remained callous to the silkworms. Until that day when Janaki Venkataraman, the then First Lady, walked into the office of Andhra Pradesh Handloom Weavers Cooperative Society (APCO) in Hyderabad and asked for a silk sari that was made without any cruelty to the silkworms. APCO rummaged its shelves but there was not an inch of fabric which could be termed ‘non-violent’.

That one wish of the First Lady prodded Kusuma Rajaiah, a technical officer in APCO to experimenting. Armed with a degree from the Indian Institute of Handloom Technology, Salem, Rajaiah knew that an arduous task lay ahead. If he let the caterpillar crack out of the cocoon it would break the continuity of the yarn that can be unspooled to nearly 600 metres. Riddled with an ‘either/or’ choice, he chose the path less travelled and patented a new technique that makes silk without killing the silkworm.

Traditionally, cocoons with live silkworms inside are thrown in boiling water to maintain the continuity of the yarn. However, what Rajaiah does is to let the silkworm break the chrysalis and slip out alive before boiling the cocoons. The continuity of the yarn is broken and there is a lot of wastage but Rajaiah would rather have less silk than thousands of dead silkworms. The process is non-violent and Rajaiah calls it Ahimsa Silk, taking a cue from Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent methods.

Since there is a lot of wasted yarn, Ahimsa Silk is more expensive than regular silk. However, with the price tag comes the convenience of no wrinkles, durability and the 80 gram per metre weight. At present, Rajaiah has 30 designs in his repertoire, ranging from traditional saris, dhotis, angavatram and fabric for dresses. To keep pace with the times, he has branched off to include trendy ties and tees. You can pick from the colour palette available or have it custom dyed. And remember, no chemical dyes here. Vegetable dyes extracted from plants and mineral sources are used – the purples, black and greys come from logwood; evening reds from Brazilwood, oranges from madder root, brown from catechu...

This ingenuous method of making silk has found a lot of takers. Orders are pouring in from the West, specially the US and Europe where animal lovers have taken to this silk with great joy. Business propositions are looking possible what with Pascal and Guitha Samy, designers from Geneva and Nerul Rodriguez, a Parisian designer having flown into Hyderabad to discuss Ahimsa silk. The fabric has found favour with religious communities that adhere to non-violence to all human beings. So grateful is the Jain community for this invention that they recently honoured Rajaiah with a prestigious award.

That is not all on the who’s who list, though. Danseuse and activist Amala is a regular Ahimsa silk buyer, so are Delhi’s chief minister Sheila Dikshit and activist Maneka Gandhi. At a symposium in Jakarta, Megawati Sukarnoputri, the former Indonesian president, picked up six Ahimsa silk saris. In a commendation letter, Amita Desai, executive director, Association of German Culture, writes, ‘...not only promotes a non-violent option to the present day processes of producing silk but will also promote the harmonious coexistence of various forms of life’.

Next time, beautifully draped in silk, you do not have to hear the wail of a silkworm that was killed callously. Make a non-violent fashion statement. You have a choice And, you sure would look more elegant.

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