Who owns India’s textile traditions in age of AI-enabled mass production?

Published On 21 Oct 202621 Oct 2026.

Key points

• The Rekh Sanganeri Dataset is a similar system developed for hand-block printed Sanganeri textiles from the western Indian state of Rajasthan.
• Inaugurated in August, the $1.4m facility intends to modernise India's handloom sector by combining traditional weaving heritage with contemporary technology.
• Maharashtra's Vingatha system does something similar at the state level by authenticating handloom sarees such as Paithani and Karvat Kathi.
• Bitupan Deka was out shopping for a "gamusa" (traditional scarf) with his mother in India's northeastern state of Meghalaya when he noticed something unusual.
• When I asked around, I discovered that weavers in Sualkuchi are paid a one-time fee of roughly 2, 000 rupees for each design they develop, instead of royalties.

"Every shop selling the scarf had the same handful of patterns repeated over and over, " he informed Al Jazeera over the telephone from Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya.

"When I asked around, I discovered that weavers in Sualkuchi are paid a one-time fee of roughly 2, 000 rupees for each design they develop, instead of royalties. Cutting down the number of designs they produce was a cost-saving practice followed by the manufacturers."

This discovery prompted Deka, an assistant professor of computer technology at Shillong's MIT University, to create a system that can produce infinite new designs for such fabrics.

"My work isn't meant to replace the traditional designers. I hope, instead, that it will become a tool in their hands to create new and modern motifs more easily, so the consumers can have variety, " Deka remarked.

Once the patent, which is being applied for under the research and development department of his university, comes through, Deka intends to monetise the system by making it a commercial designing service that the textile industry can avail.

In India's varied textile traditions, patterns and motifs carry the memory of a place and the mythology of its individuals – sometimes even the history of migrations.

Notably, the designs are imagined by weavers from things that exist around them, and then painted with locally available colours, mostly using carved clay and wooden frames. These weavers do not simply reproduce a pattern; they inherit it. Their hands hesitate where their grandmother's did, and they know why a particular flower must face left.

In practice, a computer has no such inheritance or hesitation. It learns by analysing pictures and repeating them in endless variations. As Deka's system demonstrates, the computer can now draw and weave the same flower, and yet.

For context, the Rekh Sanganeri Dataset is a similar system developed for hand-block printed Sanganeri textiles from the western Indian state of Rajasthan. It includes high-resolution images of printed patterns, annotated down to ink bleed and slight misalignment – the imperfections that are the hallmark of the handmade work.

Its developer, Reddy Sai Nivas C, notes it should be employed as a resource for research and art, not as a substitute for artisans.

But the disclaimer is the paradox: Tools built to preserve a craft are making its visual language easier to digitally reproduce without involving the craftsperson.

Dinesh Chhipa comes from one of the oldest Chhipa families, an artisan and merchant caste renowned for dyeing and block printing. He is a Bagru designer – a block printing technique from Bagru town in the western state of Rajasthan – and a textile businessman.

"Traditional craft is slow to produce. Even if someone offered us a fortune, we wouldn't be able to produce these pieces in mass numbers, so I don't fault those using digital technology and AI to fill the gap, " he informed Al Jazeera.

"But don't borrow craft and regional names like Bagru and Jaipuri [named after the capital city of Rajasthan]. These designs and motifs were born out of a culture and necessities of the communities they come from." Who owns culture when it turns into plain data?

India has been digitising its textile memory for years – from the Botanical Survey of India's historical collections to the Bharatiya Vastra Shilpa Kosh, a national portal built by the state-run National Institute of Fashion Technology and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

Without documentation, the fragile traditions and knowledge could disappear. But digitisation additionally allows the same archive to be employed by an AI system seeking to reproduce these crafts at scale.

At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in February this year, Indian software firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) showcased Bridgital Loom, an AI system that converts textile designs into loom-ready instructions. LED lights on the loom guide a weaver through the thread sequences of intricate Banarasi and Kanchipuram patterns – named after the cities where these iconic arts grew.

TCS notes the technology helps weavers execute complex designs faster and with fewer errors, and is meant to be a bridge between the artisans and technology. A pilot project that uses the loom is already under way at Kanchipuram, a town in southern Tamil Nadu state.

In an interview with the online platform Digit at the New Delhi summit, the head of AI strategy at Bridgital Loom, Muthulakshmi Nellaiappan, observed that a new weaver takes more than 15 years to master the art.

"With the technologies we have in hand. The younger weaver who has just entered the skill can become a master much sooner, " she remarked.

Technology flattens the master-apprentice hierarchy of traditional knowledge systems. The weaver no longer has to conceptualise or remember patterns, colours and codes; he blindly follows the machine's instructions, handing creativity and memory to AI.

According to Nellaiappan, since a substantial percentage of India's looms are non-electronic, TCS has ensured its system works with handlooms as well and that it was essential for scaling up the technology.

But digital looms additionally raise another question: Who owns culture when it turns into plain data?

For generations, India's textile knowledge sat outside intellectual property systems. It lived in community memory, passed from master to apprentice with no certificate of ownership. Kanchipuram, Mekhela-Sador, Sanganeri and Banarasi are names for places that these textiles supported shape, not merely emerged from.

Now, this knowledge is entering generative models that owe nothing to these traditions.

For designers and manufacturers, the possibilities are seductive: Motifs combined at will, colours changed with a command, and thousands of designs generated instantly. The machine offers abundance.

In practice, the artisan, by contrast, has always lived with scarcity: Of funds, bargaining power, or recognition.

Ananthalakshmi Vadivel, a third-generation weaver and owner of Vadivel Silk Looms in Kanchipuram, notes their venture is already competing in the market with cheaper Kanchipuram sarees produced on electronic looms.

"Perhaps, with AI, these sellers can create trending designs faster and cheaper to attract mass consumers. But these imitations can never replace the original, " she informed Al Jazeera.

"There will always be a market for authentic Kanchipuram and handcrafted textiles, no matter how much technology makes the imitation cheaper. True Kanchipuram weave, colour, and designs can only be created by hand, and discerning buyers know this."

Then again, the question is no longer whether AI can recreate a textile. It sure can. The question is: Who gets paid when it does?

In December 2025, the federal government's Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade floated a statutory "blanket licence" – a system where AI developers could train models on lawfully obtained copyrighted material without seeking permission from each rights holder. Once commercialised, those systems would owe royalties to copyright owners at rates set by the administration.

But intellectual property (IP) laws assume a traceable work with a traceable author. A motif, by contrast, is communal property, its technique passed down through generations with no single originator.

In such cases, who is entitled to royalty and copyright? The artisan who first created the design? The photographer who documented it? The researcher who assembled the dataset? In practice, the developer who built the tool? India's laws offer no clear answers. The artisan whose name never appeared on a label may once again be missing from the paperwork.

Meanwhile, the administration is planning a dedicated AI-handloom research department under the Centre of Excellence for Handloom Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in the capital, New Delhi. Inaugurated in August, the $1.4m facility intends to modernise India's handloom sector by combining traditional weaving heritage with contemporary technology.

Meanwhile, the administration additionally intends to register thousands of weavers and fit their handlooms with sensors that convert weave patterns into digital data, and problem QR-coded tags to trace provenance. Maharashtra's Vingatha system does something similar at the state level by authenticating handloom sarees such as Paithani and Karvat Kathi.

For context, the idea is simple: If a saree can tell you where it came from, the person who created it becomes harder to erase.

While these measures cannot stop AI-enabled design and mass production, they may offer artisans more visibility and turn each piece into an archive. 'Cannot separate names from community'.

For now, who owns India's textile traditions in age of AI remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.