A textile legacy in two black saris

Two types of saris defined my mother, Raj and her life in Bombay, a city she loved and shared a skin with. In those days she only wore handloom and khadi, handspun yarn and handwoven saris with thin edged borders. Simple textured cottons. She occasionally wore a Parsi Gara or an embellished georgette. She did not wear elaborate jewellery but sported diamond solitaires in her ears and a solitaire on her engagement finger. My parents home was an anchor for the young intellectuals that peopled the city in the 50s and a comfortable haven for those who visited Bombay from across India and the world. Artists, actors, painters, writers, poets, filmmakers, philosophers, business people, political activists, bureaucrats, and also the rudderless in search of a mentor, of all ages and nationalities, would congregate at their flat on Malabar Hill. A continuous flow of people and ideas, discussion, argument and debate moulded all our lives. Their friends were ours and many have remained so till today.

In 1961, when our small nuclear family moved to Delhi, my mother was bereft, friendless and isolated. Transiting from the freedom of living life with abandon, to a space where she had to contend with in-laws and a joint family, was a tough adjustment even though we lived in separate parts of the larger family home. To stay connected with Bombay she had brought a branch severed from the frangipani tree outside our home in Mayfair on Malabar Hill, to transplant in the front garden of her new home at 19 Kautilya Marg. For her it was a perennial reminder of the happiest years of the first phase of her life, the profusion of flowers marking endless entrenched memories. That once-upon-a-time small branch has, over the decades, grown and flowered into a tree that scales three floors of the building we live in, its canopy shading the ashes of my parents buried beneath it alongside its spreading roots. It is where they had instructed they wanted their ashes to go, and that is where they live on, their presence alive, their memory sharp and defined.

Two elaborate saris embody those early Bombay days. The first is a black gara, a hand embroidered sari with a black and white border and white butis, as a recurring motif. Worn by the Parsi community, this traditional sari is one of the many textiles that tell a story of trade routes and influences of motif and pattern that were absorbed, over time, into social histories from different cultures, merging into a universal directory of iconography. In this genre of sari, birds and flora intermesh to create delicate patterns, often in multi-hues of silk threads. My mother’s crepe silk gara is bordered with birds and creepers and countless embroidered jasmine buds are scattered across the body of the sari. It is an unusual pattern.

The other one is a black georgette sari embroidered by Madame Karouche, a Polish emigre who lived in Bombay and designed ethereal embroidered drapes for a host of stylish women in the 40s and 50s of the last century. She left her business to Brij Ratan Lal who was a family friend and lived on the same floor as my maternal grandparents in Carmichael House on Carmichael Road. It was an unlikely sari for my mother to have bought. Aunty Brij may well have given it to her. Georgette was a fabric that young lefties shunned because it was identified with the wealthy, social elite. The sari was a plain black length of silk georgette with a border embroidered with silver and gold zari, metallic threads, with a very western motif of bunches of grapes on a vine. The workmanship was fine and intricate, exquisitely executed. The sari has lasted, unblemished, for ninety-one years. Madame Karouche created evening handbags to go with each sari. This one was paired with a small triangular steel-grey cloth bag, embroidered with a web of fine silver threads, set in a silver filigree metal frame.

Both these saris are a reminder of how women in the 50s in Bombay styled themselves to make a statement, different for every occasion, appropriate and elegantly understated.

Excerpted from Saris of Memory by Malvika Singh, available here.