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It takes months to make a beautiful hand-painted sari, says Dhanvanti Keshavrao PAINTED saris are in vogue nowadays. Name the mode, and you have it — kalamkari, fabric painting, digital painting, tribal arts, Madhubani paintings and even woven paintings (of course, these cost more) are in the limelight for the elite. Each painted sari fashion designer has his own strong points. For example, Shanta Malhotra of Pune wants you to take a new look at kalamkari saris, which you originally dismissed as saris meant for elderly women. In kalamkari, different colours from vegetable dyes, hand-painted figures of gods and goddesses and motifs of animals and birds blend together beautifully.
For two professional sari maestros — K.M. Lekha and Amritha Manoharan from Kerala — Warli paintings, a form of Indian folk paintings by Warli tribals of Maharashtra, has caught the imagination, and they have done hand-painted designer saris based on this tribal painting style. Warli paintings depict the body by two triangles and head by circle, and thus through crude lines they show movements. Lekha and Amritha are offering designer Warli painting saris in cotton, nylon, silk and georgette materials. Apart from Warli paintings, there are floral designs, geometrical and tribal designs. Delhi-based designer Sarala Jain has come out with a brand new winter collection of traditional saris on which pictures of paintings by current Indian painting masters have been aesthetically emblazoned. The designer first took pictures of paintings made by artist Chandra Raghuvanshi, her partner in the venture, and then digitally juxtaposed the pictures on saris. This entire exercise took her almost three months to complete. Adivasi fashion designer Shreenkant Parika has progressed a long way from Kotpad, his Orissan village. And it is in the deeper jungles of Orissa that the blood red aal has survived through the millennia. Perhaps the only existing natural dye which totally eschews the use of any chemical- ‘fixing’ agents, the aal dye is derived from the bark and root of aal trees, which grow in abundance in Orissa forests. The dye is made by the Adivasis through a time-tested process based on the changing rhythms of nature and an unhurried, earthy way of life. A sari studded with gold, diamonds, emeralds and other precious stones was made by Chennai Silks in 2007. The special thing about the sari is the Ravi Varma painting, which has been woven into it. All the intricate details in the painting have been replicated like the curly hair of ladies and the jewels they are wearing. The best part of the sari is that the women in the paintings are intricately hand-woven and beautified with jewels of gold, diamond, platinum, silver, ruby, emerald, yellow sapphire, sapphire, cat’s eye, topaz, pearl and corals. A Chennai silk sari is
reported to be the world’s costliest sari, as per the Limca Book of
World Records — Rs 40 lakh, and weighs around 8 kg. This sari is the
first silk sari that required the use of 7,440 jacquard hooks and
66,794 cards during the weaving process. Moreover, a group of
consummate workers took nearly 4,680 hours to complete the work.— MF
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"The
2000-year-old craft is fascinating. It takes months to create a
beautiful hand-painted sari," she says. If the border has a
design, that goes into the pattern that takes shape on the rest of the
sari; if there are more than two colours, the designs that take shape
on it will have a mix ‘n’ match of those colours.