J. Nagaraju, a master weaver-turned designer from the remote Dharmavaram town of Andhra Pradesh, has painstakingly woven a huge silk saree measuring 180 feet in length and weighing 16 kg to be presented to the ready-to-be consecrated Ram Lalla temple in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.
Brought under the ambit of Geographical Indications (GI) registry, Dharmavaram is famous for handloom silk and cotton sarees having rich ‘zari’ borders and sporting rich floral motifs, drawing inspiration from carvings found on the walls of the historical Lepakshi temple.
Story of Ramayana
The story of Ramayana is narrated in the form of 400 images running along the border on both sides. “Right from Valmiki getting down to pen the epic and king Dasaratha performing the ‘Putra Kameshti Yagam’ till the rescue of Sita from Lanka, the flow of images tells the story to the viewers”, Mr. Nagaraju told The Hindu.
Another interesting feature of the saree is the words ‘Jai Shriram’ woven all over the body, hundreds of times in thirteen languages such as Telugu, Tamil, Hindi, English, Malayalam, Kannada, Urdu, Assamese and even in Sinhalese, spoken in Sri Lanka.
A divine gift
Nagaraju contemplated to offer a ‘divine gift’ to the temple that suited his profession. “As a weaver, I wanted to contribute to the temple the moment the Supreme Court (SC) gave its verdict. I developed this idea after a lot of brainstorming with the elders of my weaver community”. The master weaver learnt new designs at the Bengaluru-based Central Silk Board (CSB) and also got trained at the Weaver Service Centres (WSC) in Hyderabad and Vijayawada.
His pre-weaving homework, including graph-setting of letters, downloading suitable fonts from the internet and sequencing the mythological episodes, took him nearly three months, while the actual weaving part consumed four more months. Materials like cotton, silk, linen, banana yarn and silicon have gone into the making of the grand saree, while the use of gold, silver, copper, pink and saffron coloured zari added exuberance to the finished product.
“I want the saree to be adorned to the deity of Goddess Sita, but the temple authorities are free to choose the purpose,” adds the weaver. In view of the heavy rush anticipated for the ‘Pran Prathista’ event slated for Jan 22, Nagaraju has been advised to personally visit the shrine ‘a little later’ to present the saree.
