Tradition · weaving tradition · India
Banaras brocade
The Banarasi brocade silk tradition at Varanasi — the zari (gold-and-silver thread) brocade sari-weaving tradition that absorbed Persian and Mughal floral motifs (buti, buta, kalga, bel) into a Hindu pilgrimage city's weaver workshops. The tradition took its modern form under Mughal Akbar's workshops in the 16-century, when Persian weavers were brought to Varanasi and intermarried with the local Hindu Momin Muslim weaver community. The classic Banarasi sari uses silk warp and silk-zari weft on a jamawar handloom, with four main technique variants (jangla, tanchoi, cutwork and kadua). The modern Banarasi sari weighs 500-1,500 grams. Received GI tag in 2009. The 2010 Banarasi sari industry has about 1.5 million weavers across the Varanasi-Mirzapur-Gorakhpur belt — one of the largest handloom clusters in the world. Modern Chinese power-loom imitations have disrupted the industry.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 25.318, 83.006
Connections (5)
- Craft tradition ofKāshī / Vārānasī / Banāras
Banaras is as much a weaving city as a pilgrimage city, and the two economies are entangled. Muslim weaver households have produced the distinctive gold-and-silver zari Banarasi silk saris for centuries, supplying pilgrims and temples with ritual textiles while the pilgrimage economy in turn sustains the loom districts of Madanpura and Alaipur.
- Craft tradition ofMandasor (Daśapura)
The Mandasor inscription of 473 records that a guild of silk weavers migrated from Lāta in Gujarat to Daśapura, built a sun temple with their own money, and that when it decayed the guild repaired it — noting that some members had by then become archers, astrologers and ascetics. It is the fullest account anywhere of how an early Indian craft guild actually worked, and it says weaving communities moved as bodies rather than as individuals, which is how Banaras and Kanchipuram got their weavers too.
- Craft tradition ofKanchipuram silk
Banaras and Kanchipuram are the two great silk-weaving cities of India and they solve the same problem differently. Banaras brocades the gold into the weave with the kadhua technique so no float runs behind; Kanchipuram weaves the body and the border separately in different colours and interlocks them by hand. One is a Muslim weaving community working for Hindu weddings, the other Devanga and Saligar families settled since Vijayanagara.
- Craft tradition ofBengal terracotta temple facing
Bengal had no stone and no marble, so its temple ornament is moulded clay and its luxury is woven: terracotta plaque facing on the temples and Dhaka muslin and Banaras-style brocade on the looms, both traded through the same river ports. The terracotta panels themselves are one of the few visual records of what Bengali textiles, boats, hookahs and European soldiers actually looked like in the seventeenth century, because nobody was painting them.
- AnalogueSambalpurī bandhā ikat
Sambalpuri bandha and Gujarati patola are the two great Indian double-ikat traditions, eighteen hundred kilometres apart, and the technique is the same family as Andhra telia rumal and Indonesian ikat. Which way it travelled across the Bay is unresolved and probably unresolvable: the loom leaves no dated evidence, and every one of these coasts was trading with the others.
On these journeys
Sources
GI registry; Banarasi weaving records
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