Attend a Carnatic concert this season, and you are most likely to find the hall replete with women draped in Kanjeevaram pattu. For someone from outside the city, it may almost seem like an unofficial dress code.
As an ode to this deep connection between music and silk, the Palam Silks team decided to come up with saris that feature the notes of the five most popular ragas.
If you have a favourite among Bhairavi, Kalyani, Todi, Sankarabharanam and Kambhoji, you can ask for a sari with the notes of that particular raga woven into the border, at any of the shop’s showrooms in the city. What’s more, going forward, you can even ask for a customised sari with a complete song on it. The idea came to Jeyasree Ravi, founder of Palam Silks, after she saw a woman wearing a sari with ‘Sa Pa Sa’ embroidered on it. She wanted to develop on the idea, and bring out a design based on the ragas, the spine of Carnatic music, and weave the ‘signature of music’ on silk. So, she approached renowned musician Sriram Parasuram, a friend of her father and music connoisseur Nalli Kuppuswami Chetty, in August 2016. “I learnt that Carnatic music is mostly written in one’s native language. The musical notations are a Western concept,” says Jeyasree. “That is mostly because we did not have the concept of reading from sheets of music; we followed the concept of oral tradition. However, there are various ways to notate music, and we have used the hole notes for this particular collection,” adds Sriram.
The arohanam and avarohanam of each raga is distinct. And these are represented through a series of holes on the borders of the saris. Each raga is associated with a sense of rasa, Sriram adds. “For example, if Kalyani were to be personified, it would take the form of a young, beautiful and intelligent woman; Bhairavi is associated with idealism; Sankarabharanam with tenderness, loyalty and care; Thodi with being imaginative; and Kambhoji with stridency. There are thousands of ragas, but these five are like the primary colours. The other ragas are derived from these,” he says.
Sound of silk
Marking the launch of the collection at Amethyst, Royapettah, the background music accompanying the ramp walk by models included short music pieces in which the percussion was replaced with the sound of mallets and clappers of the loom. Sriram and team spent over two days recording the sounds at a weaving site, and, later, worked on the samples to create a rhythm.
