Prakriti: A Palimpsest in Print
“পিপি! এই শাড়ি টা গড়িয়াহাটের কোনার দোকান থেকে ছাপিয়ে আয়”
{Pipi! Head over to the shop in Gariahat and tell them to do a print on this saree.”}
Much of childhood fades away from the fabric of our life. But I have found that the things that once escaped our notice can turn into long-lasting impressions which only begin to grow deeper with the years.
My mother, Bejoyalaxmi, was a meticulous and unapologetically stylish woman. Her sarees would always match her blouses and petticoats, her shoes, her iconic glass and gold bangles, her hair clips, and even her nails. Wife to an itinerant and extremely senior officer of the Geological Survey of India, she did not always live in the city – and even when she did, with my father posted in far-flung corners of the country, it was with the responsibility of raising two daughters on her own.
And still, whether living out of a tent in the hills of the Northeast with no running water and gas, or when living in the heart of Kolkata bustling with the hubbub of a newly burgeoning Indian national identity all around her, my mother was the most creative and self-possessed woman you could ever meet. There would always be fresh flowers and green plants in the house, bits of hand-embroidered lace edging the curtains, every appliance in the house would have its own quilted cover, and even the knobs of our cabinets would be adorned with floral trinkets.
My mother loved florals and prints – when she couldn’t embroider fabric, she would walk over to the block printers in the nearby market and spend hours choosing motifs and laying out designs on sarees for my us, my aunts, my cousins, and finally for herself. She was my introduction to the art of handblock printing. Back then, in Kolkata of the late 1960s and early 70s, handblock printing as an art was so quotidian as to be nearly unremarkable in its everydayness. And yet, the ease with which such a seemingly simple thing as a block-print can breathe new life into an faded or well-loved saree is a phenomenon that is indelibly set in my memory.
It goes without saying that my mother believed in the value of handcrafted work – an artist herself, she remained a pillar of the community she built around herself in Gariahat: weavers, block-printers, tailors, all knew her to be a patron of the enormous effort that goes into creating fashion for the future; thinking deeply about the handmade, and how to revive a single garment with prudence and love and creativity.
Flowers, leaves, conch-shells, turtles, dragonflies, trees, tigers, butterflies – PRAKRITI is a tribute to these fleeting fragments of my mother that remain with us even today. Like a flower returned to life after a long winter, block-printing creates worlds in our imagination where previously we imagined only the empty passing of time.
PRAKRITI is, proudly, our first ever fully in-house creation, undertaken with the help of the incredible master artisans at Tharangini Studio in Bangalore, which, too, was begun by a mother – Lakshmi Srivathsa – and is now run by her daughter – Padmini Govind. Every saree is unique and designed in such a way as to never be replicated again. Handblock printing, an inherently irreplicable art, undertaken at Tharangini with ecologically friendly GOTS certified dyes, ensures that no two designs are ever quite exactly the same and that even something as ephemeral as the sunlight plays a role in the creation of each saree.
Handwoven pure silk and pure cotton flow through the collection in the myriad shapes and forms of my memory and my mother’s arboreal-sartorial dreams. I see this collection more as the fruition of her legacy than a work of my own. I hope that you will love this collection as much as my daughter and I have enjoyed creating, curating, and presenting it for you.
Stay tuned as we explore the art of the handblock here on yarrnsbybarnali. Prakriti, our spring collection of handwoven silks and cottons with one-of-a-kind, vintage-inspired handblock printing is arriving on the store soon!
~ with love, Barnali
