A few weeks back, I posted a video of our punchcard guys at work. Just hands, some cardboard, a hammer, and a lot of patience. I didn't think much of it when I uploaded it. Two million views later, it's clear a lot of you were as surprised by this little machine as I was, years ago, watching it get made in our own family's workshop.
So I wanted to sit down and write out the full story. Not just what the punchcard does, but where it came from, who made it, and why. I promise this is the part that made my jaw drop: a French weaver from the 1800s basically laid the groundwork for the computer you're reading this on.
Okay, so what is a punchcard, actually?
Every Banarasi saree starts life on paper, not on a loom. Long before any thread touches any machine, an artist draws the design, a flower, a paisley, a peacock, sometimes a whole scene. Then a specialist called a naqshaband redraws it on graph paper, square by square, where each tiny box stands for a single thread in the final weave.
That graph paper design then gets turned into cards, thick cardboard punched full of holes in a specific pattern. Each hole tells the loom's jacquard mechanism which thread to lift and which to leave alone, for that one line of the design. String enough of these cards together in order and you've written a set of instructions the loom can "read" as it weaves, row by row, until the pattern appears in silk.
This is the machine I filmed. The guys hammering, sorting, and punching those cards by hand, that's not a side task. That's the actual programming of the saree, done before a single thread is even touched.
The bit that honestly surprised me
The jacquard loom isn't just an old weaving trick. It's one of the earliest machines in history to run on stored, swappable instructions, which is a fancy way of saying it worked a lot like a computer program.
A French weaver named Joseph Marie Jacquard put this punchcard idea together in the early 1800s. It wasn't long before people with nothing to do with weaving took notice. Charles Babbage, the British mathematician often called the father of the computer, is said to have carried actual jacquard punchcards in his coat pocket while designing his "Analytical Engine," a machine that, on paper, looked a lot like what we'd now call a computer.
The person who really saw where this could go was Ada Lovelace. She's remembered today as the first computer programmer in history, and she described Babbage's machine with a line I think is genuinely beautiful: that it would weave algebraic patterns, just as the jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. She meant it literally. The same punch and read logic that puts a paisley on a saree is the logic underneath the code running your phone.
Decades later, an American named Herman Hollerith used the same punchcard idea to help the US government count its census. His company eventually became IBM. So somewhere in the family tree of every laptop, every ATM, every piece of software you've used, there's a bit of this same idea: holes in a card, telling a machine what to do, one line at a time.
Our punchcard guys have been doing this by hand in the lanes of Banaras for generations. Most of them have probably never called their own work "coding" in their life. But that is essentially the job.
Why this still has to be done by hand
You'd think by 2026 someone would've digitized all of this, and to be fair, some workshops now use design software to plan and store patterns. But the actual card cutting, the punching, the fitting of dozens or sometimes hundreds of cards together so a jacquard loom can read a single complex motif, that part is still mostly hand skill, passed from one generation to the next.
There's no course for this. No certificate. The men doing it learned by sitting next to their fathers and grandfathers for years, hammering out cards long before they were trusted to do it for a saree that actually mattered. One wrong hole, one card out of order, and the whole motif comes out broken. It's precise, repetitive, physically demanding work, and it's completely invisible to anyone just looking at the finished saree.
That invisibility is the whole reason I wanted to make that video in the first place.
Where this fits in the bigger picture
Once the design is finalized and the cards are cut, a Banarasi saree still goes through dyeing, warping, and the actual weaving on the loom, a process that can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to several months depending on how dense the pattern is. The jacquard and its punchcards sit right in the middle of all this, quietly making an intricate, dense design possible without needing two weavers working the loom at once, which is how it was done before Jacquard's invention reached India.
So the next time you see a Banarasi with a heavy, detailed motif running through it, a jaal, a jangla, a shikargah hunting scene, somewhere behind that piece is a stack of cardboard cards, punched by hand, by someone who's probably been doing this since before I was born.
That's the story behind the video. Not just old craftsmen doing old things, but a two hundred year old idea, still alive, still being hand built, in a small workshop in Banaras.
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