Weave Stories
Film · Banarasi
02 / Weave Stories
Banarasi
Varanasi and five neighbouring districts, Uttar Pradesh
The weave
- Not one cloth. A family of techniques. (mentioned below)
- A Banaras loom will work on pure silk, on organza, on georgette, on tissue, on satin, on tussar. No other Indian weaving centre works across so many grounds, and none has as many named ways of putting a pattern into a cloth.
- The design is Mughal, and behind the Mughal is Persia.
Kinds of Weaving techniques in banaras
- The distinction that sets the price is structural, and it lives on the reverse.
- Kadhwa. Each motif woven as its own island. No floats between motifs, nothing to cut. Slower, sturdier.
- Cutwork (phekwa). Extra weft thrown selvedge to selvedge, floats snipped off by hand after the loom. Faster, lighter, cheaper.
- Kadiyal. Border in sharp contrast to the body. Needs the warp dyed in sections.
- Rangkat. The highest order of kadiyal. Colour blocks across the body. Close to nine months.
- Tanchoi. One or two warps, two to five close coloured wefts. Dense self design, no float on the back.
- Meenakari. Coloured resham alongside the zari, for an enamel effect. Up to twenty colours in one sari.
- Jangla. An all over jaal of flowers and creepers. Strictly, only when woven in full kadhwa.
- Satin - Weave also
Motifs
- Kalga and bel. Paisley and creeper. Both named in the GI itself.
- Buti, butidar. Small separate motifs scattered all over.
- Shikargah. Hunting scenes, with animals and figures.
- Konia. The corner motif usually a paisley mughal inspired
- Jangla/ Jaal, jali. - is the floral jaal pattern
- Jamawar. Paisley and labyrinth. Kashmiri in origin.
Rare hallmark
- Turn the sari over. That is the whole demonstration.
- Kadhwa is the same cloth on the back. No floats, no cut ends.
- Cutwork shows thousands of tiny snipped thread ends.
Colours
- Traditionally natural: turmeric for yellow, indigo for blue, madder root and lac for the reds, pomegranate rind and kusum flower for soft greens and golden tones. Synthetic dye arrived in the late nineteenth century and brought purples, pinks and metallic tones that the natural palette could not reach.
- Red and maroon are the classic bridal palette.
- Seventeenth century European travellers called Banaras saris woven gardens.
- Firozi. Turquoise, from the Persian for the stone.
- Sona rupa. Gold and silver zari in the same piece.
- Ganga-Jamuna. The same idea in butidar work, gold and silver together, named for the two rivers.
The fold, and why
- The most common and unique banarasi gold is the long fold in banarasi keeps a jaal readable in one sweep instead of broken across four creases.
Film · Ponduru
04 / Weave Stories
Ponduru
Ponduru, Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh
The weave
- Handspun and handwoven cotton, locally patnulu.
- This is khadi, not handloom, and that is the whole point. Khadi means the yarn is spun by hand. Handloom only means the cloth was woven by hand from mill yarn.
- Grown, cleaned, spun and woven within a few kilometres. Khadi as a self sufficient local system.
- Usually woven with a silk or zari border and body is khadi cotton.
Border and pallu
- Where there is jamdani ornament, the weaver hand lifts individual warp threads against a paper pattern under the loom.
- An all over jamdani in this count takes months to weave
Motifs
- Minimal by tradition. Small buti where jamdani work appears.
Provenance and district
- Ponduru, 25 to 30 km from Srikakulam city, about 100 km from Vizag.
- Andhra Fine Khadi Karmikabhivrudhi Sangham, founded 1949 by Vinoba Bhave, now under KVIC.
- Two indigenous short staple cottons: white hill cotton and red punasa.
- Women clean and spin. Men stretch the yarn and weave.
Rare hallmark
- The fish jawbone. Raw cotton is combed with the serrated jawbone of the valuga fish, from Godavari fishermen around Dowleswaram and Rajahmundry.
- It is what gives the fibre its silky sheen. Nothing else in the world does this
- The only place in India still using the single spindle 24 spoke Gandhi charkha.
- Gandhi: he wrote about Ponduru’s virtues in Young India, the weekly he edited.
Colours
- Traditionally undyed. Kora, off white, the natural colour of the cotton.
The fold, and why
- Stiffness in new khadi is starch in the handspun yarn. It goes after three or four washes.
- In khadi the natural crease is character.
- So: loose, soft, unpressed, no sharp edge.
