Great painting, great weave

``Hamsa Damayanti'', the well-known painting by Raja Ravi Verma which adorns a great many museums of the world can now be worn in the form of a silk sari, thanks to an effort by two award-winning designers from Tamil Nadu to weave it into its ``pallu''.

``Since this is the 150th birth anniversary of Raja Ravi Verma and the 100th anniversary of this well-known painting, we decided to weave it into the silk sari,'' says Mr. K. Vishwanathan who, along with his brother Mr. K. Shivakumar, has perfected the technique of woven silk sari art.

Here in Delhi this past week-end to receive the national award from the Ministry of Textiles along with their weavers, the two say the story of Nala and Daymayanti was further woven into the border of the silk sari in 36 panels.``Our family has been into this business for generations and following the realisation that innovation was the key to making the sari appealing to the younger generation, we decided to weave poet Subramania Bharati's Chinnachiru kiliye into the silk sari in 1996,'' says Mr. Vishwanathan, who has a B. Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

This endeavour was recognised by the Limca Book of Records for the stupendous warp and waft technique that was used with as many as 9,950 jacquart cards for designing the sari.``Soon, we started weaving more themes into the sari, whether it was the carved wooden ceiling with 90 flowers on the ceiling of Padmanabhapuram palace or the Valluvar Kottam in Chennai,'' chipped in Mr. Sivakumar, who has received a separate national award for another sari, ``Aishwarya Pookkal'' in which two warps and two wefts were used to get a three-dimensional effect.

But doing the ``Hamsa Damayanti'' sari proved to be a great challenge indeed.``It is a well-known painting and we knew that if it is not reproduced to near perfection, it might be rejected outrightly,'' says Mr. Vishwanathan.``The French tapestry technique was adopted to weave this sari and more than 10 weavers worked on it for eight months,'' he adds.

The citation for the national award says it all : ``The art and craft exhibited in the sari portrays the exquisite and masterly skill of the designer and weaver and as a whole the abundant potentiality of the master craftsmen of the handloom industry. It contains 26 different colour tones and nearly 80 colour threads which were used to get the colour of swan and Damayanti. Sometimes, even half-pick design was used. The sari is a unique specimen for the designers and weavers''.

``Translating one medium into another is indeed very difficult but after working with a lot many themes, we are now confident that anything and everything can be woven into the sari,'' says Mr. Vishwanathan, who believes that ``tradition has to take different forms if it has to live.''

By K. Kannan

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