Two karigars in the Naqshbandi cluster spent eight loom-weeks on the pallu of one saree this March and April. I am writing this on a Melbourne Sunday in early April, and as of the morning I left the workshop in Lallapura last week, the pallu was three-quarters off the loom. It is a kadhua piece — kadhua, which means each motif is picked by hand, thread by thread, into the ground weave, rather than carried across the back and clipped. The reverse of a kadhua pallu is almost as clean as the face. There is no shortcut to that surface. There is only the loom, the karigar, and the hours.
The two weavers are Mohammad Shahid and his nephew Aamir. Shahid has been at this loom for thirty-one years; Aamir is eleven months in. They sit one above the other on the pit-loom — Shahid below, throwing the shuttle and managing the warp; Aamir on the small upper bench, working the naqsha cards that tell the loom which warp threads to lift for each pick. The naqsha for this pallu has four hundred and ninety-two cards. Each card is one row of the pattern. The pattern is a tilfi border — three colours of zari running in parallel, all of them real silver-gilt, none of them metallised polyester. The colour they have chosen for the centre line is a slightly oxidised gold, almost the colour of old jewellery from a Lucknow trunk.
I want to be specific about the zari, because it is the part of a Banarasi where the most lying happens. Real zari is silver wire drawn fine, gilded, and then wrapped around a silk core. It is heavy in the hand and it dulls with time into something more beautiful, not less. The polyester imitation is bright, weightless, and dies in a single wash. The price difference at the source is roughly twelve-fold. The price difference at retail is, in most stores, hidden behind a phrase like “zari work” that names neither the metal nor the technique. We do not use that phrase. If a piece in this atelier is described as zari, it is real zari, and the cluster is named, and the weight is on the spec sheet.
The economics of eight loom-weeks are unforgiving. Shahid and Aamir, working a full day each, with the small interruptions a household makes — a phone call from a daughter, a tea, a noon prayer — manage between eight and twelve centimetres of finished pallu per day. The pallu of this saree is forty-six inches deep. That is the eight weeks. It is also, before anything else, the floor of what we pay them: cluster rates, advanced in full at warp-on, with a finishing balance on cut-off. We publish those rates on the cluster page. I would rather lose a sale than carry a piece whose karigars were paid on completion-only terms, because completion-only is the lever that has hollowed out Banaras for forty years.