In the darkness of the tiny auditorium, there were just a handful of people visible; the panellists outnumbered the listeners. When the men began to speak, it sounded as if this was a local variant of Alcoholics Anonymous because the subject was addiction. The obsession in this case was on the part of men who like sarees. On stage was a man who even wore one, looking like a Roman senator with colourful tastes, along with the renowned Bharat Natyam dancer and teacher Justin McCarthy who uses them as costumes in his performances and a few men who sounded like they spent most of their waking hours buying them for their wives, mothers and sisters.
When one stepped out of the Alliance Francaise complex onto the streets of Delhi that harsh summer morning, the discussion seemed a mirage. The saree is in peril. Look around offices and on the Metro and sarees are few and far between. Glance across at that table of ladies who lunch in New Delhi and they are more likely to be wearing the baggy ensembles by Pakistani designers now in vogue. Board an airplane and sarees are invisible — except on Air India and Sri Lankan. IndiGo may be the most efficient airline in India, but those retro dress codes harking back to the era of a mediocre American airline (Pan Am) are so so last century and baffling. (Why, for instance, insist that flight attendants wear their hair short or have it tied in a granny-style bun? What’s that bizarre scarf around the attendants’ neck with a huge blue rosette pointing to the left, as if it were a Rotary Club third prize?) At the ongoing Bridal Fashion Week in New Delhi, lehengas and gowns dominate the stage.
The ‘100 saree pact’ on Facebook and Twitter, where women commit to wearing 100 sarees a year, is a noble idea, but in much of northern India, it’s a losing battle. I have no right to a vote in this matter. But my sense of loss is the product of a childhood in Kolkata where saree-wearing is still the norm and where men do buy sarees as sons are often deployed to hold the pleats of stubbornly billowing Bengali cotton sarees as their mothers get ready for the day. Mira Nair’s The Namesake, with its trousseau of candyfloss-coloured Bengali cottons, made sarees the heroine of that film. There are few whodunits as good as Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani, and few scenes more moving than Vidya Balan escaping her husband’s killers by wearing the traditional red and white saree that is emblematic of Durga Puja processions. It was a sight in its way as heart-warming in its depiction of a lone woman overcoming the evil designs of men as Draupadi’s saree magically becoming infinitely long.
I grew up in a house where my mother would often return from work to lunch followed by a 20-minute nap; her usually Kotah cotton pallu would be draped across her and fall to the floor, looking as if she were a butterfly that had laid down its wings. As a teenager, I would walk into my parents’ bedroom, witness this and suffer a wrenching presentiment of loss before the adults woke up and rushed back to their busy lives and all was well with my world.
Wearing and looking after sarees may seem out of sync with the 21st century and the disappearance of the dhobi coming twice a week to the house, but I am doing my bit to support the 100-saree pact. The invitation for a birthday party a friend hosted for me last year read, “Rahul has requested that all the women wear sarees. He doesn’t care what the men wear.” I do care what men wear but Indian men’s dress is mostly a lost cause, made worse by antiquated clubs that prohibit national dress and companies that discourage it. I was delighted when one of the male guests wore a swish bandh gala and jodhpur pants to my birthday. All the women invited did wear sarees with only the oldest (76) and youngest disregarding the request, and nearly everyone accused me of double standards. In a weak attempt at pleat-tying solidarity, I wore a sarong from Barefoot in Colombo. At a series of small dinners in Srinagar last year, I was presumptuously poring over the pallus of sarees worn by Dastkar doyenne Laila Tyabji, having only just been introduced to her.
I try to postpone the end of the saree-wearing era by very occasionally shopping at the ethereally well-curated Delhi Crafts Council sale. This week at breakfast, a childhood friend, the recipient of a few Sri Lankan sarees from Barefoot and a Maheshwari silk-cotton, jokingly implored that my saintly maid consider wearing sarees, arguing that she would be the beneficiary of an employer addicted to saree shopping. She scarcely broke stride before replying that with three kids and two houses to work in, she didn’t have the time to dress in them. This is a widespread view these days, but the editor of a book I wrote a few years ago comes to work daily in a saree with her baby girl strapped across her chest. Paradoxically, nearly all the busiest women friends in my life — who entertain often, have started businesses and juggle family responsibilities — wear sarees frequently. Come to think of it, my Tamilian grandmother cooked and cleaned in her Bengaluru home wearing sarees and improbably even played tennis in them.
Twitter: @RahulJJacob
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