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Dec 6, 1999

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Theme for a weave
If others have a Raja Ravi Varma painting on their walls, you can go one better and sport one on your sari pallu. Wearable art's acquired a new meaning now that the painter's masterpiece Hamsa Damyanthi has been woven into Kancheepuram silk saris. The shimmering lady and the swan are a nod to the painter on the completion of his 150th birth anniversary. Quite an expensive nod at Rs 43,000 a sari.

It's not just mythological yarns that the Tirunelveli-based Rs 100 crore RMKV and Sons are now spinning. Theme saris, like theme parties, are part of the one-upmanship game. So the Wonders of the World like the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal which Aishwarya Rai traipses across in the mega-budget film Jeans have been transported to the saris.

It all began innocuously with Subramanian Bharathiar's famous poem Chinnam Chiru Kilye: RMKV's K. Viswanathan and his brother K. Sivakumar turned the verse into 33 dance postures on the sari. The marriage of entrepreneurship and heritage was possible because of Viswanathan's textile engineering background. He used the combination of French tapestry with jacquard weaving to get the true colour reproduction and details. For instance, 80 colour threads were used to get the minute details of Damyanthi's sari, blouse, jewellery, even skin tone. And it took four expert weavers to work on this sari for 90 days, using computer-aided design. Nothing but an absolute match would do.

-K.M. Thomas

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