One afternoon in the village of Nuapatna in Odisha, a group of French textile enthusiasts gather inside a modest home where a loom has pride of place. The weaver is Sarat Kumar Patra, who, mid-weave, reaches for a battered wooden box resembling a spice dabba and opens it carefully. Stored inside are lac resin, jackfruit seed, sesame, bark and roots. “This,” he says simply, “is where colour begins.” Patra has spent most of his life in this quiet village lane, weaving textiles in a centuries-old handloom tradition. Though he was awarded the Padma Shri this year, his life still revolves around the loom just as it did long before awards or collectors took notice.
Patra most extraordinary creation, a 52-metre silk Geet Govinda Pata, carries all 900 shlokas of Jayadeva’s classical kavya, rendered in calligraphic ikat. It took seven years to complete and is considered among the most labour-intensive handloom works ever made by a single weaver. “In the Jagannath temple, the deity is usually adorned with clothes on which the Geet Govinda is woven,” he says. “But they usually write four line. I wove the entire poem on the cloth.”
Born in 1965 into a traditional weaving family in Hariharpurpatana, Tigiria, Patra learned the craft beside his father, Gopal. Nuapatna’s ikat tradition—part of Odisha’s Bandha kala dating back to the 12th century—survives largely because families like his refused to abandon it. Nearly 2,000 households in Nuapatna still practise the craft. There is no scope for corection in ikat. The threads are resist-dyed— a technique in which certain parts of a fabric are deliberately protected (or “resisted”) so they do not absorb dye, creating patterns or designs—before weaving, so that the patterns align precisely on the loom. Patra charted every syllable of Geet Govinda’s 900 verses before the weaving began. Patra rejects synthetic dyes, working instead with colours taken from tree bark, roots, mud, rusted stones, and fungi. His signature black alone takes nearly a month to develop. “We dye with what the earth gives us,” he says. Ask him how Nuapatna ikat differs from Pochampally. “Nuapatna mainly uses single ikat, where only the warp threads are dyed. This gives the weaver more control, making it possible to create letters, verses, and figurative motifs.” Double ikat are ill-suited to weaving words.
Nuapatna’s ikat legacy is uncertain. Two of Patra’s sons lives away from the loom. “I wanted them to have choices,” he says. Still, Patra teaches and mentors young weavers, determined that knowledge should not die with him. He is pragmatic—almost unsentimental—about art’s growing crossover with fashion. Asked whether artisans are benefiting, he answers without hesitation. “No, because the weaver still is at the mercy of too many factors, and the real artisans are struggling for sales and recognition.” Visibility, he suggests, hasn’t translated into security. The bigger problem is confusion: handloom and machine-made cloth are hard to tell apart. Here, time is the real currency. A dupatta takes him 10 days; a sari can be completed in 12 days or stretch into years depending on the complexity of the weave. At present, he is inscribing bandanas of the 19th-century Odia saint, poet, and social reformer Bhima Bhoi onto a sari.