National Handloom Day is observed on 7 August, chosen because the Swadeshi Movement was formally launched on 7 August 1905 at the Calcutta Town Hall, with a call to boycott foreign cloth and revive indigenous production. The day was first observed in 2015, when the India Handloom Brand was launched in Chennai to certify handloom products for authenticity and quality. The 12th National Handloom Day fell on 7 August 2026, when President Droupadi Murmu presented the Sant Kabir Handloom Awards and the National Handloom Awards. 'Srijan: Voices from the Loom' sits in that same fortnight of handloom programming, alongside the National Handloom Designers' Conclave and IIHT SUTRA 2026, the first national conclave of the Indian Institutes of Handloom Technology, held in Delhi on 12 August 2026. What distinguishes Srijan is its subject: not policy, design or technology, but the weavers themselves, and specifically the women who form the majority of the workforce yet are least visible in it.

Handloom is the largest cottage industry in India after agriculture, and it is overwhelmingly a woman's occupation — more than seven in ten workers in the sector are women, and nearly nine in ten weaver households are rural. Yet the visible face of the trade has usually been the master weaver, the trader or the designer, and welfare and credit schemes are often keyed to the household rather than the individual worker. A programme that puts women weavers on the record in their own words, and prints those accounts as an anthology, is a documentation exercise as much as a celebration: it creates a source for how skill is transmitted, what earnings look like, and where the pressure from power-loom imitation and yarn prices actually falls. For exam purposes, the sector links three separate strands of the syllabus — cultural heritage and traditional crafts, rural livelihoods and non-farm employment, and the Geographical Indication regime that protects regional weaves from imitation.