I still remember the evening I first drove into Koyyalagudem. The sky did what it does over Andhra Pradesh at dusk, turning everything amber and rust. I didn’t know it then, but those were also the colours waiting for me inside those humble homes, where the sound of pit looms filled the air like music I had been searching for without knowing.
I had found my ikat.
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A Village That Weaves Time Itself
Koyyalagudem sits quietly in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, and if you blink while driving through the Deccan landscape, you might miss it. But if you slow down, you will hear it: the rhythmic thak-thak of the loom, steady as a heartbeat, threading through every lane and household.
This village has been weaving ikat for centuries. The tradition here belongs to the Padmasali community of weavers, whose ancestors carried this knowledge across generations with devotion rooted in identity, not commerce. Weaving here is not a profession. It is a birthright. It is prayer.
The word ikat comes from the Malay-Indonesian mengikat, meaning to tie or bind. That is what this craft does: it binds dye to yarn before a single thread is woven, creating the signature feathered, blurred edge that is the soul of ikat. In Telugu, it is called Pagadu Bandhu, the resist dyeing of yarns, and the ikat cluster of the Krishna and West Godavari districts is recognised as one of the finest expressions of this tradition in the world.
What makes Koyyalagudem’s ikat distinct is its commitment to the single ikat technique on cotton, where either the warp or the weft yarns are resist-dyed before weaving. The precision required is staggering. The weaver must visualise the final pattern while tying bundles of yarn, knowing that a single miscalculation will only become apparent after the cloth is woven, when it is already too late. There is no undo button on a loom. There is only foresight, skill, and decades of accumulated memory in the hands.
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The Evening the Looms Were Alive
When I arrived at dusk that first evening, the looms were not resting. They never seemed to rest. In the half-light, I watched weavers bent over their work, feet operating the treadles, hands throwing the shuttle with a fluency that made the act seem effortless. It was anything but.
I came with no formal training in textiles. No degree in fashion. What I had were visions; bold, saturated, unapologetic, and an absolute conviction that ikat deserved to be seen in a way it hadn’t been seen before. The ikat of that era was largely confined to certain colour palettes, certain repeat patterns that the market had come to expect. Safe. Predictable. Beautiful, yes, but constrained.
I sat with the weavers, I painted, literally. I put my ideas on paper in colour and showed them to the master weavers of Koyyalagudem. What followed was not instruction. It was a conversation, a dialogue between my vision and their encyclopaedic knowledge of what a loom can and cannot do. They pushed back. They suggested. They showed me where my ideas were technically impossible, and then, remarkably, they figured out ways to make the impossible possible.
That creative tension between the designer’s hunger and the weaver’s wisdom is where the work was born.
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Bold Ikat: A New Design Language
The ikat that emerged from Koyyalagudem through our collaboration was larger in scale, more geometric, and more confrontational in its use of colour. Deep teals against sharp whites. Checks that felt almost optical. Stripes bold enough to stop you in a room. This ikat did not whisper. It announced itself.
And the market, to our collective relief and delight, was ready. The work sold out within weeks.
But I must say this clearly: the boldness was never mine alone. Every idea I brought to the loom was transformed by the weaver’s interpretation. The slight blurring at the edges of the ikat softened my hard lines, making the fabric more human, more alive than any perfectly printed textile ever could be. The imprecision of ikat is not a flaw. It is its soul.
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The Craft Under Pressure
Over the two decades I have spent working with Koyyalagudem’s weavers, I have watched this cluster face pressures that no amount of skill can easily counter. Power looms that can replicate ikat patterns at a fraction of the cost. Poor-quality dyes flooding the market, young people leaving for cities, unwilling to commit to a craft that demands years of apprenticeship before any mastery is possible.
The economics of handwoven ikat are brutal and honest in equal measure. A single saree can take a master weaver anywhere from three days to three weeks, depending on the design's complexity. The yarn must first be wound, then measured and stretched, then tied and re-tied in resist bundles, then dyed, then dried, then wound again before it even approaches the loom. By the time the cloth emerges, it carries within it an almost incomprehensible amount of human time and intelligence.
And yet the price the market will bear rarely reflects this truth.
This is why I believe the future of Koyyalagudem’s ikat cannot rest on nostalgia alone. It must rest on relevance. On a design that speaks to the present without abandoning the past. On collaborations that treat the weaver not as a vendor but as a co-creator, a partner whose knowledge is intellectual property of the highest order.
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What Koyyalagudem Gave Me
I have been asked many times over the years what drew me to ikat, and specifically to this village. The honest answer is that I cannot fully explain it. There was something in the air that evening: the quality of the light, the sound of the looms, the sight of yarn stretched across drying in colours that seemed borrowed from the earth itself. It felt like recognition rather than discovery.
Koyyalagudem did not teach me weaving. It taught me something more important: that design at its best is not an act of imposition but of listening. The weavers here carry knowledge that no school teaches, no book contains. It lives in their hands, in their eyes, in the way they read a thread for tension and a colour for its behaviour under different lights.
Twenty years on, I am still listening.
The looms are still alive. The craft is still speaking.
I hope the world is ready to hear it.
Welcome to Anuradha Ramam’s vision of ikat.
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