✴︎ now this

Weaves of Resilience is inspired by multiple women who came before me, and whose resilience I carry on my shoulders when I carry their beautiful saris. 

In North India, women often assemble a trousseau when they get married. I was also encouraged to build a traditional trousseau, to bring along when it came time for my wedding. As a feminist and a minimalist, this did not sit right with me – I could not justify this morally, monetarily or emotionally. 

However, I also love saris. I always have – I was the little girl who draped my mother’s dupattas on myself and played house with my dolls. 

So instead of buying anything new, I asked every influential woman in my life – my mother, grandmothers, aunts and some friends, to give me a sari they had owned, worn and cherished. I wanted to build this special part of my wardrobe with their stories.

Today, most of them wear saris only on special occasions, but almost all of them were married into families at a time when wearing a sari everyday was the default, regardless of comfort or choice. Yet each of these women stood up for themselves in their own ways and created a world where my siblings and cousins could choose what we wanted to do with our lives, how and where we wanted to live, who we wanted to partner with, and how we wanted to dress. 

I know that millions of women in India still do not have the choice to dress the way they want to. They definitely do not have access to all the choices and privileges that I have. So it only makes sense to me to always continue fighting for their rights – because no one is free until all of us are free. 

At the same time, I have also learned not to associate my own saris with oppression. Instead, I associate them with the courage of the women who came before me, whose strength and wisdom I have leaned on more than I can remember or ever hope to give back. I associate them with the hard won freedoms they fought for, so that I could be who I wanted to be. 

Inspired by some of these beautiful saris, woven from across decades, from different fabrics and handloom traditions of different parts of India, comes this triptych. The colors of the canvases are meant to be as brilliant and full of life as the women who have inspired it, with the gold flecks and borders representing designs, patterns and adornments often found in saris of the subcontinent. I also use gold acrylic generously in my paintings, and naturally gravitated to it for this collection as well.