My name carries the weight of a loom I have never touched. Kosuru, a Padmasali surname, is from a community whose identity is stitched, quite literally, into their hands. For centuries, the Padmasalis of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have been weavers. My maternal grandmother was a tailor. A distant uncle stitched costumes for Telugu film stars until readymade clothes flooded the market and he closed up shop, content that his children had become engineers. Somewhere in the lineage, there were hands that knew what to do with a needle. Mine do not.

I cannot weave. I cannot sew on a button. I cannot thread a needle, not without ten minutes of frustrated squinting, and even then, not always. And yet, over the years, I have found myself returning to textiles and crafts — not as a beat, not by design, but as if by some pull I didn't choose. A reporting trip to kalamkari artisans in Pedana, Andhra Pradesh. A phulkari and kalamkari workshop in New York. I also see the craft and skill in making pootharekulu in Andhra Pradesh, in bangle-making in the streets near Charminar, Hyderabad, in the Kummari Veedhi — a potter's colony in Visakhapatnam, and more.

That knowledge was not passed on to me. My mother made sure of it, not out of indifference, I would later understand, but out of a calculation the caste system had forced her to make long before I was born. When skilled labor is systematically underpaid because the people who perform it are considered low, when the knowledge in your hands marks you as lesser, the rational response is to make sure your daughter's hands know nothing of it. My mother doesn't stitch or weave or tailor. But she carries her knowledge of silks and cottons and different weaves somewhere at the back of her mind, quiet, unspoken, still there. 

My maternal grandmother, a tailor, sat at an old Usha machine - black and gold, the kind that was once in every Indian household that took its stitching seriously. She earned money from it. She raised children on it. Her right leg had been amputated below the knee after a medical complication, and she walked with a prosthetic wooden limb. When she sat down to sew, she would pedal without her wooden limb — fast, and with a force that always surprised me, the kind of force that said this was not effort but habit, not labor but language. 

I vaguely remember her at the machine. I remember her hands more clearly with the sudhi-dharam (thread and needle), which she handled with a swiftness that looked effortless. When she could no longer continue, she passed the machine to my mother. As a Padmasali, the craft was, by every ancestral logic, hers to inherit. She never used it. It sat in a corner of the house, lid closed, collecting the particular dust of things that have outlived their purpose. Old clothes piled on top. On some days, I remember trying to pedal it myself, to turn the tight spin, to understand how it worked. I asked to be taught. My mother refused. Eventually, my parents gave the machine away.

In India, the relationship between caste and cloth is structural. Weaving, dyeing, embroidering, tailoring, these have historically been the occupations of the lower castes: Padmasalis, Devangas, Pattu Saliyars, Meghwals, Chamars, communities whose labor built the textile wealth of empires and temples while the rewards flowed upward. The craft was never separable from the caste. To be a weaver was to be marked by occupation, by birth, by the particular way the Indian social order decided that those who made things with their hands were less than those who did not. This is not history. It is the present. The handloom weaver in Andhra Pradesh today earns wages that have not kept pace with inflation for decades. The caste system did not just assign these communities their occupations; it ensured that those occupations would never make them free. What we call craft heritage, what gets displayed in museums and sold in boutiques and taught in Brooklyn apartments, was once simply called labor. And the people who did it were, for centuries, told that the labor was all they were.

In early January 2020, I travelled to Pedana, a small artisan town near Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh, to report on kalamkari, the ancient craft of hand-painting and block-printing fabric with natural dyes, practiced for over 3,000 years. I am not sure what drew me to the story. I only remember being strangely insistent about it, the way you sometimes are about things whose reasons you cannot articulate.

As I moved through Pedana, interviewing one practitioner after another, I realised something I hadn't anticipated: most of the artisans I was meeting were Padmasali. The same caste as me. They were, in the most literal sense, my people, bound to textile work the way my own family had once been, the way I, conspicuously, was not. In Pedana, kalamkari begins with handloomed cotton, soaked in groundwater, bleached with plant dyes, left overnight in leaves from a local Myrobalan tree to retain color, then boiled in copper vessels with roots and flowers. This process, repeated across generations, became a form of knowledge that lives in the body before it lives in the mind. 

