When Suman Chauhan settles in for the day’s work at 11 am, dropping her legs into the cavity of the pit loom to position her feet on pedals and tells me, “Yahan mistake nahin chalti”, she is paying a compliment to her senior colleague; a quality control manager who sits a courtyard away from her in a tiny room lit by a bright tube. He carefully rolls out an aubergine-edged red Maheshwari cotton-silk saree in rhythmic spurts over a wooden rod that hangs on a swing of sorts, running his gaze from behind his spectacles, left to right, in search of an error. It’s the final stage of quality check conducted at a unit of Rehwa Society’s weaving centre in the ramparts of Ahilya Fort in Maheshwar, Madhya Pradesh’s temple town famed as much for the Narmada river that licks the flagstones of its ghats as its hand-weaving tradition, that some say, dates back to the 5th century. 

At this non-profit weaver’s cooperative, which employs local men and women, the fight to live up to a legacy is personal. What started with Maratha queen Ahilyabai Holkar (1725-1795) inviting master karigars from Surat and Malwa to weave traditional nauvaris, became a thing of the past after Independence with the abolition of the privy purse and the rise of power looms. But when her descendent Shivajirao Richard Holkar and his then wife Sally, decided to give it a fillip in the 1970s with the founding of Rehwa, they ended up resuscitating the local textile industry, making Maheshwar one of India’s key weaving clusters.