Paithani & Mysore: Western & Southern Treasures

From the Godavari looms of Paithan to the Mysore Silk Weaving Factory of 1912, the story of two silk traditions that stayed honest about silk and gold.

In 1912, the Maharaja of Mysore signed an order that set up a public silk weaving factory in Bangalore. He promised that every saree leaving the factory would use real mulberry silk and real gold zari. More than a hundred years later, the same promise is still on the label. A much older promise, the one carried by the weavers of Paithan on the Godavari since the first century CE, had been kept even longer. This lesson follows both traditions. It tells how the Holkar queen Ahilyabai sent Paithani sarees to the temples she rebuilt, how Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV and Sir M. Visvesvaraya built a state silk industry from scratch, how the weavers of Yeola revived Paithani after it nearly died in the twentieth century, and how two Geographical Indication tags, won in 2005 and 2010, finally gave the real weavers a law to stand behind.

A Writing Room at the Mysore Palace

It is the summer of 1912. In a cool writing room at the Mysore Palace, with the first monsoon rain hitting the teak shutters, the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, is reading a proposal from his new Dewan, Sir M. Visvesvaraya. The document is a few pages of English typescript on thin cream paper. It asks the royal treasury to release a sum of money to set up a silk weaving factory in Bangalore. Not a court workshop for royal use. Not a Mughal-style karkhana. A public factory, owned by the Mysore state, open to anyone who could buy a saree from it.

The idea has risks. Indian silk has been losing ground to cheap British mill cloth for almost a century. Handloom weavers in Karnataka are already abandoning the craft for easier work. If the factory fails, the treasury will have spent its money on nothing. If the cheap imitators copy its designs, the real sarees will be undersold. Wadiyar is thirty-eight years old. Visvesvaraya is fifty-two. The two of them are about to try something no other Indian state is trying.

Wadiyar signs the order. The Mysore Silk Weaving Factory opens later that year in Bangalore. It starts with a small group of handloom weavers, a few Jacquard looms ordered from France, and one simple promise. Every saree that leaves the factory will be woven from pure mulberry silk. The gold thread in it will be actual gold. No cotton core dressed up with plastic film. No cheap imitations. One hundred and fourteen years later, the factory is still running. The company that grew out of it still uses pure gold zari. A single Mysore Silk crepe saree still contains around sixty-five grams of gold, about the weight of a small bridal necklace, spread across the body of the cloth.