What sari means to me. Why Raveena Tandon's tweet was irritating
The first time I met Zeenath, who was neither a man nor a woman, she was dressed in a black chiffon sari with a glittering silver border that she had stitched on to it. I refer to her as "she" because that's what she aspired to become even though she never could fully cross over.
She followed Islam and most hijras in that crumbling Ramabai Chawl in Kamathipura wore saris. The one Eid that I celebrated with them, I remember them dressed in embroidered saris and to me, they looked beautiful like trapped fireflies in a jar. They even offered to buy me a sari for Eid.
Next time, I went to meet them, I wore a sari.
Sari has no religion like my Hijra eunuchs who wore it as part of their pilgrimage to Khwaja Garib Nawaz of Ajmer Sharif. I remember their white sari with pink roses as they wrapped the pall around their heads before entering the shrine.
At other times, Zeenath wore a salwar kameez and no wig to pray at the mosque. I call Zeenath the art if in-between. In Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis, Dimple or Zeenat, the enunch who makes his pipes, is Hindu and Muslim and in a chapter she wears a burqa and a sari. Sari belongs neither to a religion nor to a gender.
Sari is an emotion to me, a memory, a strange kind of nostalgia that takes me to a world where women wore it with so much ease and it was so universal that I always wanted to wear it when I grew up. Sari is secular. Let it be free of religious tags.
Sari represented to me the dreams my mother had. Didn't someone say once that my mother had dreams, too. So when Raveena Tandon tweets a picture of herself wearing a sari and says whether that would make her a Hindutva icon or a Sanghi, I feel angry.
Sari is an inheritance. It is not an inheritance of loss. It is a piece of our history and history must be freed of religious tagging. Perhaps it is a way of getting attention and she did get her share of reactions. But it is such a pathetic attempt and a dangerous one, too. Particularly so because we live in dangerous times and six-yards of nostalgia and beauty shouldn't be made hostage to such a callous comment.
Growing up, I always wanted to be like my mother. She wore no makeup and always wore a sari. In fact, most women I saw around me including my tuition teacher Shahida wore a sari. The saris were mostly "taant" saris of Bengal and my mother had some of her Banarasi saris from her trousseau that she kept for special occasions.
My favourite used to be this red-coloured wedding sari of hers with meenakari work in turquoise and gold. It is not almost 40 years but she remembers how her father had ordered it from Banaras. For her wedding, she wore it with flower jewellery, no ghoonghat and no bling. She is the most beautiful bride I ever saw. I remember a little poem about the sari.
"The sari Mother wears everyday is sometimes a train, sometimes a river, or a swing, or a hiding place..." - Sandhya Rao, My Mother's Sari.
It was all of them. It was like a canvas. I once painted flowers on my mother's sari. She still has it.
Nostalgia is often underestimated. There are mothers, and grandmothers, and chiffons, and georgettes, and handloom, and Banarasis that are part of the conversations on sari now. In fact, there is too much conversation about the sari.
The sari is now challenging the designers with its versatility and its potential to herald in a new, independent language of fashion. Not that sari was ever out of the scene. But it had been contained in the fashion industry's repertoire as "trousseau" but that's their problem. As far as I know, the sari has a stubbornness which defies all these attempts.
Sari has a political relationship. And social, too. Even when chiffon was around, it was in a way showcasing "stubbornness", saying that the sari would adapt, but would not lose its hold on India. It never did. It is also a nostalgist’s trip.
Down memory lane, picking up the stories of the sari, and digging from the subconscious the versions of the traditional garment that is stumping other designs by being contemporary and edgy as well as symbolising a return to what we are. Memory is sprinkled with impressions, and influences. What emerges then is a combination.
Whether it works, that’s besides the point. In case of sari, it is about mothers, and grandmothers generally. You saw them swinging it, and you remember from old photographs the lace and chintz blouses, the weaves before all the mill textiles came in, and the patterns, and you mix it with what you are in today's world - a hybrid if you would call yourself that, and the sari becomes a new story. All over again.
Some of my mother's old photographs have her wearing bell bottoms and shirts. She started to wear saris after she was married and she wore it with a natural grace. My eldest aunt wore chiffon saris all her life. Over time, I inherited a lot of these saris and I wear them like my mother. No safety pins.
I still find it the most versatile and effortless thing to wear. I don't understand the campaigns on social media and in the fashion world pronouncing the death of the sari and the urgency to revive it, contemporaise it and to make it aspirational. Sari is a sari. Like the cow is a cow.
So, when Tandon wears a tacky version of a sari (quite bling) and tweets that she shouldn't be tagged as "communal or Sanghi", I find it extremely irritating and a cheap gimmick to seek attention.
In a country which is anyways witnessing lynchings over almost everything, why must the sari now be dragged into a controversy regarding religion? Already, there are too many claimants from designers to wearers and fashion magazines, who credit themselves with bringing back the sari and how they are trying to save the sari as if sari needed such a rescue.
The sari doesn't need to be saved.
I grew up in a colony in Patna which was predominantly Muslim, and we attended weddings where I was fascinated with the red and blue traditional sari the women wore for the nikah in Bihar. They used to have silver chhapai work on them.
Husnara Bua, who lived across the street, was always dressed in the finest cotton saris. She had the most exquisite skin and I never saw her wear anything else. Sometimes, I wanted to imagine her and my grandmother in other garments. But I couldn't.
There are old faded photographs where my grandmother wears the seedha palla sari draped over her head in a studio with my grandfather. The sari was never the exotic garment. No fuss was made over it. It was part of life. It is part of them.
So when Sonam Kapoor wears it at Cannes, there is a celebration of sorts. But why make so much fuss over something that is so edgy and so us. Why should the sari deserve special mention and the actress be lauded or applaud herself for wearing it in an international event? Why are pictures of actresses in saris so celebrated? This is a dangerous trend. The sari doesn't need support of that kind. It will always be around.
In those days, we had a woman who came to clean the toilets. Her name was Munia and she wore a sari too. The sari had no religion and no class barriers.
Years later, when I went to Basuka in Ghazipur to meet tawaifs or courtesans, they were all dressed in saris. The sari doesn't belong to a particular class or a set of women. In a way, it is the most democratic thing. It implies freedom. At least in its unstitched form.
In August 2016, a fashion magazine named Verve declared itself to be engaged in a revival of the sari and named their article "Be a Sari Warrior". It was such a shoddy piece that it made the sari feel like a yeti. It remains the most worn garment in India. On the ramp, it is being adopted by the younger lot, who aren’t traditionalists or revivalists.
They have travelled, and they belong to the new world. And when an actress tries to limit the garment that always signified freedom in its unstitched version in terms of drapes and imagination, it means they haven't understood the essence of a drape, a piece of our inheritance that is neither bound by class nor religion nor profession nor gender.
Also read: Raveena Tandon tweets wearing saris makes one 'Sanghi' and 'communal'. Go figure