Recently I published a book on ” Silk loom of Sourashtra ” a technical explanation of Spare parts of Hand-loom. The Dhoti loom’s functionality explained in short as a preface. Then I explained nearly most of important spares & part’s sourashtra name & its English & Tamil equavalanets.
The situation arise in front of me that today most of us are not doing our traditional work (ie. handloom weaving). In Salem out of every 500 family 495 families doing non-weaving work. If our livelyhood work goes on like this (Other than weaving) then think about after twenty years. nobody in our traditional weaving community wont be in weaving field. After a decade nobody will not available to give us details about loom and its sourashtra language spare parts names.
As a humor factor one of my friend told to me ” Now a days our Sourashtra community weavers mingled with other community weavers to do weaving process, and started to speak Tamil terms of Loom spares instead Sourashtra word. Slow they replacing Sourashtra word to Tamil word. If it goes like this, after some years our sourashtra people used call ‘ Shuttle” as NHAADA (Tamil word Naada) like word we had already speaking to specify “Upstairs” is ” Mhaadi”. “Maadi ” is a tamil word, we modified it as ” Mhaadi ” instead original sourashtra word ” MIDDE”
To avoid these confusion in future, (at least a record purpose!) I prepared this book. Most important thing is, while digging in the mine of Sourashtra words from our Elders & Eldest weavers mouth, lot of confusion came. I took time and solved all the confusing statement they made about looms spares names in this book.
And when I refined a stone, and found it as ‘ DIAMOND ‘ ! The diamond word is, to State “Loom” in olden days sourashtri language as ‘ Tan nathram ‘. This one word had enough hidden history & technical details and explanation about loom. This words etimology told ” Sourashtrians are traditional Weavers ”
It had more and more explanation than Sanskrit word ‘ Tantram” or Tamil word ” Tari ” to state loom.
I made this for future use.
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