Arundhati Bandhakala Llp

Our workshop is in Balangir, specifically in Radharani Para. Gobinda Meher is the one who looks after the place. We focus on Bandhakala, which is a traditional way of working with textiles that has been around forever. It’s a slow process. You can’t rush it. We spend our days tying and dyeing the yarns before they ever touch a loom. The floors are often stained with different colors from the dye vats. It’s a bit of a messy job, but the results are worth the stained fingers. Balangir can be very dry, so we have to be careful with how we store the threads. Our building is an old one in a residential-looking street. It doesn't look like a factory from the outside. We’ve got a few looms set up in the back room. You can hear the rhythmic clicking of the wood all day long. We don't have a marketing department or anything like that. We just rely on the quality of the weaving to speak for us. People know the Meher name for this kind of work, so we try to live up to that history. It’s just us doing what our families have done for a long time. We’re not looking to expand into some massive corporation. We just want to keep the tradition going and make enough to pay the bills. It is a quiet life, but we like the work we do with the fabrics.