Six Yards of Fabric
Recently a friend walked up to me at a seminar in New Delhi and said, “Soon, you and I will be the only two women at seminars wearing saree.” Looking around me, I realised with surprise that she was almost correct; the number of women at academic meetings in Delhi wearing saree is rapidly dwindling. It is the same in high-priced restaurants and multinational offices. An upscale restaurant in Delhi generated social media outrage when it allegedly denied entry to a woman in a saree, claiming only smart casuals are allowed. Nonetheless, the streets of Delhi, bazaars in smaller towns and fields of rural India are still full of colourful sarees. Still, the class and age divide in women’s everyday wear is increasingly apparent.
Sarees represent the best of Indian textile arts, whether they are woven, printed or embroidered. They are draped differently across different regions, but in most parts of India, saris have been ubiquitous. However, the class divide in saree consumption has led to a rapid transformation in the fabrics of saris. Crisp cotton and gorgeous silks have given way to lightweight synthetics forming routine wear for women whose daily lives demand easy washing and drying.
The movement of young, modern women away from sarees and increasing inroads of synthetic fabrics constitute a crisis for India’s textile arts. Whether the handloom sector continues to thrive or not has become a bit of a political football, but a comparison of the Third Handloom Census of India in 2009-10 with the Fourth Handloom Census of India 2019-20 records a decline of workers employed in the handloom sector from 4.3 million to 3.5 million, and this at a time when working age population is growing.
Much of the policy discourse is centred around protecting jobs in the textile industry, for example, through the Handloom Protection Act of 1985. However, employment in the handloom sector barely provides living wages. The Fourth Handloom Census found that only 18% of the handloom workers earned more than ₹5,000 ($75) per month from these activities. Given the low incomes of most handloom workers, it is hard to mourn the declining employment in this sector if alternatives offer higher wages.
We need to distinguish between protecting employment and protecting the craft. Data on skilled artisans creating handwoven sarees are scarce; however, newspaper reports and ethnographic studies document the decline of handmade one-of-a-kind sarees and the growth in power loom produced and computer-designed sarees. To address this conundrum, various policy interventions are being suggested to enhance the protection of the handloom sector, improve its productivity and enhance cooperative marketing. However, as Padmini Swaminathan points out in a book review, “The flaw [lies] in the inability of the growth policy to address a key question: could urban/modern consumers be expected to purchase goods produced in the handloom or rural sector?” she goes on to note, “given a scenario where the small and cottage sector is seen as a temporary aberration of the strategy of industrialisation and also given a scenario where no system can compel its consumers (rural or urban) to purchase goods produced only by small or cottage sector, the crisis that has afflicted the handloom textile industry of the country of which the Banaras sari industry is a part was a foregone conclusion.”
Nonetheless, I find it heart-wrenching to think of textile arts as a sunset industry. Gorgeous weaves of Ikkat, Patola and Kanjivaram silks reflect the beauty of India’s artisanal heritage. Moreover, these designs and skills are passed down from parents to children in specific areas and communities. Once upper and middle-class women move away from investing in sarees, few buyers will be willing to spend anywhere between ₹5,000 and ₹50,000 to buy these works of art when cheaper synthetic fabric sarees can be purchased for ₹500, turning saree weaving by hand into a vanishing art.
For weavers and printers, sarees reflect their hunnar (craft), skills passed down from mother to daughter and a way of life. For millions of women in India and the Indian diaspora, wearing or not wearing a saree is a highly charged symbolic act. Arguably a striking example of this symbolism was recorded when Iqbal Bano, one of the most beloved singers of the subcontinent, sang jailed poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ghazal Hum Dekhenge wearing a black saree in 1986 Pakistan in defiance of General Zia-Ul-Huq’s ban of saree as being un-Islamic.
When I was twenty-one, wearing a saree was tantamount to giving into a coda of gender performance that I was trying very hard to get away from. So I rarely wore a saree. When I was a new PhD attending professional events in India, wearing a saree signalled that my American education had not taken me away from my roots. However, as I began to borrow sarees from my mother and mother-in-law over the years, it became an unexpected blessing linking me to two amazing women in my life. My mother-in-law often bought sarees in colours she did not particularly like but thought would suit me. My mother began to get two blouses made for her sarees, one for me and one for her. I would borrow a saree from them, wear them for a year and return it. I was also inspired to buy sarees for this shared collection. When I travelled to Assam, I decided to go shopping for a Muga silk saree because my mother-in-law loves it. Yard by yard, I began to appreciate the talent and artistry involved in textile traditions of different regions, and now, I can hardly stop myself from visiting Chikankari shops when I go to Lucknow or Kanjeevarm weavers in Tamil Nadu.
As I look back on my complex relationship with sarees, it feels like many emotions are invested in these six yards of fabric. One of the fascinating accounts of the complex lives Indian and diasporic women build around sarees is visible in the social media movement with the hashtag #100sareepact, which was begun by Anju Maugdal Kadam and Ally Matthan from Bangalore. As Aarti Sandhu describes it, their social media pact to wear a saree 100 days a year created an online community which held the potential to alter our perception of the intersection of traditional fashion and feminism in the Global South. And yet, the memory of my twenty-one-year-old self makes me empathise with young women rejecting sarees as they seek to forge their identities independent of traditions they are expected to drape themselves into.
I don’t have a crystal ball to tell me what the future holds for these beautiful works of art, but I know that I will continue to buy sarees in regions I visit, whether I wear them every day or not. When my now two-year-old granddaughter Lenie grows up, she will inherit a boxful of my old sarees, as I did from my mother. She will probably be living in a studio in New York, Paris or Mumbai and may well complain to her friends about her packrat of a grandmother dumping useless merchandise on her. In a more hopeful future, the thread that ties me to my mother and my mother-in-law will stretch to include Lenie, who will use these beautiful works of art to decorate her apartment. Whatever the future holds, few artefacts bring together feminism, family, art, cultural symbolism and economy the way Indian sarees do; let me celebrate this moment by bringing out the Tussar silk that was my father’s first gift to my mother.
