From loom to drape, two hundred hours condensed into five minutes

The journey of a single Banarasi saree from raw silk to a finished, folded garment in a woman's cupboard takes between four and twelve months. The journey passes through at least eleven distinct hands, three cities, two looms, four traditional crafts, and roughly two hundred hours of labour. Most of this work is invisible to the buyer, and the saree arrives in a box looking as if it had always existed in its finished state. This is a walk-through, in real time, of the eleven stages we keep records for at the atelier. The names below are the actual names of the people who handle each stage for our karkhana — recorded here with their permission, with the small dignity of being named in the journey of a saree that will eventually be worn at a wedding none of them will attend. This is the slow biography of the cloth.

Stage one, the silk arrives from Bangalore

The silk used for a Banarasi saree begins as cocoons in the silk-rearing villages of Karnataka, particularly around Bangalore, Mysore, and Chamarajnagar. Mulberry silkworms are raised on mulberry leaves for thirty days; they spin their cocoons over four days. The cocoons are then carefully boiled to soften the sericin gum and the silk filaments are reeled off — three to five filaments are combined to make a single yarn. The yarn arrives in Banaras as undyed white skeins, packaged in cotton bags, by overnight train. Our atelier sources from a specific small farmer's cooperative outside Mysore that does not use any chemical degumming agents, only hot water and time. The yarn is paid for by weight; current rates are approximately seven thousand rupees per kilogram for the grade we use.

Stage two, the silk is dyed in Lallapura

The white yarn is then carried by hand to a dyeing workshop in the Lallapura mohalla of Banaras, where the master dyer Khalid has been working for thirty-six years. Khalid prepares his dyes from a combination of natural and synthetic pigments — for the deep maroon that defines a wedding Banarasi, the base is alizarin red modified with iron mordants; for the gold-honey tones, it is turmeric stabilised with tin. The yarn is dipped, lifted, dipped again, and finally heat-set in a copper vessel over a slow flame. A single dye batch takes between six and twelve hours, depending on the depth of colour required, and the consistency of the colour across the batch depends entirely on Khalid's eye. He has no instruments. He tests the colour by drying a single thread over a small flame and holding it against a wall.

Stage three, the naksha is drawn

In parallel with the dyeing, the design draft — the naksha — is being drawn. The naksha-band master, Habibullah-saab, sits in a small first-floor room in Pilikothi and works on squared graph paper with a wooden ruler and a soft pencil. Each square on the paper represents one warp thread and one weft pick; an average Banarasi pallu naksha covers four to six thousand squares, sometimes ten thousand for a heavy bridal piece. Habibullah-saab draws from memory of perhaps four hundred Mughal-era motifs — the kalga paisley, the bel vine, the jhallar border edging, the floral jaal mesh — combining them anew for each saree. Each naksha takes between three and eight days. The finished draft is the score that the weaver reads.

Stage four, the warp is dressed

The dyed silk is then taken to the weaver's house in Madanpura, where the warp must be dressed onto the loom — a separate, lengthy job called sizing. The warp threads, roughly six thousand of them for a standard Banarasi width, are wound onto the back beam of the pit loom, then individually threaded through the heddle and the reed. This is a two-day job done by a specialist named Rashid, who does nothing but warp-dressing across the karkhanas of Madanpura. The dressed warp is then sized with a starch solution to give it tensile strength for the weaving. The starch is washed out at the very end of the process; the saree will never carry starch on a customer's body.

Stage five, the zari is wound

The real silver zari, which we addressed in an earlier reading, arrives at the weaver's house in skeins from a senior zari-maker in Pilikothi. Before it can enter the loom, the zari must be wound onto small wooden bobbins called paranda. This is a painstaking job done usually by a female member of the weaver's family — Iqbal's daughter-in-law winds for him most days — because the zari is fragile and a careless hand will break it. A single saree's worth of zari is wound across two or three days.

Stage six, the weaving begins

At last, after roughly six weeks of preparation, the weaving begins. The master weaver, in our case usually Iqbal or Salim or Habibullah, sits at the pit loom — a recessed loom where the weaver's feet hang into a small pit dug into the floor, operating the treadles. Above the weaver, the naksha hangs on a pulley system; an apprentice called the kaarigar reads the naksha aloud, pull by pull, while the master weaver throws the shuttle. For a kadhwa Banarasi, each motif is woven in real time with its own discrete zari bobbin. The weaver produces between half an inch and two inches of finished cloth per day. A heavy bridal piece, with dense pallu and full body brocade, takes between eight and twelve months on the loom.

Stage seven, the cloth comes off the loom

When the last weft is locked and the weaver pulls the finished saree off the back beam, the cloth is technically complete but visually unfinished. The starch from the warp-dressing makes the cloth stiff. The reverse carries the floats and the loose ends of the brocade. The cloth must now be finished — a two-week process in itself.

Stage eight, the finishing and clipping

The finished cloth is taken to a finishing workshop, where the loose ends on the reverse are individually clipped with small scissors, the cloth is gently washed to remove the starch, and the saree is dried flat over two days. For a cutwork or kadhua Banarasi, the floating threads on the reverse must be clipped away in pattern — a separate skilled job. The fini, the master of this stage, is the senior craftsman who decides where the cloth needs additional pressing and where it must be left alone.

Stage nine, the quality check and the GI tagging

The finished saree returns to the atelier office in Madanpura for quality inspection. We check the alignment of the borders, the density of the pallu, the regularity of the buti, the integrity of the zari. Approximately one saree in twelve does not pass and is returned to the loom for repair. The passing sarees are then tagged with the GI mark, the weaver's woven initials, and our atelier's serial number. A passport document is generated naming the weaver, the loom number, the start and end dates, the naksha author, and the dyer. The passport will travel with the saree to its eventual wearer.

Stage ten, transit to Mumbai

The sarees are then sent by overnight train in cotton-wrapped parcels to our Mumbai atelier, where the second half of the journey happens. For traditional six-yard sarees, the journey from Mumbai is direct to the customer. For pre-drape commissions, the saree goes next to our pattern room.

Stage eleven, the pre-drape architecture is built

In the Mumbai atelier, a senior tailor with a background in couture sari-blouse construction takes the finished saree and builds the pre-drape architecture — sewn pleats at the waist, a tailored fall, a pallu seam at the shoulder, a built-in blouse. This is a three-to-five-day job per piece. The tailor is named on the passport beside the weaver. When the pre-drape leaves Mumbai, the cloth has been touched by at least eleven hands across two cities and two hundred hours of labour. The woman who unboxes it will, we hope, feel some of that weight in the cloth. The arithmetic of two hundred hours, spread across eleven hands, is what makes the price honest and the saree alive.