New yarn for old weaves

BENGALURU: The power of bringing back forgotten weaves, like the Kunbi or gomi teni saris, goes beyond the draping. It is like reviving a piece of history.
Last June, Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting and Textiles, Smriti Irani, announced in Goa that “the central government would go all out to revive the Kunbi sari”. She made the announcement wearing the sari.The handwoven sari, recognized by its red colour and thick checkered pattern, was traditionally worn by the Kunbi tribes who inhabited the coastal region hundreds of years ago, long before the Portuguese colonised it. While the sari may have languished from the ’70s to the noughties, it is certainly enjoying a revival thanks to initiatives by the government, designers like Wendell Rodricks – who showcased a line in 2011 and wrote about it in his 2015 book, Moda Goa, and revivalists like Rohit Phalgaonkar and Vinayak Khedekar.
For Phalgaonkar, a historian, reviving the Kunbi and the Gauda sari, was a fortuitous accident. “We were looking to revive a forgotten dance form and realized that it wasn’t being performed anymore because the traditional attire –the Gauda sari – worn by performers was not woven anymore!” says Phalgaonkar. That crucial missing link led him to focus on reviving the sari that is as much a part of Goa’s identity as are its beaches. It was a journey that saw him visiting tribal pockets through the length and breadth of Goa, collecting sari samples that were over 150-years-old, and sitting and interacting with weavers in Coimbatore and Hubli to get the sari woven exactly as it was done all those hundred of years ago.
The revival of the Kunbi and Gauda saris is a happy story but at a time when words like ‘textile revival’, ‘textile revivalist’ are the new cool in the business of fashion, it is efforts by people like Phalgaonkar and ilk that need to be highlighted to understand what the job of infusing life to a forgotten weave entails.
BRINGING BACK 12TH CENTURY SARI TO 21ST CENTURY
For textile designer and revivalist Hemalatha Jain, the job is as unglamorous as it comes. For the NIFT alumna who has researched and revived north Karnataka’s Patteda Anchu and the Gomi Teni saris, being a textile revivalist is about pursuing what you love while fighting copycat designers who are quick to make replicas, struggling for funding and most importantly, convincing weavers to work with her.
“Within a few weeks after I had launched the Patteda Anchu sari in 2016, I saw replicas being sold online. What took me by surprise was that people who called themselves ‘revivalists’ and ‘handloom experts’ had picked up information from us and went ahead and made their own versions. For people like me who work at the grassroots level, there is huge competition, all in the name of textile revival,” Jain confides.
REVIVE TEXTILES TO MAKE THEM RELEVANT
This is where designer Pradeep Pillai pitches in to makes a contentious statement. A designer who is known for his efforts in contemporizing traditional sari weaves, Pillai could very well fit the ‘revivalist’ tag but he quickly refutes it. “Please do not call me a textile revivalist,” he insists before sitting you down to explain things in a measured manner.
“If you were to go by the technical definition of a ‘revivalist’, it would mean recreating something the exact same way it was done. And doing that in today’s times would be impractical. Can you, for instance, imagine weaving a Kodali Karuppu sari using pure gold zari and hand painting motifs – the way it was done for the royal family of Tanjore? It would cost over a lakh today and it would be consigned to a museum,” he says. For Pillai, the whole point of revisiting an old and dying textile is about making it accessible to the buyer. “I want my saris to be worn by common people,” he says. Pillai's experiments to achieve that vision include transposing the Chanderi, Venkatagiri, and Kodali Karuppu designs on to linen. His label also makes desi Tussar saris. “We weave the Tussars using yarn made in India, unlike others who use Chinese-made yarn.”
Sanjay Garg, the creator of the decade-old label Raw Mango echoes Pillai when he says that ‘revivalist’ is a word that is being encashed by people today. “In fact, I say that it is the textile that is reviving you because while it has stood the test of time it is we who’ve lost the context,” he quips. For Garg, who has done yeoman work in reinventing the Chanderi and Mashru textiles, the point to keep in mind while reviving textiles is to ensure that it is relevant to the times you live in. “The Indian textile tradition is hundreds of years old. But if I stuck to the traditional format of doing things, where is the value that I bring in as a designer? Tradition only has value when it moves with the times. It should flow like a river else there’s the danger of it staying stagnant,” says Garg whose creations are not only worn by India’s who’s who, they have also been displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
MAKE IT A SUSTAINED EFFORT
Indian textiles have got a fillip today and as Garg, Pillai and their ilk will attest, a lot of designers are getting back to their roots to make a statement. While the attempts, including getting weavers to walk the ramp, get them the headlines, the real job of sustaining traditional handlooms is a long-drawn process.
“Most designers just do it as a one-year project before they move on to the next thing that catches their fancy. That does nothing to the weavers. If you are talking about reviving a textile, then you’ve got to make sure that it’s a 365-day project,” says Pillai who started his eponymous label in 2011 and has been nurturing a network of weavers.
Jain too started the Punarjani Trust to ensure sustained employment for weavers. “I started the trust because I realised that while a lot of our traditional arts and crafts were languishing, the craftsmen were impoverished too.” Today, she has a set weavers who work for her and are excited by her vision.
“The reason I do what I do is because I think India has so much to offer. Why do we have to look to the west?” For Phalgaonkar, the joy of reviving the Gauda sari comes from the fact that, “I am helping keep a small piece of Goan history alive.”