A vast expanse of fabric, dark as the night sky, with small circles shining through. That was how I looked at my grandmother’s traditional sungudi , a lovely coffee-brown with a mustard border and dots in the same colour. Years later, I chance upon it again, in the city. But, why would sungudi , which has the word Madurai prefixed to it, find a place in this column? There’s a reason. For, you can find here authentic sungudi saris, hand-knotted the way they once were, instead of being printed.
The colour schemes are as old-world as they can get — turmeric yellow, mango yellow-orange, brinjal purple, bachelor button ( vaadamalli ) magenta, and ghee -like beige. At Kamala, the store of Crafts Council of India, you find a rich variety of these saris, revived in the city of their birth. These are priced from ₹2,200 to ₹4,000. Certain niche stores in Chennai are also said to stock them.
It is said that the dots on the fabric are inspired by cosmic stars and the kolam drawn in front of homes, and the knotting pattern is drawn from real life — it replicates the knots that women use to tie up their hair.
Traditional sungudi uses two techniques — tie resist ( pulli katradhu ) and clamp resist ( katta katradhu ). Through these techniques, artisans dye chosen parts of a fabric, while leaving the rest untouched.
And then, somewhere along the way, this technique, which is time and cost-consuming, lost to inexpensive versions. It was in 2009 that CCI and World Crafts Council, led by Usha Krishna, took up Project Sungudi. They went armed with swatches of traditional sungudi and worked with the handful of artisans still familiar with the technique.
The result of that intervention, and the workshops led by artisans Saroja and Mahalakshmi that followed, is what you see at Kamala.
A young designer Lisa Mathew worked with Dally Verghese of CCI to impart skills in preparing the cloth, transferring the designs, tying and then dyeing. And then, Tharagai, a group of 12 women led by Sridevi Suresh of Madurai, worked to keep the craft alive.
And that is why the Kolam collection is part of CCI’s Tamil Nadu Crafts Revival Programme.
Sudha Ravi, CCI executive committee member, says they now send designs to trained artisans in Madurai and Gandhigram, not necessarily those traditionally engaged in the craft, so that awareness and practice spreads. Hopefully, in some years, sungudi will be rejuvenated enough to claim its rightful space in the crafts space.
How it began
Weavers from Saurashtra (Patnulkarans or silk weavers) migrated to Madurai in the 16th Century, and were welcomed by the
local Nayak king. They gifted the local rulers a cotton fabric with a dotted pattern, ideal for the heat and dust of Madurai.