The warp & weft of art

Swati Rai

At the age of 8, sitting in his father’s small saree store, young Gaurang dreamt of being a designer. He saw the sarees from handloom as a sort of canvas for his imagination — to paint on as he willed. As he grew up, his vision broadened and he began creating sarees in traditional jamdani, employing eco-friendly techniques and using natural dyes. All this while, he was giving a modern twist to the traditional weave. Today, two decades after he set out, award-winning designer Gaurang Shah has a fine team that consists of over 800 weavers across 16 states. We speak to him on the sidelines of the launch of Santati, his avant-garde collection of khadi sarees at Hyderabad.

You have always worked at the grassroots level. Tell us about your latest collection.

It’s really an ode to the fabric khadi and the Mahatma. It is my way of bringing to the centrestage the luxurious aspect of khadi that is traditionally thought to be banal. Santati is a collection of 30 sarees. The pallu of each has an interlaced reinterpretation, recreation of paintings by Raja Ravi Varma and some took over three years to weave. Every saree has been woven using 150 count fine khadi, with the yarn sourced from Ganjam Zilla Khadi Gramodyog Sangh. For the weavers to replicate the paintings using Srikakulam jamdani technique, 200 kg of dupion silk yarn was dyed in 600 hues of natural dyes. Dyed in Kutch, the silk yarns were developed to give the 3D effect; that was the work of Junaid Khatri, a master craftsman from Kutch.

For me, the purpose of this project is to make people realise that khadi is not just a poor man’s fabric; it can be an item of luxury and it is a fabric that symbolises strength, resilience and ambition; it speaks of struggle and perseverance. The idea is to continue preserving the country’s rich heritage and make people aware of what India is all about.

Why have you chosen the word re-creation and re-intepretation to highlight the collection?

So that I can’t call them copies as I have secured the rights of the paintings to be recreated. At the same time, as much as I have tried to be true to the paintings, we can’t be too sure of the perfection. There would be slight variations in colour and that’s why the word replicated has been replaced by recreated.

Beyond the buzzwords of sustainability and handloom, how have you kept touch with the base?

As a designer, I have always seen the saree as a canvas for a painter to create and colour it with his imagination. Now also if you ask me to make a saree, I will start from the scratch, from the yarn to the weave. I always give out a rough figure of the number of artisans I am working with, but there are many more that I am actually working with and we have empowered together in this journey. So these are not just words for me, but a way of living and loving.

My design challenges the weaver. It takes a minimum of five to six months to weave a saree. Unless I challenge them with new designs and the economic potential their work has globally, I foresee the art of handwoven fabric fading away. And this is very disheartening for a designer like me, as I love Indian weaves and I am confident it has fine potential to become a global trendsetter in the years to come.

How do you recharge your creative batteries?

I am creative all the time, though I need my four hours of sleep to be able to create more designs. I usually sleep by 9:30 pm and get up by 2:30 in the morning to hit re-start!

More on Santati

It all began in 2017. Gaurang and Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation in Bengaluru visualised the project, and chose some of the famous painter’s lesser-known paintings. They were in three categories — women, gods and stories from mythology. Eventually, Gaurang chose 54 paintings of which 30 paintings were recreated in 30 pallu’s of khadi saree.

Gaurang says he decided to choose jamdani for this project for its unique characteristics and versatility. Each saree took several months to weave, and some intricate paintings took more than a year.

Before sending the design to his team of weavers and into their looms, Gaurang’s team drew the Ravi Varma paintings on paper to scale with the 42-inch saree pallu width, and outlined every colour to accuracy, for weavers to follow the pattern, shades, textures and intricate elements in the loom. Every colour of the saree was then decided based on the painting.

Among the most challenging body of jamdani work was to recreate a painting which has 20 people, each carrying a different expression, body language and attire. Gaurang says, it was near impossible but we accomplished it to near perfection capturing all the expressions and the fall of fabric as seen in paintings, through our weave technique. Gaurang hopes to display this collection at other national and international museums. He is considering auctioning the sarees after two years.