The artisans I spoke to were mostly in their mid-forties and older. There were very few young people. When I asked about succession, the answers were tired and unsurprising. The wages kalamkari brought in were insufficient. The growing economy had opened other doors. Their children wanted a different life, a higher-paying job. Most did not want their children to carry on. How could they? The block print, they said, simply wasn't enough. I recognised the logic immediately. It was the same logic that had emptied my grandmother's machine of purpose, the calculation, made quietly across thousands of households, that the skill was not worth the life it bought. And what I could not stop thinking about, standing in those workshops, was this: the craft isn't fading because the artisans stopped caring. It is dying because the system that consumed their labor for centuries never paid them enough to make caring sustainable. 

There is a concept I keep circling back to: ancestral memory. The idea that knowledge doesn't only pass through instruction, that it can live in the body across generations, dormant, waiting. I don't know whether I believe this. I am a journalist; I am suspicious of the romantic. But I also don't know how else to explain what I felt in Pedana, or why I keep ending up in rooms where something is being made with the hands. My mother chose not to teach me what her mother taught her. And I, who was never taught, cannot seem to stay away. 

But the more I sit with the concept, the more uncomfortable it makes me. Ambedkar, in Annihilation of Caste, argued that the caste system is "not merely a division of labour" but "a division of labourers," a hierarchy in which those labourers are "graded one above the other," assigned their occupations not by aptitude or choice but by birth. The idea that weaving might live in my body because I am Padmasali is not so different, structurally, from the very logic Ambedkar was dismantling. Caste has always insisted that your hands know what they know because of what you were born into. Ancestral memory, applied to caste-assigned craft, doesn't challenge that claim. It repeats it, more gently, in a register that feels like reclamation but carries the same root.

Where is the ancestral memory of weaving through my caste that I can't seem to find? Maybe the body remembers what the hands were never shown. Maybe it doesn't, and what I'm calling ancestral memory is just guilt wearing a more poetic disguise. I genuinely cannot tell. What I keep returning to is this: the concept tells me more about how caste thinks than it tells me about myself. What I know is that the pull is there, and that it arrived before I had language for it, and that it has not left.

Before I left the region, we passed through another village in Krishna district, a cluster of communities that had collectively vowed to work exclusively on handlooms, refusing power looms. One weaver showed me a pink saree with a silver zari border and pointed to the pallu: a faint grey thread running through the dark pink. A misthread. The saree could not be sold. She smiled when she showed me. She was sad about the economics, she said, but the thread was there, and it was hers, and the loom had done what looms do. 

Late last December, I attended a phulkari embroidery workshop at Nikita Shah's studio in New York. Phulkari, literally "flower work,"  is a Punjabi embroidery tradition, historically made by women as part of their trousseau, each piece carrying the geography of its maker's hands. It too belongs to a lineage of lower-caste craft: Banjara women, Dalit artisans, communities whose needlework was worn by those above them and rarely credited to those who made it. Shah moves between these traditions, kalamkari, phulkari, Kutchi work — not as a curator of heritage but as someone who understands that they all share the same origin: the hands of people the social order decided did not matter.

I could not thread the needle. I tried for nearly ten minutes. The thread kept missing the eye, sliding past, refusing to cooperate. I had watched my grandmother do this a hundred times, quickly, automatically, the way you do things your body has always known. She threaded needles when my buttons fell off, when my saree blouses needed loosening. Without looking. I felt, very suddenly, the full weight of what had not been passed on, and the stranger weight of who had and hadn't chosen to carry it. 

A few months later, I was back in Shah's studio for a kalamkari workshop. Shah is an artist and educator who spent eight years as a designer with a luxury Indian textile brand, living with weavers and artisans in homestays across the country, learning not just technique but the traditions embedded in the making. When she moved to New York in 2019, she began running workshops out of her apartment — a deliberate choice to replicate the atmosphere of a weaver's home rather than a classroom. She sources her bamboo pens and natural dyes directly from her mentor in India, paying above market rate. "They are custodians of a knowledge system that's very rare," she has said.

