The Great Riches To Rags Story

Everyday at 3 am, some narrow, winding lanes off Chittaranjan Avenue, the arterial road into north Calcutta, start rustling with activity. By daybreak, long before the neighbouring commercial district of Dalhousie Square wakes up, more than 2,000 entrepreneurs of a different hue have started doing brisk business. These are the citys dealers in a mundane but high-demand commodity: old clothes and rags.

Calcuttas old clothes market, situated between Beadon Street and Adwaita Mullick Lane, is among the oldest in India. This century-old trade has spawned various lucrative subsidiary businesses, notably in gold and silver barter and provides a livelihood for hundreds of traders from Bengals far flung districts.

 

Business at this grand buyer-seller meet reaches its peak between 6.30 and 8.30 am, when traffic is thin on the roads. There are clusters of dealers weighing frayed bronze zari taken off from old saris, while others are busy counting the pieces in a bundle. The atmosphere is festive rather than business-like even as tea vendors and hawkers with glass boxes sell cheap sweets and savouries for breakfast.

I have been buying and selling old clothes for the past 20 years, says Bhim Barik, who comes from Midnapore district. Barik for whom this has been the family trade for the past three generations is now settledin Calcutta with his family. His daily earnings average Rs 30. Like Barik, buyers to this daily haat come from neighbouring villages of Duttapukur and Sheoraphuli and also from the districts of Midnapore and Murshidabad.

This unorganised market works on a simple structure. Old clothes are acquired from the metropolis in exchange for stainless steel utensils, a coveted asset for the average Indian housewife. The barter system is graded according to the quality and demand of the clothes. For instance, explains Poornima Barik, A kota sari can be exchanged for a tiffin carrier.

At the dawn market, these clothes fetch a price that is fixed by the individual dealers there is no local mahajan or middleman involved. Old cotton shirts and trousers are priced at Rs 3 and Rs 4 while printed saris, in better condition, fetch Rs 10.

The price of saris and lungis vary with the quality and condition. A bundle of 500 pieces of cotton lungis cost around Rs 2,500; 300 pieces of ultra-white saris come for Rs 4,200 while 300 pieces of Madras silk lungis are priced around Rs 2,500.

Cotton baby frocks, baby suits, trousers and T-shirts do not exceed Rs 30 per piece, nylon or artificial silk saris in reasonably good condition fetch around Rs 100 on an average.

This brisk business services two kinds of demands. Old clothes are transported to rural and moffusil markets and rags are sold to factories for cleaning machinery.

This forms the bulk of the old-clothes market with its high volumes and low margins, as it were. But the trade has various shades to it. One offshoot of the main business is the demand for gold, silver and traditional embroidery plucked out of old clothes and fabric. Mohammed Ismail and his partner with their dingy shop off a small bylane deal in family heirlooms like rich benarasis, jamevars, sequined brocades and other fabric with pure gold or silver embroidery. They usually wait at mid-afternoon in Burrabuzur, the hub of Marwari traders, at peak shopping hours to catch prospective sellers.

Then there is Calcutta Zari Stores in Burrabazar, which dates back to the opening decade of this century. Owner Parmeshwar Lal is a well-known trader of wedding goods and accessories among Marwari families, but he also runs a small but profitable operation in old zari clothes and jewellery. We have our fixed customers who sell family antiquities through us, says Lal.

The clothes are first checked by Lal personally to confirm that the gold and the silver is pure. Then the saris are weighed and prices are fixed accordingly. Bought at the rate of Rs 1,000 per kg, the prices of clothes and saris can vary from Rs 800 to Rs 3,000. There are no hard and fast pricing rules; much depends on the bargaining powers of both the buyer and the seller.

On an average we have about two to three customers every day, says Lal, who is extremely tight-lipped about this side business in old clothes.

The extracted metals are finally sold in their pure forms, to local jewellery shops at a profit. The current market rate of silver is Rs 7,000 per ten grams approximately, says Ismail, as he throws open tiny wooden boxes to reveal a gold ring or two, a broken nose stud, or a portion of an ancient jewel box.

True to its unorganised nature, however, not everything is above board in this business. There are, for instance, a few groups of traders, also in Burrabazar, who dont go for direct exchanges. Their agents are mostly tribal women from neighbouring Bihar who come and look at the designs on the richly embroidered old fabrics in return for expensive steel kitchenware. We rework the designs and use them on new clothing, claims Motibai, a local agent for a group of travelling traders from Gujarat, temporarily based in Burrabazar.

A Ghosh, a professor of geography in a city college and a resident of south Calcutta, regularly dealt with such agents and received piles of good quality stainless steel ware after she revealed the family treasure trove to them. After dealing with them for over six months I allowed the agent to take an expensive jamevar shawl for a couple of hours to Burrabazar in exchange for a paltry cash deposit, she says.

The agent never returned and the Ghoshes lost an exquisite and invaluable work of art more than a century old. That shawl, a true museum piece, would have cost a fortune now, says Ghosh.

But in the bylanes off Chittaranjan Avenue, there is too much at stake for this kind of subterfuge. Business is built on a bush telegraph of contacts and addresses. And as the morning traffic increases, the dealers pack up and walk across to other parts of the city, hunting for cast-off wardrobes and tracking down hidden family treasure troves for their riches to rags industry.