Kanchipuram & Dharmavaram: Temple Silks of the South

From Krishnadevaraya's weavers in 1520 to the 2005 GI registration, the story of a saree built like a Dravidian temple.

Around 1520, Emperor Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara ordered his Telugu Devanga and Saliyar weavers to move south and dress the queens and deities of his Tamil territories. They came, and they stayed. Their descendants still sit at pit looms in the Pillayarpalayam lanes of Kanchipuram, weaving silk sarees for Chennai wedding halls and for the daily garlanding of Lord Balaji at Tirumala. This lesson walks into one of those workshops. It asks why a Kanchipuram saree is built in three parts locked together at the seams, why a real one weighs over a kilogram and cannot be torn with bare hands, and how in 1928 a single shop on Nageswara Rao Road in Chennai turned the urban Tamil bride into the patron who saved a five-century-old craft.

Before Dawn in Pillayarpalayam

It is 4:30 in the morning in Pillayarpalayam, the weaving neighbourhood at the back of Kanchipuram city. Through a small window that opens onto a stone courtyard, you can hear three sounds: a temple conch from the Ekambareshwarar precinct a kilometre away, a cock in the next lane, and the slow wooden knock of a pit-loom treadle. The treadle belongs to a weaver we can call Devanathan, a composite drawn from the old Devanga master weavers who still sit at pit looms in this neighbourhood. He is fifty-eight years old. He is the fifth generation in his family to weave silk. One of his ancestors, eight generations back, came down from the Godavari country to Kanchipuram in about 1520, under an order from Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara. That ancestor came with a loom and a wife. Devanathan's house still stands on the same lane.

This morning he is finishing a bridal saree. A wedding has been booked for three days later at the Kapaleeshwarar temple in Mylapore, Chennai. The saree is nine yards of arakku maroon silk with a parrot-green border and a pallu woven in the annapakshi (swan) motif. The pallu is finished. The body is finished. What he is working on now is the last few inches of the korvai join, the place where the maroon body and the green border lock into each other.

Korvai cannot be done by one weaver. The body uses one set of warp threads. The border uses a different set, dyed in a different colour. The two weavers sit next to each other at the same loom. When the weft shuttle reaches the edge of the body, Devanathan's son Karthikeyan, twenty-six years old and the sixth generation, passes a second shuttle loaded with green weft back through the border warp. A third shuttle joins them at the exact point where the two colours lock. For about twenty seconds, three hands are working on the same saree at the same instant. This is why a real Kanchipuram is sometimes called a three-shuttle saree.