Reliving royal glamour
By Vimla Patil

"When I look around in the salons of great designers around the world, I see a total eclipse of hand-made textiles and embroidery. Today’s mindless fashion trends have destroyed all heritage textiles and crafts, and I am truly distressed at the loss which technology and the relentless march of materialism have brought," says Ritu Kumar, one of India’s pioneering fashion designers whose book Costumes and Textiles of Royal India was published recently by Christies of London. To launch this magnum opus, Ritu, the Taj Group of Hotels and Christies recently held a display of some spectacular royal costumes of the past centuries together with a fashion pageant of modern versions which Ritu has designed for 1999’s Indian beauty queens who will contest in international pageants in the millennium year.

The story of how Ritu Kumar, one of the earliest and most famous designers of India, started to document the textiles and costumes of the erstwhile nawabs and maharajas of India is one of the last decade’s mega success stories. "I have been in the fashion designing business for over 25 years," says Ritu, "Even today, I make more than four collections annually for the European and US markets. But while doing this work, I became increasingly aware that slowly and steadily, the world’s hand craft skills were vanishing. Clothes are made today from machine-woven textiles and the world’s heritage of embroidery, which flourished till the first half of the past century, is disappearing altogether. To my mind, at the dawn of the new millennium, only India has preserved handlooms and hand embroidery in all their pristine glory, thanks to the inspiration of great visionaries like Indira Gandhi, Pupul Jayakar, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Rukmini Devi Arundale, Marthand Singh and others.

"In India, even today, textiles and embroidery skills or gold wire work are not just museum exhibits as in other countries. They are part of our living culture and are seen in the everyday life of village people — at weddings, melas and weavers’ colonies. They flourish in the many sprawling weaving, printing, dyeing and embroidery belts of the country. These crafts still offer a good livelihood to over 16 million people in India. That’s nearly the entire population of many countries. In the West and in those oriental countries where western lifestyle is copied with a vengeance, such arts have died because consumerism and materialism have caused millions of people to lose contact with their original cultures and the arts originating in the soil of their countries. They have gone for mass production and killed the traditional skills in textiles and crafts by flooding the markets with pop fashions and hip clothes whose appeal lasts only for the season. We are fortunate that our textile and embroidery skills are perhaps the best in the world and are a treasure we should conserve with determination."

Ritu says that in the last several centuries, royal or temple patronage kept many weavers and embroiderers occupied and prosperous. Great weavers and artists were honoured by nawabs and kings and they were given every facility to excel in their art. Indeed, the whole economy of India depended on the huge domestic and world-wide market for fabulous Indian textiles which attracted traders from faraway lands. During the British rule, with rajas and nawabs emulating western dress styles, a decline set in the textile industry. The British Government systematically wiped out the Indian textile industry to create the world’s largest market for their own machine textiles and even copied Indian traditional designs to attract Indian buyers.

"But in the ’60s", Ritu continues, "after India settled down to being a democratic republic, India’s textile art and embroidery went through a renaissance and reached its zenith through the many festivals of India and through thousands of trade fairs and fashion shows in over 100 countries. Indian connoisseurs also rediscovered the country’s treasure of cotton and silk fabrics and designers marketed these textiles to the whole world, rebuilding India’s reputation as one of the world’s greatest producers of hand-made textiles and hand embroidery. It was around the ’80s that I became active in documenting the textiles and costumes made for Indian royalty by some of the greatest weavers and craftspersons of the past era. Seeing how even young urbanites in India were crazily going the way of the West, I decided to work on a project which was mammoth by any standards but extremely challenging. I travelled to every corner of the country, to every erstwhile riyasat, and dug up the past glory of textiles. I persuaded the present heirs of the royal families to open their caskets of clothes and to allow me to exhibit them, photograph them and to create a bank of archival material which is a great job accomplished before the new millennium. My job was easy because heritage clothes are carefully preserved by royal families, especially when they belong to illustrious ancestors or to royal women who have died as suhagans."

Ritu took 10 years to put together a collection of royal costumes. Among these were sherwanis wedding jodas, embroidered ghagra cholis, churidar kurtas, sarees, angarkhas and kameezes which had incredibly perfect and elaborate embroidery and zardosi work. She was successful in making some present-day royalty — like Nawab Mansoor Ali Khan pataudi and Sharmila Tagore (Begum Ayesha Sultan) — model their family heirlooms for photographs.

"During the last few years, Christies of London joined the project as publishers. They helped with teams of photographers and stylists to get extraordinary photographs to illustrate the book." says Ritu, "The book is a veritable treasure, a documentation of the royal ensembles of India. It shows the world how India has preserved its legacy of beautiful textiles and crafts from the past centuries. Our creative team has hopped around India for years, thanks to Jet Airways, to put together a book which we think is a milestone in our cultural history. We hope Indians will be proud of the work we’ve done. The book will sell at £ 85 a copy world-wide and has been launched in all four metros of India with some fanfare."

Ritu Kumar is a celebrated designer who, starting with just two tables for block printing in a village near Calcutta, has gone on to participate in the most prestigious fashion events in London, Paris, Milan and New york. She is the only Indian designer who has a boutique of her own in London and as well as several outlets in Indian cities. Her ensembles have been worn by the international style icons, including Princess Diana. Her work to promote Indian crafts, textiles and embroidery skills has been truly awesome. Now, with a new century’s dawn facing the world, Ritu is determined to continue to uphold the heritage of India further. She will work on similar projects on jewellery and sarees, both of which have a treasure-house of history.