Textiles and clothing

Every region and community in India has its own styles of clothing. Yet some traditional Indian dresses have something in common, whatever the material.

An obvious example is the sari, a plain length of cloth, worn in most parts of India and made of different fabrics: mostly cotton or silk, and nowadays synthetic fabrics too.

Banarasi, Kanjivaram, Paithani, Patan Patola, Muga and Mysore are some famous kinds of silk sari, and there are many more kinds of cotton saris. Altogether, this unstitched piece of cloth comes in hundreds of varieties. They are made by different ways of weaving and designing: some designs are woven into the cloth, others printed after weaving. And the colours vary endlessly, made from many kinds of pigments.

The sari has a long history. A stone relief from Vaiśhālī (today in Bihar), going back a few centuries BCE, shows a woman in one. (A relief is a design that stands out from the surface of a panel of stone, wood, clay or another material.)

For a very long time India made the finest cotton in the world, and Indian textiles were sold as far away as Europe. One beautiful printed cotton called 'chintz' became so popular in 17th-century Europe that sales of some European dresses dropped sharply. In the end, to protect their own products, England and France banned the import of chintz from India! Two countries banning a cloth is a strange kind of compliment: nothing they made could compete with it.

There are many ways of wearing the sari, differing from region to region and community to community, and new ways of draping it are still being invented. But in the end it is one dress, the sari. Travellers to India in past centuries marvelled at its simplicity, economy and the many ways it is worn. Women have also used it in many ways beyond clothing: tied to a tree as a cradle for a baby, spread out to collect grain, as shade from the sun, or to strain water.