The sari is the longest-lived garment still in daily use. Its earliest references are in the Vedic literature of roughly 1500 BCE, which describes an unstitched length of cotton, wrapped around the waist and draped over a shoulder. Terracotta figures from the Maurya and Sunga periods (c. 300 BCE) confirm the draping. It is probable that versions of the garment predate the written record by another thousand years.

What has changed, across that history, is not the sari but the body underneath.

The Mathematics of Drape

A standard modern sari is between five and nine yards long, and forty-eight inches wide. It is pleated at the waist — conventionally seven pleats — tucked into an underskirt, and passed over the left shoulder. The shoulder-drape, called the pallu, is the most expressive element, the piece traditionally most heavily embroidered and most frequently adjusted.

There are, by the count of the Mumbai textile historian Rta Kapur Chishti, 108 regional draping styles currently in use on the subcontinent. This count, she notes, excludes extinct styles and new ones invented by individual designers within the past forty years.

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A sari is unstitched but not unordered. The order is in the drape. — Rta Kapur Chishti

The Blouse, and Empire

The choli blouse worn beneath the sari is a recent imposition. Before the mid-19th century, most women on the subcontinent wore the sari directly over the skin or over a simple breast-band. The modern tailored blouse was introduced — and, at high-Victorian social functions, enforced — by the British Raj, which found the pre-colonial form of the garment unacceptable for official engagement.

This is the moment, arguably, at which the sari became a colonial object. The act of draping one now involves, unavoidably, negotiation with a 19th-century administrative intervention.

Contemporary Draping

The sari was, through most of the 20th century, a garment associated with older women. In the cities of the 1990s it began to return, as a specifically chosen garment rather than a default one — worn, often, by designers and their clients as a statement against the homogenising Western wardrobe.

The Sari Project, an archival initiative launched in Delhi in 2017, has collected over two thousand regional drapes on video. Many of these drapes, the project’s curators note, were learned, in the past fifteen years, by the granddaughters of women who had stopped wearing them.

The sari, in other words, is a garment whose survival depends on a deliberate re-acquisition. Which is to say — and this is unusual for any garment — that its future is not automatic. It must be, with each generation, chosen.