The finest jamdani saris from Bangladesh make a pitstop in Delhi

Delhi saw its craftsmanship in a first-ever Jamdani Exposition at the National Crafts Museum. The show that closes on Tuesday, is co-curated by Indian craft and textile revivalist Chandrashekhar Bheda and Chandrashekhar Saha, one of the pioneers of Bangladesh’s craft revival. Brought together by the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi, over 100 saris by master artisans, including two rare 150-year-old pieces, tell the story of the ancient weave.

Since the 15th century, fine malmals and jamdanis have found their way on caravan routes to Iran and Uzbekistan. Patronised by the Mughals till the late 17th century, the Bangladeshi jamdani as a textile made its way into European and American markets. But with the rise of mechanised cotton and materials, jamdani saw a decline. Between the world wars, the Partition and shifts in consumer preferences, the textile got relegated to the back-end of history shelves.

The golden lining was the documentation of the fabric, the weave and the motifs that kept it alive, be it through international exhibitions, books or research by scholars. Saha is one such expert, who has been working on patterns by rural craftspeople since 1981. Both Bheda and Saha, classmates from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, have made the sari the hero of this exhibition. On customised bamboo racks, saris float as “woven air”, streaming down in shades of white, beige, browns, moss green, corals and blues.

“We didn’t want to crowd the aisle but allow the viewer space to breathe as they move from one sari to the next, feeling the fabric, its translucence, experiencing the warp and weft of the cloth, the shadows it creates on the walls,” says Bheda.

Two national award-winning jamdani weavers, Mohammad Jamal Hossain and Mohammad Sajeeb, who have come from Bangladesh, sit at the loom, brought from home. Hossain, who has been weaving since the age of 12, knows over 1,500 patterns, all in his mind’s eye, bringing the imagination of the flora and fauna of Naranyanganj’s Rupganj to his creation. Each song is sung with mathematical clarity as he teaches his shagrid (apprentice), “the ropes”.

“In Rupganj, there are over 18 to 20 villages, which have around 4,000 to 5,000 weaver families. They continue to live in the region, by the Sitalakhya river, for the moisture and water quality that bring out the best patterns. These creations cannot be replicated on a machine. Even when the wooden looms are taken to other regions of Bangladesh, they do not have the same effect. This jamdani weave is unique to this region,” says Bangladesh’s High Commissioner to India, M Riaz Hamidullah. Even as the country presses the reset button on politics, he says, “ The exhibition is a subtle reminder of the two nations – India and Bangladesh – of how we can be liberated, through our textile heritage and shared aesthetic. With so much of our markets infiltrated by machine goods and this appetite for volumising, how do we put a price tag for an art form such as this?”

And indeed one finds the calm and quiet elegance in each pattern — the gossamer, almost ethereal fabric, is more than just muslin and motifs. It is a way of life. It is in the way the weaver finds inspiration in the clay and stone moulds that shape the amsatta and the sondesh, in the water of the Sitalakhya river, in the construction and deconstruction of everything that nature holds. “Our lives are our reality. When I visited Kanchipuram (Tamil Nadu), I asked the weaver if his wife or daughter owned a sari they would wear to a wedding or a special function. He said, ‘No, it’s too expensive’. When one puts his heart into making something, he has no claim over his own creation. That is the sad reality of craft,” says Saha.

This Jamdani Exposition, which has saris on sale, is also that reminder that beauty is often in the unseen, the unspoken.