Mar 01, 2025 07:53 AM IST
Across generations, regions, religions, and socio-economic status, this unstitched garment has endured for 5,000 years
I do not know of any Indian woman who cannot tell you a sari story, or 10. Some will recall a purchase from a first salary, others will remember a graduation gift, and almost all will tell you of what they wore at their wedding.
Across generations, regions, religions, and socio-economic status, this unstitched garment has endured for 5,000 years through handloom and polyester, hand-embroidered to mass produced, nine-yards to pre-stitched, paddy field to Met Gala. In a country where we speak in many tongues and the imposition of one can be fractious, the single unifying dress of Indian women is the sari.
My first was a navy blue with what was then a fashionable polka dot blouse. I was being uprooted from a fairly anglicised education in Mumbai to study in the far more nationalist-leaning boarding school founded by Gayatri Devi to educate a generation of independent women steeped in the culture of India. Among the list of clothes to be packed in my trunk was a sari to be worn by students over the age of 13 on formal occasions. And so, the practical ’drip-dry’ came along with me. And although my stint at the school lasted for only a year, my love for the sari continues.
The title of Malvika Singh’s Saris of Memory: Fragments of My Life, immediately resonated. For those of us who wear saris on occasion, each one tells a story. And through the saris she has acquired over five decades, Singh tells hers with aplomb.
The book is an important repository or, to use Singh’s word, bhandaar, that tells the story of India and the non-stop love affair of its women with the sari. There are regional variations from the tie-and-dye of Kutch to the gara embroideries of the Mumbai Parsis with styles of tying from the Maharashtrian nine-yard hitched between the legs for freer mobility to the household keys clanging from the ends of a Bengali tangail.
While the sari has made its debut in the museums of the world — London’s Design Museum featured 90 in 2023, including a copy of Tarun Tahiliani’s foil jersey sari-gown for Lady Gaga — few in urban India wear the sari as an everyday garment. For one there’s the question of expense; a sari requires a blouse, petticoat, the stitching of a fall.
And, yet it endures. Partly it is, as Singh reminds us, because of the women — and men — who have nurtured, travelled, catalogued, reproduced, patronised and, most important, reinvented it. From Pupul Jayakar to Martand Singh, from Laila Tyabji to Rakesh Thakore.
But partly, it’s also because the sari is constantly reinventing itself to remain relevant, from the college student who pairs it with sneakers to the badlands of Bundelkhand where members of the Gulaabi Gang armed with laathis dispense gender justice dressed in rani pink saris. “Our greatest strength is when we are united,” gang founder Sampat Devi Pal told the Financial Times in 2011. “We always attract attention, because we all wear pink saris.”
Namita Bhandare writes on gender.The views expressed are personal
