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Benaras dreams at Taj

Traditional look The Taj staff in handwoven silk sarees

The only bizarre silver lining to the abject penury of the hand weavers of Varanasi would have been the Hindu belief that one who dies here would attain salvation. With powerlooms and their prints stepping in, demand for traditional, hand-woven fabri c with their customisation in silk and its intricacies melted away.

The number of traditional master weavers dwindled to about 160. This art resembled the Ganges at the delta before it joins the sea — dribbling painfully along, labouring heavy silted paths, headed for an inevitable loss of identity.

As a part of their Building Livelihood programme, The Taj Group espoused the cause of 25 traditional master weavers of Benaras by adopting their hand-woven saris for their 650 front office staff at 10 of their luxury hotels. This was launched at the Taj Krishna on Friday.

“This is for a cause and my effort is totally complementary,” says designer Jay Ramrakhiani, who was chosen to design these uniforms for the Taj Group. “The details of types of weaves, colour palettes, fall of garments, textures etc are something I learnt in Paris and I want to bring in to India,” says Jay for whom working on a sari is a first-time thing. “I want to break the traditionally held belief that you can’t be more expensively dressed than your boss. You’ll see that the sari colours and designs are identical with the peepal leaf motif (symbol of Benaras) for managers and the paisley design for executives being the only difference,” he points out.

For someone featured in Debonair and involved in Bipasha Basu’s ascent to supermodel status, Jay’s fashion bastion is to see Hollywood actresses in saris (we haven’t seen those since James Bond’s Octupussy).

The core of the event was models sashaying in varied hues walking down the winding staircase leading down to the Grand Ballroom as the music by E-Tribe, a Buddha Bar collection, crescendoed. Interestingly these ladies weren’t models, they were the hotel staff.

The days ahead would see Taj Udaipur and Taj Umaid Bhavan staff donning Benaras weaves as well, said the PR Head from Mumbai, in response to whether Taj’s gesture would be a sustainable means of livelihood for the handweavers.

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