In the last couple of years, vibrant conversations about the sari have emerged in urban India. Handloom weaving experiments by some designers have led to renewed interest in the unstitched drape. There have been sari seminars and sari pacts. Now sari stories abound. For many women, the sari is a topic for bonding—like career hiccups, tall dark coffees, humorous men, single malts and jasmine flowers. We may cling to our version of “it’s my grandmother’s sari”, but the woven sari’s status as Indian fashion’s spine endures.
In this charming story land, where designers and handloom artisans collaborate to innovate, live some important characters. Among them, Sally Holkar Maheshwaris, Abraham & Thakore Ikats, Raw Mango Chanderis and Anavila Misra linens. Saris from bai lou belong on this list too, though they aren’t as well known. They have never walked at a fashion week and their creators never advertise.
Bappaditya Biswas is, thankfully, a Luddite. You can only reach him via a phone call—no emoticon-embellished messages and no email either. A pile of cotton bai lou saris sits on my office desk as I prepare to call Bappaditya. Besides the dozens of bai lou admirers I know in Delhi, some of my colleagues are fans too; they have happily brought in their saris to touch and hold, fold and unfold. I marvel at the maroon-orange combination of one and run my hands over the blue-green peacock personality of another as I dial Bappaditya’s number.
The voice on the phone from Kolkata has little use for words like “amazing” and “super”; there are no self-congratulatory footnotes either. Bappaditya, who founded bai lou in 2002 with his wife, Rumi Biswas, is attentive and forthright. “Bai lou doesn’t mean anything. It is just an expression. It has no baggage as a term,” he says.
Predominantly an export company that used to make fine wool and handloom scarves, and also showcased its wares in Indian cities, including Delhi, bai lou got a push from the Delhi Crafts Council to create saris. Bappaditya says they paid heed. At its first sari exhibition, in Delhi in late 2005, 75 of the 80 saris exhibited were sold.
In the 10 years since, the couple have subverted design patterns while sustaining handloom traditions. Their enterprise is backed by a pragmatic sales plan and lasting commitment to reasonable pricing, which helps them create more work for weavers. In their collaborations with handloom artisans, the Biswas team have ensured that learning does not just flow from designer to weaver. It has to be a mutually engaging and viable process, emphasizes Bappaditya. He adds that they were able to understand their market, make their saris attractive in form and fall to wearers and increase their appeal across age groups and geographies. “Now our saris have gone from humble homes to well-known people,” says Bappaditya. “Well-known people” is Bappaditya’s modest word for actor Vidya Balan, who often wears bai lou saris.
“Modernity”, the frequently employed but difficult to explain word in Indian fashion, is, in the bai lou context, represented by audacious patterning, altered textures, splashy colours and bold experiments with Jamdani weaving. “We had to study Jamdani weaving,” says Bappaditya, who studied textile design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Kolkata; Rumi is a textile design graduate from the National Institute of Fashion and Design, Kolkata. “The Bengal Jamdani was always a poorer version of the Dhakai Jamdani. We researched to create new yarns and introduced geecha to the Jamdani weave. The warp was made transparent with filature silk,” he says. Spun from natural silk cocoons, geecha is a thick, raw yarn.
While Bappaditya and Rumi worked extensively in the Nadia, Burdwan, Hooghly and Sundarbans regions of West Bengal in the early years, their curiosity about the handloom identities of different weaves took them to other states. They worked with Telia Ikats in Andhra Pradesh, bringing to their customers stunning interpretations of the missing check (negative space introduced deliberately by removing intermittent warp and weft threads) in linen and silk, some with silk satin borders and sequins. If there are bai lou saris in matka silk, there is also Bappaditya’s rework of the Garad saris (distinguished by a plain red border on a white or off-white field) from Bengal and interpretations of Angami saris, inspired by the eponymous Naga tribe.
The weaving techniques used by the Biswas couple were written about by Australian artist, writer, curator and art coordinator Maggie Baxter, in her well-researched book Unfolding: Contemporary Indian Textiles, published last year. “On a silk and linen gauze check sari, they have deliberately stripped down and dismantled the grid form, consciously removing weft threads to suggest a tenuous frailty. Laid flat or hung against the light, the grids become quivering matrices of drawn lines but wrapped around the body their formality deconstructs further,” writes Baxter.
Besides enlarging traditional motifs—floral or geometric—with the use of thicker thread on finer fabrics, Bappaditya and Rumi wove glowing sequins inside two layers of silk by making tiny pockets. Rumi also made sequin yarns and wove them into the fabric to get the embroidered look. That particular experiment, first tried for woven shawls, won them the Unesco Seal of Excellence for Handicrafts (now called the Unesco Award of Excellence for Handicrafts) in 2006. The first such saris were called Disco Khadi, borrowing the name from the Khadi dupatta that won them the award. The seal is a certification for products that meet “the highest level of crafts excellence” and are “distinguished as a benchmark for craft production,” says bai lou’s website. “The weavers have been doing their work for years. We can’t just tell them to throw away their traditional knowledge, so we build trust slowly, before working with them to develop new yarn or patterns,” says Bappaditya.
It’s this regard for weavers that makes bai lou’s Abir sari the star of the house. A pure cotton weave woven in West Bengal, priced at ₹ 750, it serves as a lasting example of affordable yet aspirational design. While even the most expensive bai lou sari costs ₹ 15,000, pricing the Abir sari at just ₹ 750 was Rumi’s idea, says Bappaditya, explaining that his spouse handles the business and logistics for bai lou. “That’s how I can go back to the weavers with more work. It is all about scale.”
For customers, bai lou saris offer an unpredictable interplay between design, colour, feel, fabric and pricing. “Contemporary”, in lay parlance, is perhaps another word for saris that appeal even to those who may not essentially be sari wearers. Like Priya Kapoor, the editorial director of Roli Books. “What I like about them are the colours; they are young and bright, and the motifs are not traditional. They are a great alternative, even for someone who may not always be drawn to handloom saris, besides being extremely well-priced,” says Kapoor, who invited bai lou to set up a pop-up shop at Roli Books’ Delhi CMYK book store last October. “We had so much fun selling them. I noticed so many women, including Priyanka Gandhi, loving these saris.”
Bai lou doesn’t just make saris. Handwoven scarves, Khadi curtains and Kantha quilts are some of their other products. As Kapoor rightly points out, bai lou also attracts customers because of its location. Bai lou is the “anchor brand” of the well-known store ByLoom, a house of handloom and handicraft traditions co-founded by the husband-wife duo Malavika and Jeet Banerjee. The first ByLoom store is housed in an old, two-storeyed, middle-class house in Kolkata’s Gariahat, with chequered floor tiles, wooden benches with bamboo trees and a small fountain in the backyard, and large windows with wooden panels. The ambience underlines bai lou’s culturally specific identity as a handloom brand from West Bengal.
Even so, it is Bappaditya’s discerning design mind, the couple’s conviction about collaborative work with weavers and Rumi’s business pragmatism that have made the bai lou sari a recognizable marker in India’s sari story. “Wrong information about powerlooms being paraded as handlooms is harmful, but apart from that, I take everything written, spoken or heard about handlooms in a positive way. Whatever publicity the weavers get is good. That’s the learning of this decade,” says Bappaditya, never one for any negative space outside the realm of the six yards.
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