Brand Khadi

We need to liberate khadi from the Bhandars.

Imagine you are at an airport in a foreign country. Having checked in, and with time to spare, you start strolling through the labyrinth of boutiques that showcase a whole range of lifestyle and other products. Suddenly, you stumble across a store called ‘Khadi Wadi’. Curiosity stirred, you wander into the store and are surprised. Every product has the lustre of an international designer brand conveying a sense of having been designed in a Parisian atelier, imbued with the reassuring feel of luxury. And then you notice the tag that says “Concept Khadi — 100% Indian”. Why, you wonder, hasn’t anyone in India done this yet? Or rather, why does khadi as a brand have a ‘discount’ implication in the country of its birth?

 

It doesn’t take much to realise that there has been virtually no effort to promote the ‘concept’ of khadi. It is more of a fits-and-starts approach fuelled for brief periods by concerned individuals, charitable agencies, national celebrations, hopelessly lethargic Khadi Udyogs, unimaginative policies and a system that’s neither accountable nor responsible. But this product needs a 360-degree approach from concept to the final stage. The potential of making it a successful luxury product from India is a dynamic possibility. We don’t need a think tank to tell us that ‘brand khadi’, at least in India, has remarkable recall value, something every good marketing professional would know.

The mistake is that we see khadi simply as a fabric, and compare it with other fabrics like linen. The private sector lacks innovation and cannot find a justification within the cost-versus-profit ratio. The government does not know how to inter-link it with opportunities that are already present within the system, while designers cannot seem to maintain the consistency and quality that are a basic requirement. The Khadi Udyogs have been given a mandate by the government to buy what the underprivileged weaver hand-spins. The weavers, with no exposure and guidance, churn out the same dull patterns and non-luxurious quality of khadi year after year, which finds its way into godowns. Some of the fabric is converted into ‘basic’ clothes while the rest is stacked (unimaginatively and for the most part uselessly) in khadi stores — the Bhandars and Gramodyog Bhavans — across India — a collage of missed opportunities, unnoticed and unresolved.

But somewhere in this disorder lies an opportunity. To brand khadi as a technique rather than a fabric. To get a world-class design house to adapt a hundred-odd designs connecting with all aspects of lifestyle, steeped in the idea of India rather than the ethnicity of the product; then link the whole to the fashion seasons, so the wheel of collections and seasons starts an irreversible turning. All we need is to apply our minds to make this work.