Reading Traditional Cloth

Reading Traditional Cloth

What is traditional cloth?

It’s just threads woven together in an intricate pattern in villages. But this cloth, particularly, undergoes a series of interpretation and restoration of history in one way or the other. It aims on educating you to understand a culture, a society, topography and most importantly it interpreting a way of living. It provides the community with an identity. It’s not just threads woven together, but a series of underlying layers of stories.

It’s a real task to find these associations and find a story within them, because the cloth goes through a lot of process of becoming attire or something to wear and to find the appropriate information. Digging for accurate facts is another big task.

According to my understanding, now, traditional cloth is an intriguing design or pattern as a whole that represents or resembles a culture or a region incorporated on the local material.

The cloth that I decided to read was this kurti. Last time I wore this was to a Garba (Gujarati dance function), held in my locality. What makes this kurti special is that it reminds me of Gujarat. The fall at the end of the kurti feels like I’m wearing a Ghagra. Most importantly are the colors and the beautiful print on the cloth.

Earlier girls, after reaching the age of 7 years or more, in Gujarat had a tradition of applying permanent tattoo to their body, Chundana (it still happens in a lot of regions there), dark green in color. The belief behind it was, the more you apply it to your bodies the more beautiful you look and it protects you from any negativity.

This pattern looks like a lady finger cross section.I remember in my crafts class using paint and then using the cross section as stencil to make prints on paper . My entire kurti is embedded with this vegetable print with a jari border at the bottom. This jhari border has a base of two most common colors used for Ghagra and choli, red and green. 

As a whole this cloth always reminds me of my native place,

ironically it is a produced by the brand ONLY.