With trending hashtags celebrating
it, the saree has become more fashionable and popular than ever
Over the last fortnight one hashtag has
been trending on twitter. It’s called #sareetwitter and is used by women from
across the world to upload pictures of them wearing sarees. So, how could I possibly
resist? The moment I saw it, I went scrolling through the pictures on my phone
to pull out some shots that I could upload as my contribution to #sareetwitter.
As did most of my friends and the days passed in a pleasant blur of mutual
admiration that left us feeling all warm and fuzzy. (Anybody who has ever been
on Twitter will recognize this as a novel feeling.)
But all those lovely pictures of women of
all ages, shapes, sizes and, indeed, ethnicities, left me marveling about the
saree all over again. It is such a versatile garment that it suits every single
woman who drapes it. It can be made to look sexy. It can be turned into
something conservative and staid. It can be used to play dress up. And it works
perfectly as a utilitarian everyday garment as well. There are as many ways to
drape the saree as there are to love it.
That was a lesson that I learnt pretty
early in my childhood. Growing up in a joint family I was always intrigued by
the fact that my mother and grandmother (both Punjabis who were brought up in
Pre-Partition Punjab) draped the saree differently. While my mom draped her
pallu over her left shoulder – what we would call the modern drape, I guess –
my grandmother favoured the ‘seedha palla’ in which the pallu went over her
right shoulder and then fanned across her torso in a concertina style. Try as I
might, I couldn’t get the ladies to explain this difference. The only answer I
got from my mother was a short: “This (pointing to herself) is how we wear the
saree now. That (pointing to my grandmother) is the old style.”
Of course it wasn’t as simple as that.
Even today, many decades on, there are Indian communities, like the Gujaratis
for instance, who still swear by the ‘seedha palla’ style. Though, ironically
enough, my mother-in-law, who was a Gujarati, never favoured that style. (Maybe
she too thought it was old-fashioned, because that was how her mother wore her
sari.)
But the style of saree-wearing that
really intrigued me as a child was the one favoured by the grandmother of one
of my Bengali friends. She wore her saree Bengali style, with an absence of proper
pleats and with the pallu draped almost toga-style, and held in place with a
bunch of keys tied to the end of it. To my childish eyes, that looked like the
most elegant style of all.
So glamorous did the saree – and all that
you could do with it – look to our young eyes and I would spend entire
afternoons with the best friend of my childhood experimenting with the drape.
It wasn’t easy. We were so short that we had to first fold the width of the
saree in half before it would fit us. But once we had done that, we would spend
hours trying out different styles. With one drape, we were matriarchs ruling
the domestic roost. With another, we were modern women heading out for our
first jobs. And so on.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait
for my first job to get my first saree. That happened when I joined Junior
College (or Plus Two, as we used to call it in those days). I was studying in
Loreto House, where the normal school uniform was a nice blue midi-length skirt
matched with a no-nonsense white blouse. But somewhere along the line, the nuns
in charge decided that we girls needed a saree uniform as well. After all we
were growing up into young ladies; and young ladies needed to know how to wear
the saree.
So, all of us were assigned light-blue
georgette sarees, that we were enjoined to wear to school at least one day a week
(we could wear it more often of course; but once a week was compulsory). Many
of my friends complained bitterly but I have to admit that I loved it. In no
time at all, I was wearing it through the week, comfortable enough in its folds
to walk the streets and even run after buses (and board them).
That early training has stood me in good
stead. Even today, I am never more comfortable than when I am in a saree. I can
drape it in a matter of seconds, I don’t need a pin to keep my pleats together
(or even my pallav in place), and I can do anything from light up a dance floor
to cook a meal in it.
Not that there’s anything especially
amazing about that. Millions of Indian women have been doing the same through
the millennia. And I can only hope that millions of us, and those who come
after us, continue to do that. And if hashtags like #sareetwitter make the
saree seem more accessible – even glamorous – to young women everywhere, then I
for one hope that it trends for all time to come. The saree deserves nothing
less.
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