Mending has been used throughout history as a means of repair and for extending the usability of textiles. One of the oldest pieces of evidence we have that humans have been darning, is an Egyptian children's tunic, extensively darned with coloured wool threads, in the Whitworth Gallery's collection in Manchester, which has been dated to around 600-700 BC.
In India, both visible and invisible mending have been going on for centuries. Rafoogari has been used to restore valuable pieces of clothing. It is most famously known as the highly skilled technique, which uses patchwork and darning, to repair Pashmina shawls. It is believed that these Rafoogars migrated to the Kashmir valley from Samarkand and Iran.
It gained prominence during the Afghan rule of Kashmir in the 1700's, as a heavy tax was imposed on shawls and to evade this, they were made in sections on different looms and then assembled from separate pieces. A book on Asian Textiles in the Spencer Museum of Art states - 'that assembling a shawl from many segments required considerable skill to assure that the patterns and sizes fit together. Shawls composed of hundreds of small pieces and required astonishing skill to assemble into a coherent unit. The craftsmen responsible for this were the Rafoogar, needleworkers who received the individually woven segments of a shawl and joined them together like a jigsaw puzzle with such skill that the seams are very difficult to detect.' By the end of the 19th century the industry had declined and over the past 200 years Najibabad, in Uttar Pradesh, has emerged as a centre of shawl restoration.
Another source of origin is the development of the craft alongside the manufacture of the Dhaka Muslins. There are instances in poems and historical texts during Mughal times where fine rafoogari on muslin and jamdani have been recorded. George Thomson in his lectures on British India in 1840 -' At Shanteepooree and Dhaka, muslins are made...The ruffooghurs , or darners , were also particularly skilful.' It is quite possible that our rafoogars here in Bhagalpur are from this lineage
Process know-how
In Rafoogari craftsmen repair holes or worn areas in the woven fabrics using needle & thread alone. Done by hand it requires tremendous skill & finesse, as they match the thread-work and mend the product in a way that it is hard to find any traces of the repair. It requires immense discipline and patience, sitting on the floor through the day, while maintaining an upright back, with one knee folded & tucked under and the other folded with the sole of the foot lying flat on the ground. Rafoogari comprises of two methods — patchwork and tana-bana (interlay). In the patchwork style, a part of the same cloth is cut and fixed over the torn part with fine stitches. In tana-bana, threads from the fabric are pulled out from an unused area and the tear is filled with intricate cross-stitches that must have the subtlety to appear invisible. If the yarn is weak and fragile, it is plied to give it the needed strength.
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