Everything I have learned about the Ambani wedding has been against my will. The event has been shoved in my algorithm and its ubiquity is even more undesirable than flickering through a thousand euro summers that aren’t mine. I get FOMO from everything; I wasn’t invited to the Cannes film festival or the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics in Paris. But the circus of the Ambani wedding inspired more resentment in me than any other emotion. I expected even to have some vehement, jealous form of FOMO, knowing that my sarees and lehengas are rotting disused in bags with mothballs. Western media described it as a Met-Gala-esque parade of celebrities, with Indian media treating it as their own version of Royal Family nuptials.
Indian media revelled in the world’s sudden fascination with traditional Indian clothing at its highest form on the Ambani red carpet, crafted by high-fashion names like Sabyasachi, Manish Malhotra, and Anita Dongre. Validation from the West has long been a goal for India, has it not? So it follows that the saree takes its course of westernisation, morphing to Hollywood bodies to garner some international acclaim.
But the saree’s beauty, to me, is muddied in the exorbitant, grandiose, gluttonous dystopia of the Ambani wedding. A live broadcast of the event was screened on a skyscraper towering somewhere in India, the country with the world’s largest number of people living below the poverty line: 228.9 million. Even in a country where weddings are happily lavished upon, hardly any Indian can fathom the $600 million price tag of the Ambani wedding.
India’s poverty is undoubtedly the consequence of British colonial rule, where nearly 400 years of looting has deprived South Asia of economic and social development. The Indian source of pride for the Ambani wedding and its spotlight on lehengas and sherwanis and sarees may be because the Ambani family are the modern antithesis of the British Raj. A New York Times essay compares the wedding — attended by political elites like Narendra Modi, Boris Johnson, and John Kerry — to the 1911 Durbar, or the Coronation of King George V as emperor of India. While the East India Company and British Raj impoverished Indians for centuries, Mukesh Ambani’s company Reliance Industries is such a formidable beast that it’s been regarded as a proxy for India’s rising economy. The Ambani wedding heralds a desirable vision of a Gilded Age for Indians, where their wealth is attention-grabbing rather than attention-seeking: where cultural clothing isn’t deemed uncivilised and savage, but worthy of the Kardashians.
There’s no better time for the recontextualisation of the saree, which is not simply a status symbol or weaponised assertion of a billionaire’s wealth, but a garment worn from premodern times until today by working women, women protesting their colonial masters, and by transgender women in India asserting their rights.
Before colonial times, the saree was worn sans blouse. Meaning “strip of fabric” in Sanskrit, the saree was a singular length draped and pleated, covering the bare breast in communities like Bengal, and in some areas of Southern India not covering the bosom at all. During the Victorian era, donning simply the semi-transparent six-yard length was deemed savage. The simple beauty of the saree was complicated thereafter with mandates for blouses and petticoats to enter establishments. The echoes of this stifling demand for modesty ring bitterly today, where rape rhetoric blaming women’s dress persists on national television in India and Bangladesh.
Britain’s exploitative economic policy in India literally changed the fabric of a nation, leaving an irrevocable stain on the saree. Destroying local textile industries, the British syphoned the profits of Indian craftsmen and weavers, exporting their products for the international market. Meanwhile, British mill-made cheaper fabrics were sold to Indians, with their traditional textiles heavily taxed, putting saree-weavers out of jobs and contributing to a loss of saree designs and patterns. Sarees traditionally feature motifs and stories woven in gold thread or embroidered intricately, like peacocks, parrots, mangoes, elephants, and instruments. Even beyond colonial rule, the Indian Independence Movement demanded that Indians wore white, forsaking the unique jewel-like colours of shifting silk for resistance.
The reclamation of the saree’s colours and patterns became integral to the revival of culture. Not a short stroll away from my grandparents’ home in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, the Kalakshetra school of dance was founded by Bharatnatyam dancer Rukmini Devi in the era of Independence. In 1937, Rukmini Devi saw that the tales of gods, myths, and history were unable to be told in classical dance without the vividness of saree designs which were then fading into obscurity. With a government grant, she started a weaving room with a solitary loom and craftsmen, restoring artistic dignity and employment. Going to weavers’ homes, Devi dug out patterns from attics that hadn’t graced the Madras sun’s hotness in years. Stitched into sarees the colour of peacock’s necks, Devi rediscovered temple borders depicting ancient architecture, golden banana flowers, and native trees with their tamarind seeds. The Kalakshetra was a cornerstone moment in cultural fashion evolving from the paternalism of the British.
However, the saree, from its Indus Valley origins till now, has always been a marker of caste and the wealth gulf between castes. The gold threads adorning the saree’s borders and the luxury of materials like pure silk make some sarees unattainable, with some styles marked as exclusively Brahmin. The saree has been interconnected with status virtually since its inception. What constitutes the ‘elevated’ saree at present is its shift away from ‘traditional’ patterns imbued with local significance, and towards florals and glittery simplicity for the Eurocentric palate, seen in Sabyasachi pieces worn at the Met Gala earlier this year. Such is the natural course of globalisation. Paradoxically, however, the saree is a symbol of nationalistic pride in an India that is more fiercely assertive than ever before. Only last week on August 15, Indian Independence Day celebrations echoed all the way to the USyd Quadrangle. The event marks 77 years of Indepedence, but also 77 years since India’s Partition from Pakistan, a “mutual genocide” with “Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other”.
Indian PM Narendra Modi also joined in the Ambani wedding festivities. The Ambani family plays fiddle to Modi’s weaponisation of traditional clothing as a way to aggressively push Hindu-nationalist ideology. Modi’s 2014 ‘Make in India’ campaign, an incredibly politicised attempt to sever India’s dependence on Chinese and Western goods, seems to be a bitter reply to the British Raj’s one-way trade policy. This movement championing local manufacturing was initially led by a fashion designer and urbane party politician, Shaina NC, beginning with a saree exhibition called the “Banarasi Textiles Movement”. Modi promised to revive the tradition of the opulent Banarasi saree, primarily donned by Hindu women and woven in the holy Hindu city of Varanasi, also his constituency. Political, economic, and celebrity elites seem to be ushering in a cultural renaissance for India in which the saree plays a starring role. Still, the saree is bittersweet for the expanding South Asian diaspora: where, when, and how to tie this garment? Brown women are done with tied-tongues and tied-hands on this conundrum. My favourite ‘Saree Architect’ Natasha Thasan is teaching people to drape sarees in under a minute, reminding me that I can wear it to both temples and the bar.
The flowing saree feels like the river in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha: “for it only the present exists, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future”. I find myself longing for the saree’s golden past and cursing the tide of modernity that sullies it. But the saree’s fluidity and persistence is something beautiful; when I wear it I am unburdened, at peace. I pose Siddartha’s question to you: “Have you also learned that secret from the river, that there is no such thing as time?” As a girl from a long line of saree-wearers, I say yes.
