A NEW NARRATIVE FOR HANDLOOM REVIVAL

Handloom revivalists and curators are finding fresh, interdisciplinary ways to tell the rich stories of textiles of India

- Shrabonti Bagchi, Avantika Bhuyan, Pooja Singh, Jahnabee Borah & Mahalakshmi Prabhakaran

For veteran Indian designer Ritu Kumar, it’s the past that takes handloom into the future. Kumar, whose ideas have led the world of couture for five decades, has been instrumental in reviving the Banarasi sari. And that has involved stripping away crude changes that have made their way into the weaving culture over the decades and creating something for the future built upon the Banarasi’s strengths: its suppleness, richness and beauty.

She felt the storied weave, which has been a part of Indian tradition for centuries, had stagnated. So it was up to Indian designers like her to support artisans and make the Banarasi weave richer, purer and—to use a much abused word—more “authentic”.

“I was trying to recreate the old Varanasi sari and take out the stiffness we now associate with it. The traditional Varanasi sari was such that you could wrap it and put it in your handbag. It was so pliable (because) it was often meant for 16- to 18-year-old brides who were petite,” says Kumar, who has been working with Varanasi weavers to create more refined versions of the silk fabric since the early 2000s. “Today’s Varanasi saris look like wall hangings,” she says.

It took Kumar some time to figure out what had gone wrong—the weavers had started using Chinese silk. Traditionally, the fabric was woven using Murshidabad silk, which was hand-twisted. “Hand-twisting toh gayi (it disappeared). What does this hand-twisting do?” she says, rubbing her thumb, index and middle fingers together to show the movement. “It creates pores between the weft and the warp and these pores give the sari that suppleness.”