Weave la Sari
INDIA’S TRADITIONAL DRAPE IS SEEING A HAPPY REVIVAL ACROSS THE COUNTRY. A WHOLE NEW SORORITY IS EMERGING AROUND THE SIX YARDS, WITH YOUNG WOMEN WHO HAVE NEVER WORN A SARI BEFORE TAKING TO IT WITH WACKY ABANDON
Aconversation-starter, an easy topic to bond over, a paean to nostalgia and memory. The sari is having its moment. When Shital Mahajan Rane, 36, wore a pink Nauvari Maharashtrian nine-yard sari instead of a highperformance freefly jumpsuit, the international audience at the Thai Skydiving Centre in Pattaya sat up and took note. That was in February 2018, when the Padmashri awardee and holder of 17 national and six world records, made yet another skydiving mark by jumping from a height of 13,000 feet in a sari. To prove that Indian women are capable of excelling at anything.
In 1976, when she had looked into the mirror and found a young woman dressed in a pink and blue Narayanpet sari her mother gave her to wear in junior college staring back at her, Tejdeep Kaur Menon had said to herself: “A woman is born.” Today, the 1983 batch IPS officer and DGP Telangana, is part of the Global Saree Pact, a Facebook group which boasts more than 15,000 members who have decided to wear 100 saris a year, come hail or storm.
“My first sari,” says Shakti Khanna, a Gurugram-based social worker, “was a pink Khandua, hand-woven with mulberry silk yarn and calligraphy designs, during a visit to Maniabandha, Odisha, in 2005.” She was told these saris were so special that they were draped around Lord Jagannath of Puri by devotees. In 2016, Shakti started a Facebook group—The Saree Story— with sari-loving friends from Mumbai and Chennai, where they post pictures and discuss weaves and designs.
Pune-based Anjali Sathe-Lowalekar could not contain her happiness when a detour to Ilkal village on her way from Kolhapur to Badami brought her face to face with a living tradition: looms set up in homes around the village. She immediately shared her delight at seeing the sari at “the source” along with pictures on Saree Speak, another FB group that boasts 90,000-plus members.
Artist Bakula Nayak, on the other hand, was devastated when during a visit home to Hebri village near Udupi, Karnataka, she paid just Rs 100 for a handloom sari. The tag inside carried the name of a weavers’ society in Udupi. The FB sari group Kai Thari took this information, crowd-sourced funds and popularised the sari. They did the same with the Kunbi sari of Goa, Bakula says.
In hashtags and social groups, in telling photographs, in stories and images of unknown weavers, a new ode is being paid to India’s six yards of wonder—for its stubborn refusal to disappear from the life of the Indian woman and for its chameleonesque ability to keep up with the times.