National Award Winning Textile Designer Gaurang’s dream project to recreate Raja Ravi Varma’s Paintings has been in the making for two years and the designer beams as he shows off the saris, at his Hyderabad store.
The saris have been woven using 150-count fine khadi, with the yarn procured from Ganjam Zilla Khadi Gramodyog Sangh in Odisha. Two hundred kilograms of dupion silk yarn were dyed in 600 hues of natural dyes, for the weavers to replicate the paintings using Srikakulam jamdani technique.
The colours of the yarns ranged from pastel pinks to luminescent greens. “It wasn’t easy to develop such colours using natural dyes,” Gaurang recalls. One of his team members worked with Junaid Khatri in Ajrakhpur, Kutch. The master dyer’s team created eight to 10 shades of each colour; for instance, they developed 12 hues of white. Several shades of pink and beige were developed for the skin tones.
As Gaurang unveils one sari after another, it’s evident that the project has been worth the time and effort of 20 families of weavers in villages near Srikakulam, six dyers in Ajrakhpur, six members of Gaurang’s team, among others.
The genesis of this project harks back to eight years, when Gaurang had replicated some of Laxman Aelay’s paintings on Telangana women, through jamdani weaves. Lavina Baldota of Abheraj Baldota Foundation had seen these saris and was impressed. She had kept in touch with the designer and urged that they should collaborate.
In 2017, she facilitated a meeting between Gaurang and The Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation in Bengaluru. “The Foundation showed us 100 oleographs and helped us choose some of his lesser known paintings. They were in three categories — women, Gods, and stories from mythology. We chose 54 paintings,” says Gaurang.
