In the summer of 1929, one of India’s foremost female freedom fighters, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, traveled to Berlin with several other delegates to attend a conference of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship. India was still under British rule and, as a result, the Indian representatives at the gathering didn’t have a flag.
Kamaladevi, who today is better known by her mononym, saw this as deeply unjust. So she and her delegates cut up their saris to create their own flag to fly at the conference’s opening gala.
“No one grudged tearing up their fineries,” she said, according to a biography, “The Art of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and the Making of Modern India,” by Nico Slate, a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. “In fact, we felt free and liberated.”
In an instant, those women turned the sari into a political statement.
Among the oldest-known garments, but one that remains fashionable enough to be spotted on red carpets and runways, the six- to nine-yard draped fabric that constitutes a sari has long been more than just clothing: It has been a symbol of empowerment, of global trade, of diplomatic soft power and of resistance.
That is the idea at the center of an exhibition at the New York Historical, called New York Sari, which runs through April. The exhibition aims to shine a light on how the garment is woven into the complex histories of the Indian subcontinent and, in unexpected ways, New York City and the United States, and how it “might tell stories about migration and diaspora and struggle,” Salonee Bhaman, a historian and a curator of the exhibition, said while walking a gaggle of visitors through the show last week.
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