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Banarasi Silk: The Brocade of Varanasi

Woven with gold thread on pit looms in one of the world's oldest cities, the Banarasi sari is India's most celebrated brocade.

In the weaving quarters of Varanasi, the loom has sounded for centuries. Men sit at pit looms sunk into the earth, feet on the treadles and hands on the shuttle, and out of this rhythm comes the Banarasi sari: silk shot through with gold and silver zari, patterned with flowers, vines and paisleys. It is the sari of north Indian weddings, kept as an heirloom, and one of India's most imitated textiles.

History and origins

Varanasi, also called Banaras and Kashi, stands on the Ganges in eastern Uttar Pradesh and is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Silk weaving there is ancient, but the brocade that defines the Banarasi sari today took shape under Mughal patronage between roughly the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Persian weavers and their design vocabulary arrived with the Mughal court, and their floral vines, paisley forms and garden motifs merged with the skills of local weavers. A commonly told chapter dates the arrival of Gujarati silk weavers to the famine of 1603, after which brocade weaving grew in scale and refinement through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Momin Ansari weaving families became the custodians of this knowledge, and the craft remains largely a family trade.

Materials

The foundation of a Banarasi sari is silk, most often mulberry silk. The classic base is katan, a firm plain-weave silk made from twisted filaments, which gives the cloth body and a soft sheen. Other bases include kora, or organza, a crisp and sheer silk; tissue, in which silk is woven with metallic thread for a shimmering finish; and georgette, a lighter, flowing silk. The defining material, however, is zari: fine metallic thread traditionally made by winding flattened gold or silver wire around a silk core. In older saris the zari was real gold and silver; today most zari uses silver or silver-plated copper wire, sometimes with a gold finish, and cheaper saris use purely metallic imitation thread. The silk yarn is dyed in small batches before weaving, in deep bridal reds, maroons and greens as well as modern pastels.

Technique and process

A Banarasi sari is not printed or embroidered after the cloth is made; the pattern is woven into the fabric itself, thread by thread, which is what makes the work so slow. The process begins with the design. A master designer, or naqshaband, draws the motif on graph paper, a stage called naksha, and the drawing is then translated into perforated punch cards that govern the loom, lifting one set of warp threads and dropping another so the pattern emerges in the right colours. Meanwhile the silk is dyed and the warp prepared: thousands of fine threads, sometimes around five thousand six hundred, are stretched to roughly twenty-four to twenty-six metres. Three people traditionally work on one sari, one weaving while the others manage the loom and the pattern cards.

The weaver builds the plain silk ground, then works in a supplementary weft of zari or coloured silk to form each motif. In the most demanding technique, kadwa, also spelled kadhua, each motif is woven separately: the weaver works the pattern thread only across the small area of the motif, cuts it, and ties it off before moving on. The result is a clean reverse side with no long loose threads, and a sari that is effectively reversible. Another celebrated variety is tanchoi, woven on a satin base with two or more coloured silk wefts and often little or no zari, which produces a smooth, jewel-toned cloth with a jamawar-like richness. Depending on the density of the work, a single handloom sari takes from about fifteen days to a month, and heavily patterned pieces can take up to six months.

Motifs and design language

Banarasi design is Mughal in its bones and Indian in its detail. The most common motifs are intertwining floral and foliate patterns: the bel, a climbing vine; the kalga, or paisley, called boteh in Persian; and the jaal, a fine net of flowers. Small scattered motifs are called butis, and a sari covered in them is a butidar. The border carries its own vocabulary, often ending in a jhallar, a fringe-like string of upright leaves along the outer edge. Jangla saris are covered in dense, scrolling vegetation, as though the whole cloth were a garden, while shikargah, meaning hunting ground, depicts scenes of elephants, tigers, deer and hunters drawn from Mughal court art. The pallu, the decorated end of the sari, is usually the most elaborate part, a framed panel of dense brocade displayed over the shoulder.

GI-tag status

Banarasi silk carries one of India's earliest textile Geographical Indication tags. In July 2007, nine weaver organisations from Uttar Pradesh, including the Banaras Bunkar Samiti and the Human Welfare Association, applied to the Geographical Indications Registry in Chennai, with support from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. In September 2009, "Banaras Brocades and Sarees" was registered as a Geographical Indication, covering six districts of Uttar Pradesh: Varanasi, Mirzapur, Chandauli, Bhadohi, Jaunpur and Azamgarh. Under the GI, no sari or brocade made outside those districts can legally be sold as a Banaras sari or brocade. The tag is a legal recognition that the craft belongs to this place and its weavers, and it sits alongside the Silk Mark and Handloom Mark certifications buyers are encouraged to look for.

How to identify an authentic piece

The most reliable check is the reverse side of the cloth. In a genuine handloom Banarasi, the pattern is woven in, so the back shows the same design in a neat network of interlocked threads, or, in kadwa work, cleanly cut and tied motif ends. Power-loom imitations often have a rough, scratchy back with loose synthetic threads or a glued backing, and the pattern can look printed rather than woven. A real sari also shows the small irregularities of handwork: slight unevenness, tiny pin marks along the selvedge, and a soft, substantial feel in pure katan silk that art silk cannot match. Ask for the GI tag, the Handloom Mark and, for pure silk, the Silk Mark, and buy from weaver cooperatives or established shops in Varanasi rather than from a seller who cannot say where or how the sari was woven. A price far below what weeks of handwork could support is itself a warning.

Where the craft stands today

The handloom industry in and around Varanasi supports well over a hundred thousand weavers, by commonly cited estimates, yet the craft is under pressure. Power-loom saris woven in Surat and elsewhere copy Banarasi designs at a fraction of the cost and are sold under the Banarasi name, and the GI tag is difficult to enforce in a crowded market. Many weavers work for traders and middlemen on piece rates, and younger members of weaving families are leaving the loom for steadier work. At the same time, the craft has real momentum. Banarasi silk is the designated product of Varanasi district under Uttar Pradesh's One District One Product scheme, bridal demand remains strong, designers are reworking the brocade into lehengas, jackets and lighter saris, and weavers' villages such as Sarai Mohana now welcome visitors who want to see the looms at work. The sari's future depends less on whether people admire it, which they plainly do, than on whether the weavers who make it can earn a living from it.