An Overview of the Development of Novel Textile Design by the Application of Creative Components of the Chakma Community of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh

In the world, there are more than 370 million indigenous and tribal people with especial culture and traditions. The Chakma’s is one of the groups of indigenous people dwelling Chittagong hill tracts in Bangladesh. Chakma’s has its own culture, tradition, literature, and costume designs. The design costumes of the Chakma’s play an essential role. The Chakma’s preserved their textile design in “Alam”. Alam is a kind of cloth embroidered with various designs carrying the heritage of the Chakma. The use of Alam began approximately 500 years ago. All used clothing in Chakma society is weaved manually in the back-strap loom, which is generally very time-consuming— this limits its design aesthetics and universal use. Because of globalisation, the use of the traditional design of Chakma’s are threatened today. Till today in our country and overseas, no attempts were taken for research of the traditional Chakma’s design. The purpose of this research is to upgrade and digitise Chakma’s designs. Furthermore, efforts were made for the automatization of the traditional process to preserve traditional Chakma’s designs. In this study analysis of the fabric designs, pattern structure, colour applications of the traditional Aalam design were constructed using small prototype Rapier loom technology. We found that most of the single designs of the Alam were possible to weave in small prototype modern loom. On the other hand, intricate designs were not possible to weave in small prototype loom but are possible in the jacquard loom. The key idea is to establish an approach to modernise the traditional weaving process in order to make it convenient, economical and less time-consuming.