Erode Weekly Textile Market (Monday Night Market)

Erode's weekly textile market is the city's best-known cloth market. A school textbook used across India describes Erode's cloth market as one of the largest in the world. Every week it sets up on Monday evening and trades through the night into Tuesday.

Where it is held

The market is centred on the old Central Theatre area, now the Central Textile Market, and spreads along Gandhiji Road and State Bank Road in central Erode. Many sellers set up temporary roadside stalls for the night. A second night market runs in the Ashokapuram area.

A market that moved

For years the weekly market (the "sandhai") was held at the Abdul Gani Textile Market. After Gani Market's new commercial complex opened around 2024, the weekly sandhai there stopped, and wholesale buyers now go to the Central Textile Market and Ashokapuram. Gani Market's shopkeepers have asked the Erode Corporation to bring the sandhai back.

Who sells and who buys

Manufacturers and traders from Erode, Tiruppur, Coimbatore, Namakkal, Salem, Karur and Dindigul set up stalls, so buyers can purchase direct from producers at bulk prices. Buyers come from across Tamil Nadu and from Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. In one Deepavali-week report, about 60% of sales were retail and 40% wholesale.

What is sold

The market sells everyday clothing and cotton textiles: shirts, T-shirts, trousers, jeans, churidars, children's wear, innerwear, nightwear, sarees, dhotis, cloth pieces, bedsheets and towels. Demand follows the festival calendar: Deepavali, Pongal, Onam (for Kerala buyers) and the Aadi month, when yellow sarees, saffron dhotis and towels sell well.