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The Trinjan Weaving SChool
In Punjab, cotton was never transformed into cloth by machinery alone. It moved through a network of farmers, spinners, weavers, songs and gatherings called Trinjan.
The Artisan Archive’s partnership with The Trinjan Weaving School is teaching textile skills while restoring the conditions through which culture can move from one generation to the next.
In 2022, Aditi and Kheti Virasat Mission’s associate director Rupsi Garg traveled across Punjab to meet grandmothers who were among the final stewards of the region’s handspinning and handloom traditions.
Those visits made clear that reviving desi kapas would require more than returning the seed to the soil. The skills needed to transform the fiber into yarn and cloth also had to be renewed.
In 2023, Rupsi proposed creating a weaving school under the name Trinjan. Through her fashion and social-impact network, Aditi seeded the initial funding of $12,000 required to begin the school.
The first pilot brought together twenty women under the guidance of elder Shinder Kaur—one of the women Aditi and Rupsi had documented in her home the year before.
What began as a pilot has since taken shape as a permanent physical space where women can learn spinning, weaving, and the material language of Punjab’s native cotton.
More than a textile tradition
In Punjabi culture, trinjan refers to a gathering where women came together to spin cotton, sing folk songs, exchange stories, and pass knowledge across generations. Trinjan transformed textile production from an isolated domestic responsibility into a collective practice. The cloth was one outcome of the gathering. The other was culture.
As women cleaned and spun cotton, they also created a space of companionship and mutual care. Skills were not learned through written instructions or standardized courses. They were acquired through repetition, observation and proximity: watching how an elder held the fibre, controlled its tension, repaired a broken thread or judged the quality of yarn through touch.
Trinjan was part workshop, part classroom, part oral archive and part women’s commons.
When the Gathering Disappears
Over time, this network began to fracture.
The arrival of industrial yarn and factory-made cloth reduced the household need for spinning. Agricultural transformation shifted Punjab away from diverse local fibre systems. Migration, changing village life and the declining economic value of handmade textiles further interrupted the spaces in which knowledge had once moved naturally between generations.
What we are doing
Supporting intergenerational knowledge transfer
Through Kheti Virasat Mission’s Trinjan initiative, elders train younger artisans in spinning and weaving practices that were once passed naturally between generations.
Creating a future for the craft
In addition to our seed funding to begin the school, The Artisan Archive commissions fabric from the weaving school, turning training into paid work while supporting the continuation of these skills, stories and shared traditions. These fabrics are the core of our collections.
SEED, STRING, SILHOUETTE
The Trinjan Weaving School is the second movement in The Artisan Archive’s opening chapter.