From Kota with love

Only a handful of Kota sarees sold across the country are genuine and these come from Kaithoon village in Rajasthan, writes Abhilash Gaur

IF Banarsis and Kanjeevarams are the flavour of winter, Kota sarees rule through summer. Light and airy, these are an excellent protection against the north Indian heat. However, these are less common than one thinks. One can get Kota sarees at practically every saree shop, but the bulk of these have never been within a few hundred miles of Kota. They are probably the fruit of a busy power loom in Benares, Surat, or some other weaving centre.

The ‘real’ Kota sarees are still made as they were 250 years ago, by a tedious, fully manual process, in a village called Kaithoon, 22 km away from Kota city. And how many sarees does Kaithoon weave in a year? Well, it has 1,200 looms, each one producing no more than five sarees a month. That is 60 in a year from one loom or 72,000 from the entire village. The actual figure, however, is closer to 60,000.

Like any old craft, the Kota saree comes wrapped in lore. Did the weavers in Hadoti (realm of the Hada Rajputs) always make such light cloth? If you believe the weavers, the airy Kota fabric came into being only about 250 years ago, during the reign of Rao Kishore Singh.

In the heart of Kota, close to the fort-palace, is a manmade lake called Kishore Sagar, amid which stands a palace called Jagmandir. The history of Kota sarees is linked with the woman for whom this palace was built. She was a queen, no doubt, and came from Udaipur, the lake city. When Kota’s heat got to her, Kishore Singh built the lake palace, but the queen still wasn’t comfortable. So the weavers were summoned and ordered to produce cloth that wouldn’t trap the heat, which they achieved by reducing the number of fibres in both the warp and the weft.

Another story goes that Kishore Singh, while on a campaign down south for the Mughals, was so impressed by Mysore’s weaves that he brought back some weavers to make those ephemeral sarees for his queen that have become Kota’s main claim to fame. Within Kota, the sarees are still called Masuria, an allusion to the Mysore origin of the technique. But again, there’s a counterview about this name. Some people hold that Masuria refers to the tiny checks, about the size of a lentil seed (masur in Hindi), that are the most common motif in Kota sarees.

While the Mysore link of Kota’s sarees may not be true, the raw material for making them certainly comes from the south. Cotton is sourced from Coimbatore and the silk comes from Bangalore. The zari (gold thread, now generally made of cheaper metals) however comes from Surat.

It’s only recently that tourists — both Indian and foreign — have discovered Kaithoon, and that only in a small way. So strangers rouse the village’s collective curiosity. From the moment you turn into the narrow lane leading to the weavers’ cluster all eyes are on you.

The weavers are all Muslim. The women also weave, often better than their husbands. They cover their heads and go about their business cheerfully. The burqa is a rare sight indeed in Kaithoon. Money is also in short supply, and you’ll find the family, their loom and their goat coexist in the one-room-veranda dwellings.

As in the other old weaving clusters across the country, the loom never rests in Kaithoon. One or the other member of the family is always at work: one reason being the tedious nature of the process. The Kota saree’s weft is woven using a reel mounted on a slender frame that is flung from side to side between the raised warp. Pedals set in a pit below the loom are used to raise the warp for this ‘shuttle’ to glide through. No wonder then that a day’s labour yields only about two feet of fabric — less if it incorporates a complex motif.

The warp is also prepared by a fascinating, even if slow, process that requires two persons to walk round and round a long framework of sticks on which the fibre is stretched. In a word, the tools of a Kota weaver are rudimentary; the magic of the weave lies entirely in her skill.

Traditionally, ‘Kotadoria’ (doria means thread) sarees were always white, in order to beat the heat. However, they came in five different shades of white, namely ‘conch shell’, ‘sea foam’, ‘jasmine’, ‘moon’ and ‘cloud’. But bowing to popular demand, all sorts of bright colours have been introduced. Now you can even get a black Kotadoria, never mind the heat.

For years, Kaithoon’s sarees were packed off to Kota and bigger cities almost as soon as they came off the loom. But now, Asgar Ali, a weaver, has opened a shop near the village’s police post, and the response from tourists has been encouraging. He stocks sarees and suit lengths priced from Rs 300 for plain cloth to Rs 18,000 for the most intricately woven sarees, which take a few months to complete. A visit to Kota Sarees, his little shop, will rid you of the notion that Kotadorias are plain and cheap. And whatever souvenir you bring back from there will bear Kaithoon’s stamp of authenticity.

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