It’s my first memory. I’m watching my mother put on her sari in her old bedroom in Southall. It’s 1969 and I’m two years old. It’s early evening, all dark browns and blacks in my mind, like a sepia-tinted film. I remember the long white petticoat, tied at her waist with string, her figure defined by a dim light from the hallway. She starts wrapping her body in the lengths of material, quickly tucking the first layer into the petticoat. Part of the sari is still lying in a heap on the floor, before she transforms it magically with her hands into an outfit that fully envelops her.
This is the primal image I carry around with me – of my mother, her body and her sari, imprinted for ever in my consciousness. But my memory always behaves strangely – often I feel as though I’m both part of the scene and an outsider, looking in. It seems to reflect my conflicted feelings towards the sari itself. The sari is an essential part of my maternal heritage yet, at times, I view it with the eyes of an outsider. My emotionally charged relationship with the sari is deeply symbolic of how I feel about myself as a British Bengali woman and how this country feels about us as Indian immigrants.
In a sense, this simple strip of material carries a whole fantasy world in my imagination, the lost idyll of my mother’s Bengali childhood. The lives of my female ancestors and timeless Hindu traditions are woven through its threads and pleats, part of an unreal past I’ll never know. All I have are fragments and stories.
I have an image of my mother as a little girl. It’s February 1954 in West Bengal in India. She and her three sisters can’t wait, they’re going to wear saris for the first time, for Saraswati Puja – the festival for the goddess of learning. They are in their garden – acres of jungle and ponds. Bright sunlight pours through the trees as the sisters scoop up jasmine flowers on the ground like treasure, and throw them into a brass pot. Later, they’ll crush the powdery orange stamens into a paste with their hands to dye their new white cotton saris a vivid, sacred yellow. On the day itself, the whole town celebrated. I imagine a riot of yellow saris on the streets – marigolds and chrysanthemums garlanded around the goddess Saraswati, the materiality of the sari fused with the divine.
For my mother and her sisters, saris were a sign of womanhood and they were desperate to wear them. In post-independence India, they were also a sign of strength: female freedom fighters had proudly worn indigenous cotton saris as a symbol of resistance against the British. In 1957, the film Mother India represented the heroic birth of the new nation through the iconic image of a sari-clad woman.
Over the years, I’ve pored through family albums from the late 1960s, when my parents arrived in this country. In the photos, my mother is always wearing a sari. Standing on a drab London pavement, in a sari down to her feet with a cardigan over the top, posing next to a car; with me as a toddler, outside our house in Southall. But these images, like those fragments of stories from India, can seem as if they are part of an unreal world.
For this is not the mother I saw with my own eyes as I grew up. By the 1970s, she had abandoned wearing a sari in the outside world. She had been racially abused when wearing one and had switched to wearing trousers at work after she realised she wouldn’t be taken seriously in her job as a chemist. She told me how she had felt deeply uncomfortable about it at first, how it had made her feel “almost naked”, but her work was important to her, and she was determined to get on. Out on the streets, for my mother and many Indian Bengali women, the sari disappeared from public view.
But inside was a different world, an alternative reality. Dressed in silk or chiffon saris, our mothers cast a spell over our drab 1970s living rooms, over the TV sets in the corner, the faded brown carpets. As they moved through these interiors at family parties, saris swishing, laughing, chatting, bringing out trays of fish cutlets, they transformed these spaces in a way that went to the core of our psyches. The garment was a deep psychological connection – to the people they had once been in India, to their authentic selves. And we, as their children, felt at home in a way we never could among the English.
I remember the most spectacular of these transformations happening every October, at our main religious festival, Durga Puja, held in the town hall in London’s Belsize Park. My mother would have taken out all her saris at home, laid them out on her bed and chosen her favourite. She loved her black Baluchari sari – handmade by Bengali weavers through an ancient process, intricately embroidered with scenes from the Ramayana.
I used to find the walk from our parked car to the town hall embarrassing, my mum’s sari and coat, her open-toed sandals, looking out of place on the rain-slicked pavements. But once through the doors, we’d enter another realm. Hundreds of Bengalis were there from all over London. And as soon the women got into the warmth, they’d take off their ugly cardigans, the anoraks, dazzling in their gold-threaded silk saris, tight-sleeved blouses, midriffs exposed, dripping with glittering gold jewellery, that they only got a chance to wear during these five days of celebrations.
By the time I was a teenager, I wasn’t interested in the sari. I’d grown up terrified of being attacked – physically – for looking different. In west London, where I lived, racial abuse and street violence were common. My reaction was to be as British as possible. By 16, I was a punk, wearing skull and cross bones dungarees, or a vintage black lace slip, tattered vest and holey tights. In an act of desecration, I even took a black sari blouse of my mother’s and tore it into strips, tied around my bleached jeans. Part of me also wanted to shock the sari wearers of Belsize Park, who seemed to my simplistic teenage mind too conservative, too willing to accept the restrictions of a patriarchal Bengali community.
My adult life has been spent dressed like my white British friends, in jeans and tops and dresses. I worked in the media in the 1990s and 2000s, where the idea of turning up to work in a sari was unthinkable – it certainly wouldn’t have enhanced my job prospects with the white, mainly Oxbridge-educated powers that be. Occasionally, I’d wear a sari at Bengali gatherings, but I was out of practice and found it cumbersome. I felt the sari slipping away from me altogether – an archaic piece of material from my past.
But many years on, things are changing again. My mother is in her 80s and recently we had to clear the semi-detached house where she’d lived for 40 years, to move her and my father into a much smaller flat near me. There were countless saris, tucked away in those drawers, saris I’d seen her in at Durga Puja, at a family gathering at Christmas, a blue chiffon sari she used to wear in India. We sorted them and she gave the best ones to me – she says she has no need for them. She and my father say they’re too old to go to Durga Puja now. As I took the saris away in a suitcase, I felt impossibly sad, almost as if the grownup who had always looked after me was disappearing, as if an image of motherhood that was imprinted in my mind had dissolved.
I spoke to my cousin, Mousumi, about it. She immediately understood the importance of the sari – how much, after all, they matter. She too now has her mother’s collection. Her mother – my aunt – recently moved into a care home and has nowhere to wear them either. We decided they are something we want to hold on to, before they slip away for ever. We promise each other to wear the saris we’ve been handed down. I find a local Bangladeshi tailor in Hackney and he makes us new blouses. We’re ready to go.
Then a family wedding comes up, and we decide it’s time to wear them. It’s quite an effort, there are all the parts that go with it – the gold jewellery, the petticoats, the safety pins to keep it in place, the flat sandals that have to look Indian enough and yet be comfortable to walk in, the teep (bindi) for the forehead. But it’s worth it, it feels right. It feels as if we’ve grasped the sari tradition just before it’s too late. Fleeting memories return as I drape the fabric around me: my mother putting on her sari in a dimly lit room; the rustle of silk at suburban family gatherings and the thought of how its folds and threads, the reams of intricate embroidery, all connect me, in a fragile way, to the lost world of my Indian ancestors.
What’s in a Name? by Sheela Banerjee is published by Hodder, £18.99. Buy it for £16.71 at guardianbookshop.com
