The Patterns Were Disappearing. Vianney Nongrum Decided to Weave Them Back.
Vianney Nongrum, eri silk weaver and founder of TYNGKAI, Ri Bhoi, Meghalaya
ഈ കഥ പിന്തുടരുന്ന ചോദ്യം:
“When the weaving patterns of an entire sub-tribe start to vanish, who decides to bring them back — and can a single brand in Ri Bhoi carry that weight?”
Eleven years of eri silk in Ri Bhoi, and TYNGKAI's deepest work is not the jainsem — it is the revival of the weaving patterns belonging to Ri Bhoi's forgotten sub-tribes.
Vianney Nongrum started TYNGKAI in Ri Bhoi because she wanted to work with something real — something rooted in the land she came from. She had studied design. She chose eri silk.
For eleven years, she has woven Ryndia jainsem, stoles, and traditional garments in her workshop in Ri Bhoi. A jainsem takes a month. A shawl takes a week. Every piece is customised. The raw material comes partly from Assam — the cocoon is local to Meghalaya, but spinning still has to happen elsewhere, and that creates the fragility in her supply chain.
But the work that matters most to Vianney is the work that is hardest to explain to a customer: the revival of patterns that belong to Ri Bhoi's sub-tribes — visual languages that exist in memory and in old fabric, but almost nowhere in production. At TYNGKAI, these patterns are being woven back into existence.
This is not nostalgia. It is documentation. It is the belief that culture and environment belong to the people who grew from them — and that the next generation has a right to inherit both.