A CURATOR’S JOURNEY
For museum curator Divia Patel, preserving the rich story of Indian saris is a personal mission
A creative family, a history of politics and a passion for silk saris all combined in Divia Patel’s career.
Iam an expert on modern and contemporary art and design from India and am based at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where I have worked for over 15 years. The museum has the most important collection of South Asian art and textiles outside of India.
As curators, we need to leave our own legacy of new research and scholarship and over the years my research has covered photography, art, design and textiles.
Early Inspirations
I was born in Kenya, in East Africa, to Indian parents, who were also born in Africa. We all moved to England when I was about five.
My grandfather learnt how to do basic tailoring at a young age and quickly became a wellrespected men’s tailor. I loved watching his incredible work with fabric, he made exquisite men’s three- piece suits and would make my sister and me skirts and blouses. I would occasionally ask him to create pieces for me from magazine pictures.
I still have strong memories from my time growing up in Kenya. I remember the intense colour of the incredible dark red earth, the stunning, flat spectacular landscape and being surrounded by nature and animals like giraffes.
My mother treasured her silk saris and she has told me stories of how she would wait for months for friends to travel to India by boat to bring new saris back for her. I have inherited some of these including a very regal, bright purple silk, woven with silver design, which was in the family for well over 50 years and is a favourite of mine. It is a very light silk so is a pleasure to wear. This sari has a sense of history and my mother only wore it on special occasions. She knows which party each stain came from on each of these saris. They have that ‘wear’ to them.
My mother was an artist and, like many Asian women, was
taught embroidery at home at a young age. In her spare time she would embroider. I still have the beautiful bed covers she made.
My father was a good amateur photographer. In 1950s Africa, it was rare to have a top-end Rolleiflex camera; he took composing images seriously and developed his own photos. I see a lot of my aesthetic and desire to be creative as coming from my mother and her love for textiles, from my grandfather with his tailoring and my father with
his photography.
My First Sari
Lots of young Asian women don’t know how to wear a sari and rely on their mothers to help. I really wanted to learn how to put a sari on myself when I was ten. It takes a bit of practise learning how different fabric drapes. I find them very comfortable and it gave my mother great pleasure knowing that one of her daughters was wearing her saris.
My sister gave me my first sari at 18. It was a plain silk sari and cost around £30 at the time. I remember wearing my mother’s dark red sari with gold thread and embroidery, with tiedyed dots to family weddings. Saris were relatively expensive and she had around 30 saris of different quality collected over many years. There was silk for special occasions and some nylon work saris for day-to-day. The tradition is to wear a silk sari through your life and then pass it on. Some women have hundreds of saris.
First Visit to the V&A
I grew up in outer London and went to the V&A for the first time as a teenager. I was in awe of the architecture, the sense of space and the immensity of it all. My father died a couple of years after we arrived in England, so my mother was a single parent for a lot of the time and visiting museums was done through schools.
It is difficult when you are 16 to know what you want to be in life. My first university degree was in economics and politics. I then became an assistant in the Registrar’s department at the V&A to gain experience and get an insight into how the museum works. After that I knew that I wanted to be a curator in the Indian Department and so I undertook a Master’s degree in South Asian history and anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. My Indian background and knowledge of the Gujarati language has
“A hundred years from now people will see how we lived today because we continue to acquire modern collections”
helped my curatorial career and I love being able to research, write articles and books about the V&A collections and generally immerse myself in aspects of my heritage.
My first trip to India was after I finished university and I had already begun working at the V&A. The experience was overwhelming. The colours, smells and noise were very powerful and exciting. We went as a family with my grandfather to his village in Gujarat to understand the rural India in which he grew up. We also visited cities such as Mumbai, Delhi and Agra and saw many of the famous monuments of India’s past. It was a powerful experience because of the sense of history and connection to culture that I got from it.
My grandfather also took us to Dandi where Mohandas Gandhi led the Salt March in 1930. [An act of civil disobedience against British salt taxes and laws.] It was an important event in the Indian independence movement. My grandfather returned from Africa to join the march, as he felt very strongly about Indian independence. The march went past my grandfather’s old house en route to the sea. He took us to where the Salt March ended on that visit, which was very special to see.
Now I go to India once a year to conduct research on aspects of the collection. For The Fabric of India exhibition (V&A October 3, 2015 to January 10, 2016) I visited more often to speak to textile makers and designers and to acquire pieces for display. Our earliest piece in the exhibition was from the third century, borrowed from the British Museum, and the latest was made in 2015 and acquired specially for the V&A. Included in the show was a particularly special sari made of khadi (handwoven fabric made from handspun thread) in 2013. This sari references the fabric used and made popular by Gandhi during the Independence movement.
From the 1900s European fabric was flooding India’s markets and Indian weavers were suffering. From the 1920s Gandhi asked Indian spinners and weavers to boycott European products and spin their own material. Those famous images of Gandhi and his followers wearing the white cap and loincloth were taken during the Salt March. Gandhi promoted them as a symbol of the independence movement. The spinning wheel was used on the independence flag at the time and khadi is still used today by contemporary designers because of the connection to Indian independence. Even if you don’t know the history, these saris are beautiful and the fabric is entirely handmade, handspun and handwoven.
Even growing up in different countries, I was always aware of my Indian heritage and learning about it was very important to me. A lot of South Asians are known for their interest in the law or accountancy. I feel very passionately about the cultural side and want to be able to convey it to a much wider audience.