Baluchari Sarees

Baluchari Saree

The name ‘Baluchari’ is derived from the area in which the sarees are woven: Baluchar, now known as Jiaganj, in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district. Early Baluchari sarees were silk sarees believed to have been the creations of weavers who had migrated from Varanasi to Bengal around the 16^th century; these early sarees are said to have depicted scenes on their end-pieces not only from everyday life – everything from women smoking to horses being ridden – but also from the great Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the Puranas. Each scene was set in an oblong frame on the end-piece of the saree, and each frame could feature a different scene; together, they actually told a story. In addition to this, the borders of Baluchari sarees often featured floral designs or figures, as did ‘butis’ on the field.

The technology and know-how required to produce such sarees is now lost to us – unable to compete with less expensive textiles, by the time of independence in 1947, Baluchari sarees were all but extinct. It was due to the efforts of Akshay Kumar Das, a local artist, and Gorachand Diasi, a weaver that the saree was revived in the mid-1950s with the support of Subho Tagore and Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay.

Contemporary Baluchari sarees are primarily woven in Bishnupur, Bankura in West Bengal usually with silk from Bangalore forming the warp and Bengal’s malda silk being used for the weft. They still feature mythological scenes and floral designs but the frames tend to be repetitious and the end-pieces no longer tell stories: where they are not floral, they generally depict figures in lateral view. There are no colour restrictions when it comes to Baluchari sarees in theory but, in practice, most of these sarees are in darkish colours. The repertoire of motifs has, in a way, expanded to include references to the caves of Ajanta and Ellora, and to North Indian miniature art. The border is usually designed to echo at least one of the motifs on the end-piece, and is woven using supplementary mina (coloured thread), zari or both.