When Shah speaks about kalamkari's origins — pre-colonial, before Hindu temple patronage reframed it as devotional art — she describes it as a practice historically rooted in communities that had no social power. "There have been histories of kalamkari written by lower-class people, people who didn't have a voice in society," she has said. And sitting in her studio, I kept thinking about the artisans in Pedana, my people, in the most literal sense, who could not afford to pass the craft on. Shah's workshops cost money to attend. The Brooklyn professionals who came to learn kalamkari had the leisure and the income to do so. The Padmasali artisans who built the craft across generations did not. There is something important and something uncomfortable in that gap, in the fact that the knowledge travels, but the conditions that made it precarious do not change.

I didn't mention, in her workshop, that I was Padmasali. I just picked up the kalam, the bamboo pen, its tip shaped to hold ink differently depending on the line required, and drew a ramen bowl. Then some flowers. Kaju katli. The ocean. A pair of double-egg chicken noodles. Fish along the bottom. I was hungry and homesick, and the pen was in my hand, and those were the things that came out.

I want to be careful not to over-romanticise this. I was not recovering an ancestral skill. I was not completing a circle. I was a Padmasali woman in a Brooklyn apartment, using a bamboo pen to draw comfort food on cloth, keeping the craft alive while the communities that built it could not afford to, without knowing that one of them might, depending on how you count, be me. 

The Padmasali community's relationship to weaving is explained as being cosmological. The name comes from Padma: lotus and Sali: weaver/tailor. My father used to tell me the story of Markandeya, a mythological weaver said to have woven a lotus for the goddess Lakshmi, and that we are all his descendants. It is precisely the kind of story caste has always told — rooting labor in the divine so that those who perform it cannot question it, granting spiritual significance to an occupation in lieu of fair wages or social dignity. The mythology elevated the craft. It did not elevate the weaver. 

And yet the craft persists, in other ways, elsewhere. It is now taught in Brooklyn apartments to young professionals seeking something slow and handed down. It is shown in galleries. It is worn by people who do not know its caste history, sold by brands that have stripped it of the communities who made it. This is not preservation. This is the same structure, wearing a different name. For centuries, lower-caste labor built India's textile wealth while upper-caste and merchant communities controlled the trade, the pricing, and the markets. Today, the same textiles are repackaged as heritage, sold at a premium, celebrated as artisanal, and the Padmasali weavers who made them earn the same meagre wages, or have left the craft entirely because those wages were never enough. The aestheticization of lower-caste labor is not a corrective to caste. It is one of caste's most elegant contemporary operations: it takes what was marked as low, strips it of the people who made it low-paying, and sells it back to those at the top as beautiful. The craft travels upward, as it always has. The caste stays where it is.

What does it mean to carry a caste identity when the skill is gone but the caste never left? I have the name. I have the lineage. I have, apparently, some form of gravitational pull toward the craft that I cannot fully account for — call it guilt, call it ancestral memory, call it the body's long, inarticulate grievance. What I do not have is the skill. But what does it mean to grieve a cage?

There is a word I keep not using: grief. I am not sure I am entitled to it. The weavers who could not pass their craft on because the economics made it impossible,  they have more claim to it than I do. But the economics didn't appear from nowhere. The impoverishment of weaving communities, the meagre wages, the slow death of the handloom, these were not accidents of modernisation. They were produced by a system that spent centuries deciding that the people who made cloth were worth less than the cloth they made. The grief belongs to all of us. The accountability belongs to the system. And perhaps my mother understood this better than I have given her credit for. Perhaps her refusal to teach me was not indifference but intention, a quiet, deliberate act of severance. She could not undo our caste. But she could make sure my hands did not confirm it. I used to call that a loss. I am no longer sure it wasn't also a kind of love.