The loom has been running for six hundred years
The weavers of Kanchipuram, a town about 75 kilometres southwest of Chennai, have been at this since at least the 15th century. The silk comes from Bangalore. The zari, real zari, in the traditional weave, is silver wire coated in gold, wound around a cotton or silk core, and woven into the border and pallu by hand on a pit loom that has not changed in its essential design for generations. A single saree of six yards can take anywhere from two weeks to six months to complete, depending on the complexity of the design. You are not buying a garment. You are buying the accumulated hours of a craft that requires a weaver to hold the pattern entirely in memory, because there is no machine setting to recall it.
