19 C Banarasi saree, Bharany Donation, National Museum Delhi, 2014 Oddly enough, despite now being coveted for their silk and zari brocades, early Banarasi sarees were not woven in silk. Although Banaras does have a tradition of weaving that appears to go back over a millennium, that weaving seems to have been of cotton. Kautilya's Arthashastra written sometime before the birth of Christ, for example, refers to Banarasi linen which is unsurprising given that it would have been cotton that was most easily available locally. Travelling in India in the 16th century, Ralph Fitch described the cotton textiles of Banaras while Tavernier, who made several voyages to India and Persia between 1630 and 1668, seems to have made no mention of silk being woven in Banaras at all. Some tales say that a 1603 famine in Gujarat brought silk weavers to Banaras, while others talk of a great fire. Whatever the truth is, it appears that it was in the 17th and 18th centuries, as the Mughal...