The Registry of Sarees Bangalore, and nine stories through sarees

The exhibition, being held in association with the Kishkinda Trust, will remain on view through December 6, daily, except Tuesdays.

For someone who appreciates handlooms, a visit to The Registry of Sarees (TRS) in Bengaluru can be quite rewarding. There are sarees of the softest fabrics displayed rather grandly on the walls from ceiling to floor and on tables, each one of them giving an insight into traditions and complexity of the weave.

When Ahalya Mathan founded TRS, she wished it to be a research and study centre that would enable design, curatorial and publishing projects in the area of handspun and handwoven textiles. In the five years since, TRS have collected sarees from collectors and family collections, including the late Martand Singh, an extraordinary textile revivalist, and have displayed the saree collections in places where there are no formal museums and are close to the region’s weavers. For instance, one exhibition was held in Chirana village in Rajasthan, a first for the village.

This month, an exhibition entitled Red Lilies, Water Birds – The Saree in Nine Stories, is presented by TRS in Anegundi in Hampi, Karnataka, and is curated by Mayank Mansingh Kaul with design by Reha Sodhi. “It (the exhibition) is a narrative that is 150 years old and Red Lilies, Water Birds feeds the curatorial path TRS has embarked upon,” Mathan said.

The exhibition features a selection of 108 sarees and draped garments, organized under nine themes or stories. They represent a period of almost a century, from the late 19th to the early 20th, and comprise textiles from some of the most prominent handloom centres of India, including Kanchipuram, Venkatagiri, Chanderi, Paithan, Patan, Varanasi, Murshidabad, and Sambalpur.

The Nine Stories

At a time when sarees and drapes are primarily known by where they were woven (Banarasi, Paithani, Kanjeevaram), the exhibition is explored through nine themes which go beyond, highlighting distinct aesthetic-technical aspects which are common to broader geographies. These themes are: the use of fibres in their un-dyed form or kora, the colour red, ikat, stripes and checks, metallic brocades of Deccan and South India, metallic brocades of Deccan and Gujarat, traditions of Varanasi handlooms (in two parts), and global influences.

STORY 1 - KORA

The sarees here use cotton and muga silk in their un-dyed form, often referred to as Kora, along with silver and gold zari. Their compositions highlight the distinct design and structural elements of the saree in India and draped garments across South Asia—the border, the end panel or palla and the field. They equally draw us to the different qualities of yarn achieved through spinning by hand and the semi-mechanised ambar-charkha. These sarees were designed by Rakesh Thakore, and commissioned between 2000-01 for a series of exhibitions titled Khadi — The Fabric of India, being further exhibited as part of Meanings, Metaphor — Handspun and Handwoven in the 21st Century in 2019, presented by The Registry of Sarees.

Story 2 - RED

The textiles here convey the common use of red in India across traditions and creative media, regions and communities. With diverse aesthetic, cultural, spiritual and religious symbolism, the colour has been rendered in fabric in the subcontinent through natural dyes such as madder, chay, lac and cochineal before the advent of chemical dyes, where different shades and tones are achieved through specific processes. Along with kora, indigo and yellow, red forms a distinct palette in historical Indian textiles, an application which continues till now.

STORY 3 - IKAT

The textiles here are created with ikat, a generic term used globally for the technique of pre-loom patterning warps and wefts for handwoven fabric. This is achieved through a process of tying and resist-dyeing of the yarns. Known as Bandha and Bandhani in India, a particularly geometric repertory of its motifs is conventionally associated with Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and curvilinear to calligraphic patterns with Odisha. While these form the main regions where traditions of ikat are practised in the country today, suggestions which have emerged recently point to its more widespread use in the subcontinent historically, expanding an understanding of their significance to the region, and to other parts of Asia.

STORY 4 - STRIPES & CHECKS

The textiles here form a distinct feature of Deccan and peninsular India, that of patterning with stripes and checks. This region includes the States of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu. Such patterns are shared, to some extent, with textiles in other parts of the country, from the north-east to the west, as well as countries of South Asia. Requiring special effort in the warping of yarns on the loom and insertion of wefts, achieving a successful play of colours and scale in such design layouts are skills fast disappearing in Indian handlooms. They may offer to creative practitioners of today, the possibilities of emerging new directions in Indian fabric for markets at home and abroad.

STORY 5 - METALLIC BROCADES OF THE DECCAN AND SOUTH INDIA

The sarees and draped garments here represent among the least researched traditions of the Indian subcontinent. While those attributed to central and south India share clear common attributes like the use of muslin and fine cotton along with a distinct variety of zari, they equally show connections to features of handloom cloth in the western and northern parts of the country, through a decorative repertory of motifs in Gujarat and Varanasi which are drawn from nature. Could the gossamer cottons and silks of Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh be seen as bringing these traditions together, towards forms which are syncretic?

STORY 6 - METALLIC TEXTILES OF THE DECCAN AND GUJARAT

The textiles here form a distinct group of metallic textiles in cotton and silk from Deccan and West India, which are observed to share visual and technical features and influences. These include the broad genre of the Paithani, characterized by the use of a specialized, double interlock complementary weave technique with metallic yarn, and the Asavali of Gujarat, with similarities to certain traditions of brocading in Chanderi and Varanasi. The aesthetic amalgamations visible in this group, as in the previous two, are part of wider processes which have defined the historical and contemporary culture of Deccan and peninsular India over centuries.

STORY 7 & 8 - VARANASI I, II

The textiles are created in Varanasi, with techniques typically associated with its many traditions of hand weaving. The first group includes those which have been acquired from families in south India and Bengal, showing how the handloom centre’s products reached wide markets beyond the north. The second, reveals how a diverse range of influences from the outside, in turn, have been assimilated into these very handlooms of Varanasi themselves. Together, they convey the fascinating nature of one of the country’s most prolific brocading ecologies, constantly evolving and responding to new stimuli, while retaining its core visual-material features.

STORY 9 - INFLUENCES BEYOND

The textiles in this story demonstrate that a global dialogue of design influences seen previously was also reflected in regions other than Varanasi towards the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. In turn, Indian motifs and patterns were replicated on mill made cloth in Europe. This group further reflects two prominent aspects of Indian handmade fabric’s role in the colonial period — the assimilation of European aesthetic influences beyond the British and the Khadi movement as part of Indian nationalism, eventually leading to its very own subversion. These processes were a part of broader cultural developments within which also rose the Navi saree — the most common form of the drape in India today.