Film · Paithani
06 / Weave Stories
Paithani
Paithan and Yeola, Maharashtra
The weave
- Silk sari with gold zari border and pallu.
- One of the oldest silk traditions in India, traced to the Satavahana period. Named for Paithan.
- Yeola is the volume centre now.
- Peshwa era zari was gold mixed with copper for strength. Today silver with gold plating.
Border and pallu
- A tapestry weave, not a brocade. This difference is the whole card.
- No extra weft floats behind the cloth. Each colour area is woven separately and interlocked with its neighbour where the colour changes.
- The consequence: the pallu has no reverse. It is identical on both faces. A brocade never is.
- Kadiyal. Interlocking. Border warp and weft one colour, body another, so the two look like different silks joined invisibly.
- Border and pallu are woven in zari regardless of the body colour.
Motifs
- Bangdi mor. A peacock inside a bangle, in the pallu. The most prized and the most expensive.
- Muniya. Parrot, in the border. Always green with a touch of red at the beak. Single, double, or the coveted triple.
- Asavali. A flowering vine.
- Akruti - Geometric Floral Vines
- Ajanta Kamal. The lotus, close to the Ajanta cave murals, read as a sign of rebirth.
Provenance and district
- Paithan, Aurangabad. Yeola, Nashik district.
- Fifteen days to six months per sari, depending on intricacy.
- Motifs are plotted on graph paper and followed strand by strand.
Rare hallmark
- Fold the pallu back on itself so a visitor sees both faces at once. They match.
Colours
- Kalichandrakala. Pure black with a red border.
- Shirodak. Pure white.
- Raghu. Parrot green.
- Pophali. Yellow.
- Neeligunj. Sky blue.
- Motiya. Peach pink.
- Kusumbi. Red violet.
- Mirani. Black red.
- Morpankhi. Peacock feather. Still the most requested shade.
- Black is not inauspicious in Paithani. It is a named category with a prescribed red border. Pure white is another.
The fold, and why
- The only one where one end weighs several times the other. The Pallu is heavy.
- So the fold treats one sari as two objects. The pallu is folded in separately.
Film · Pochampally Ikat
08 / Weave Stories
Pochampally Ikat
Bhoodan Pochampally, Yadadri Bhuvanagiri district, Telangana
The weave
- Yarn resist dyed before weaving. Locally paagadu bandhu, chitki, buddabhashi.
- It is done on Cotton, silk and sico, a silk cotton blend.
- ikat forms made here are single and double ikat
- The technique arrived from Chirala, the old centre of telia rumal. The telia rumal was a kerchief which was exported to the Gulf. Pochampally is what happened when it came inland.
Border and pallu
- The border is a dyed section of the warp.
- Everything is decided in the yarn.
- Single ikat resists warp or weft. Double resists dyes both.
Motifs
- Chowka. A diamond within a square. The signature.
- Kumbam. Temple border.
- Chinni ashalu, small-patterned
- Abstract geometry. Diamonds and repeating blocks across the field.
- Geometry is the native language, because the resist is tied in bundles of yarn. Curves are possible but the grid is what the process wants. That is the honest explanation for why ikat looks the way it looks.
Rare hallmark
- The feathered edge. Where two colours meet there is a soft halo, because the resist can never be exact.
- That blur is the signature of yarn tied and dyed before weaving. A print has a hard edge.
Colours
- Traditionally natural dyes. Now both natural and synthetic. Known for colour retention.
- The Original telia rumal palette is red, black and white.
- Telia means oily. The yarn is treated with oil and ash for roughly a fortnight before dyeing, and that is where the name comes from.
- Telia rumal is properly a Chirala and Puttapaka tradition, not a Pochampally one. The oldest surviving regional ikats are telia rumals from the late 1800s.
The fold, and why
- The only one whose original object was a square rather than a length.
- The telia rumal was a chowka of about 1.0 to 1.1 metres, made to be wound as a turban or worn as a lungi.
- It went to the Gulf as Asia rumal. Fishermen wore it because the oiled cloth repelled water.
- A cloth made to be wound has no natural fold line. The sari came later.
- Yarn preparation matters: steeped in dung, then worked in sesame or castor oil with burnt castor pod ash, over sixteen days.
- That leaves the cotton soft and moisture retaining, so it resists a hard crease at all. But oiled cotton collects soil at a crease line. The hazard is not a broken fold but a dirty one.
- The fold of ikat is unique and its fold shows the design of the body which is most important.
Eleven weaves, in print
Every tradition in the collection, with its motifs, colours, rare hallmarks and folds.
The Art of the Sari