A FLAG OF FREEDOM

A EXHIBITION IN NEW YORK EXPLORES HOW THE INDIAN SARI TRANSFORMED FROM A POLITICAL STATEMENT TO AN ENDURING SYMBOL OF IDENTITY

- STORY: ALISHA HARIDASANI GUPTA / NYT

In the summer of 1929, one of India's foremost female freedom fighters, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, travelled to Berlin with several other delegates to attend a conference of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship. India was still under British rule and, as a result, the Indian representatives at the gathering didn't have a flag.

Kamaladevi, who today is better known by her mononym, saw this as deeply unjust. So she and her delegates cut up their saris to create their own flag to fly at the conference’s opening gala.

“No one grudged tearing up their fineries,” she said, according to the biography The Art Of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay And The Making Of Modern India by Nico Slate, a history professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. “In fact, we felt free and liberated.”

In an instant, those women turned the sari into a political statement.

Among the oldest-known garments, but one that remains fashionable enough to be spotted on red carpets and runways, the 5m to 8m draped fabric that constitutes a sari has long been more than just clothing: It has been a symbol of empowerment, of global trade, of diplomatic soft power and of resistance.

That is the idea at the centre of an exhibition at the New York Historical, called New York Sari