The name before the silk

Long before anyone wove gold in this city, the world already knew its cloth by name. The early Buddhist texts — the Pali canon, the Jataka tales — speak of kasika vastra, the cloth of Kashi, as a byword for fineness; around the second century BCE the grammarian Patanjali ranked Kashi's cloth above Mathura's, the way one might rank wines. It is one of the oldest textile reputations on earth. And here is the detail most retellings skip, because the Journal's histories do not skip things: that ancient fame was cotton — gossamer, celebrated, almost certainly unwoven with metal. The city learned to be the best at cloth first. The silk came to a town that already had the patience.

The travellers' witness

Cloth woven with gold is as old as the Vedas — the hymns speak of golden drapes, hiranya drapi — but those verses name no city, and honest history resists the urge to hand them to Banaras retroactively. What the record does give us is appetite: by the eleventh century, chronicles of Mahmud of Ghazni's raids list Banaras textiles among the prized plunder — cloth worth carrying away across half a continent. And in 1583 the first English merchant-traveller to describe the city, Ralph Fitch, wrote down exactly what he saw: Banaras, "a great towne," with "great store of cloth… made there of cotton." No silk in the sentence. As late as the age of Akbar, a European eyewitness still found a cotton town — which makes what happened next more remarkable, not less.

The silk arrives

Scholars place the rise of silk brocade weaving in Banaras in roughly the seventeenth century, with some arguing for earlier roots in the Sultanate period, when Iranian craftsmen carried drawloom technique east. The trade tells a more romantic version — silk weavers walking from famine-struck Gujarat to settle by the Ganga — and we pass it on as the trade's telling, because the scholars who have looked for the paper trail call it a legend. What is certain is the design inheritance: through the Mughal workshops, the Persian vocabulary of flowering vines, hunting scenes and leaning blossoms entered Indian brocade — the very words our Motif Register still conjugates: the jangla, the shikargah, the kalga. Banaras did not invent these words. It became the city where they refused to die.

The exhibitions

By the nineteenth century the pupil had become the master. Banaras brocades travelled to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 — pieces bought there survive in the Victoria and Albert Museum to this day, including a kincob that carries its weaver's name woven into it in Persian. At the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, the official catalogue judged the kinkhabs of Banaras "the most effective of all the fabrics shown" — a jury's verdict, in writing, on a city's looms. The heaviest of those gold cloths, the kimkhab, has the next essay in this series to itself.

The living century

The twentieth century rebuilt the loom without retiring the weaver. Jacquard card machines reached the city's pit looms through the weavers of Alaipura in the early 1930s, translating the old naksha drawings into punched cards and multiplying what a single karigar could produce — while the powerloom, in the decades since, has pressed on the handloom from below, flooding the market with imitations the way another of our essays describes. The weavers answered in law: in 2007 the Banaras Bunkar Samiti and eight fellow organisations petitioned for protection, and on the fourth of September 2009, "Banaras Brocades and Sarees" received its Geographical Indication — six districts, one protected name, a legal seal on a living craft.

Which is the point of this whole history. Nothing in it is finished. The looms that answered Patanjali's compliment, Fitch's ledger and the 1886 jury are the same institution — repaired, re-threaded, taught to the next pair of hands — that wove the saree in your cupboard. The history is not behind a Banarasi. It is inside it, four inches a day.