A few months ago, a ‘Whatsapp uncle’ (we all have them in our lives, no?) sent me a forwarded text about the Thapar-Singh family, to which Malvika ‘Mala’ Singh, author of Saris of Memory, and her husband Tejbir belong. The burden of the unkind forward’s song: here is a family marinated in generational privilege, with unwarranted influence and power. I blandly informed the sender that Mala and Tejbir were dear friends of mine and left it at that. Months later, Saris of Memory, beautifully illustrated and handsomely produced, arrived as a stern, if unintended, refutation of the mass forward.
Malvika Singh,
Saris of Memory,
The Variety Book Depot (December 2024)
Flip through Mala’s latest book and you will see what the text, perhaps deliberately, missed: Mala may have been born a ‘Lutyens aristocrat’ but she is far from the decorative parasite that that term, in today’s times, mischievously implies.
Mala’s life’s work – a vast corpus of projects she has energetically helmed – has been powered by her love for and devotion to her country. She communes with India through the medium of textiles and craft. For Mala, India is synonymous with her craftspeople and her infinite cultural practices, and the secret codes through which they communicate. (For instance: Wear only black on Diwali, Mala once told me, for it nods to the moonless Amavasya sky.)
Mala could easily have been just another elegant memsahib who lives to buy saris and wax eloquent about textiles – a species that is as populous as Whatsapp uncles. But no, Mala rolled up her sleeves, or in this case hitched up her sari, and waded into the arena. Her life has not been about passive spectating but about being the change she wanted to see. Mala’s life is a lesson in doing.
Just a few pages in, one reads that at a young age Mala was working under the legendary Pupul Jayakar at the Handicrafts and Handlooms Corporation of India. There had been a famine in Bihar and as a part of the relief work, the corporation had commissioned the women of Mithila to paint their traditional murals on paper. These became wildly popular and defined chic interiors for a generation of Indians. The men of Mithila were tasked with weaving baskets which the corporation then sold to vegetable vendors in the sabzi mandi on Old Delhi’s Mall Road. “Every morning at the crack of dawn,” Mala writes, “I would exit the air-conditioned comfort of my bedroom at Kautilya Marg, climb into the front companion seat of a truck, sit alongside a random driver I had never met, and chug noisily and uncomfortably to the market to sell those baskets.” A lesson in doing.
But that was just the beginning. Mala and Tejbir were founding members of the Rehwa Society, set up to revive the weaving of the Maheshwar Sari. When Mala couldn’t find the Venkatgiri sari she remembers seeing in her youth, she directed the weaving of an entire collection of them. She similarly produced two more collections of saris that were no longer being made, tributes to the styles of her sartorial role models: Indira Gandhi and Prem Bery, one of the founders of the Central Cottage Emporium. Mala was associated with the Festivals of India, exhibitions put up across the world, 1980s onwards, to showcase India’s craft and culture. And also the Vishwakarma exhibitions, “albeit at the periphery”, to celebrate Indian weaving and which were helmed by the legendary Martand ‘Mapu’ Singh and Rakesh Thakore. Mala has been part of countless documentary projects alongside Tejbir. She ran an arts magazine in the 1970s and 80s, a TV station in the 90s, established Bikaner House in Delhi as a cultural centre in the 2010s, and all throughout, Mala and Tejbir also ran Seminar, a monthly journal of record.
But if all this makes Mala sound like a saint, don’t worry. In this marvellous book, vignettes from Mala’s life, sometimes based on events, sometimes on people, and at other times on saris that spark a memory, Mala’s acerbic wit and opinionatedness are on ample display.
She sends up the centralised cultural bureaucracy of India – babus dazzled by the product range and wash-and-wear culture of the West, so disconnected from India’s realities that they turned bronze diyas to be used for worship into ashtrays and peddled cardboard turbans with cloth glued on them at government emporia. She is unsparing of the wealthy who can’t see beyond religious philanthropy. And she is self-deprecating too: Mala unapologetically recounts the time she refused to loan a sari of hers for an exhibition. And another time she “greedily” took back a sari she had given someone so she could have it copied – and, hilariously, never returned it when the copying project failed!
When COVID struck, Mala, prodded by her daughter-in-law Anjali, directed the weaving of a group of saris, one each from India’s most iconic traditions: a Banarasi brocade, a Kanjeevaram, a kalamkari, a chikankari, a Baluchari, a telia rumal, and so on. Mala and Anjali didn’t want the looms of India to fall ominously silent during that awful time. And so they commissioned saris and paid the weaver whatever was asked. But get this: once done, in an interview about this project, Mala published the phone numbers of all the weavers. At a time when people guard information and access, and prize the uniqueness of their possessions, Mala gave away the recipe to her secret sauce.
When asked why she did this, Mala tartly answered, there will be no revival of weaving traditions unless there is wider demand. Mala, in her 70s, remembers a time when kani weaving was dead, when ajrakhs were rare, when block printing had been lost. For her, these kinds of losses are like the chipping away of part of the soul of India. These traditions have now been revived but there are innumerable examples of saris in this book that can’t be bought any longer for love or money. Early on we encounter a stunning black beaded sari made by a Polish émigré called Madame Karouche in Bombay. That India no longer exists. What is clear though is that Mala’s life’s work has been to stanch any more losses and to attempt the revival of branches that seem dead.
Perhaps the most touching anecdote from the book is about the passing away of Mala’s mother. Mala describes a red puja sari, the kind her mother was cremated in. An agnostic, Raj Thapar had cancer and was dying when she told Mala she wanted to be cremated in a red sari and as she was dying a married woman she wanted a bindi on her forehead, even though she never wore one throughout her life. She wanted dhrupad music playing at home and red and white flowers at the crematorium. She wanted an open house every evening so her friends could come to raise a glass in celebration of her life.
Mala often jokes that she is in the “departure lounge” and has told her household of the hiding place of that special red puja sari she wants to be sent off wearing. That day is hopefully decades away but this story aptly sums up both the emotional power of the cultural codes of India that Mala is so intrigued by, and also the intense memories that can be ignited by seemingly ordinary pieces of cloth.
Parth Phiroze Mehrotra is editor in chief of Juggernaut Books .
