Banarasi sari

What is Banarasi sari?

A Banarasi sari is a silk sari woven in Varanasi, in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The city is known across India for very fine silk, and this is the sari made from it. Weaving happens inside the household, and the people behind it are mostly Momin Ansari Muslims, a weaver community whose name means helper in Arabic. Skill moves from father to son. The surface is dense with pattern and carries zari, metal thread worked into the cloth. These saris are not everyday wear. They are kept for functions and weddings, and they are the kind of thing a young woman may hope to wear on her own wedding day.

Where does Banarasi sari come from?

The article gives no founding story and no date for Banarasi weaving. What it does describe is a craft held inside families: generation after generation, fathers taught sons to work silk on looms driven by the feet and large enough to fill a room. Real gold thread once went into the decoration. The trade has since shrunk. By 2015 around 40,000 people were weaving in the city, where the figure had earlier stood near 300,000. No single cause is agreed on. Some blame saris brought in from elsewhere, others blame power looms taking over the work.

How is Banarasi sari made?

Silk is the fibre, and the loom is worked by hand and by foot. It is big enough to fill a room, which is why weaving fits into a home rather than a factory floor. The weaver sits at it and builds the pattern thread by thread as the cloth grows, adding zari where the design calls for it. In earlier times the decoration was carried out with pure gold thread. Because the work is done by hand at this scale it is slow, and the number of people able to do it has thinned. The article says nothing about how long one sari takes.

Colours, motifs and borders

Patterning on a Banarasi sari is intricate, laid over the silk and picked out with zari. The article does not name individual motifs, so no ornaments can be listed here. What it does record is the older practice of using thread drawn from pure gold for the decoration, a level of richness that later gave way to other metal threads. Beyond that the descriptions stay general: fine silk, detailed patterning, zari highlights.

How Banarasi sari is worn

It is worn the way a sari is worn, with the cloth wrapped around the body and one end brought over the shoulder. The sources do not describe the drape any further, and say nothing about a blouse or petticoat. What they do make clear is the setting. This is not cloth for ordinary days. Varanasi silk saris are reserved for special occasions, above all weddings and traditional functions, and they belong to a formal, celebratory moment.

When Banarasi sari is worn

Banarasi silk saris belong to occasions rather than routine. Weddings come first, along with traditional functions, and the article describes them as dress for special events only. The article also notes how much such a sari means to a bride: it is the garment many young Indian women picture themselves wearing at their wedding. At the same time the saris are woven in ordinary homes, by families who have done this work for generations and who sell to buyers rather than wearing the cloth themselves.

Styles of Banarasi sari

The article draws a line between hand-woven cloth and the power-loom kind, though it does not compare how the two look. Power looms are named by some as a reason for the fall in weaving work, and saris brought in from outside are named by others. Both are offered as explanations for a shrinking trade rather than as descriptions of style. Nothing is said about regional variants, modern adaptations, or how a buyer might tell a genuine handloom sari from a copy.

What Banarasi sari means

2009 brought official standing: Geographical Indication rights for Banaras Brocades and Sarees, won by bodies of weavers and their cooperatives. Behind the cloth sit livelihoods that have been shrinking for years. The article gives a 2015 figure of about 40,000 weavers against roughly 300,000 before, and lists softer demand for saris, imports and power looms as suspected reasons. It also raises a harder point. Human Rights Watch reports that children of five or six commonly work in the trade, on the argument that young hands learn faster than older ones.

Questions people ask about Banarasi sari

Good reading and sources

• Silk industry in Varanasi on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data