Chennai unfurls its updated answer to north India’s ‘ghagra-choli’. Deepika Padukone gives it the thumbs up. With a broad zari border on a green dupatta, an orange silk blouse and a flowing yellow skirt, Deepika Padukone in a pavadai thavani, or half-sari, is almost a cliché in the role of village belle in Chennai Express, which releases on 8 August.
The humble half-sari, once the bridge outfit for girls too old to wear the traditional silk skirt without a dupatta but too young to graduate to a sari, has now been adopted by the Hindi film industry.
Padukone’s outfit is the introduction to her role as Meenamma, daughter of a village don in Tamil Nadu. “We studied street fashion in Chennai and tried to understand how the locals dress—that’s where the half-sari came in,” says designer Manish Malhotra, who has styled the actor for the film. Colourful silks, bright gold borders and flowing skirts—Padukone’s outfits match the shock of colours that director Rohit Shetty has used to paint his idea of south India. Though Malhotra has stuck with traditional gold borders for dupattas, he has deviated slightly by using netted fabric in one song sequence.
Tamil cinema has dressed heroines playing village girls in this outfit for decades. Worn by tucking one end of the dupatta into the skirt and draping the other end in the seedha palla style, the half-sari drape has also been spotted on the runway. From Sabyasachi Mukherjee (PCJ Delhi Couture Week 2012 and Lakmé Fashion Week Summer Resort 2013) to JJ Valaya (India Bridal Fashion Week 2012), there seems to be a growing urban interest in this outfit.
Lately, the skirt and dupatta pairing has been making a steady comeback into the wardrobes of young south Indian women as traditional wear. The most prominent comeback was first seen during Chennai’s famed Carnatic music season last year. Eager to level up to the diamond-studded, Kanjeevaram silk-clad seasoned senior artistes, young female musicians chose the half-sari to look traditional. “In December I noticed a lot of kids running around in pavadai thavanis in the music season,” says Aruna Subramaniam, a management consultant who is a regular during the Marghazhi, or the Chennai music season.
When 14-year-old Janani Iyer moved to Chennai three years ago to train and explore opportunities in Carnatic music, she was enamoured by the three-piece outfit. “I bought many for my performances during the Chennai music season,” says Iyer. “It’s a smaller version of a sari and makes you look taller,” says the young musician, who recently participated in the Tanishq Swarna Sangeetham, a music competition for which she put her four-five half-saris to use.
The pavadai thavani’s filmi resume in the north became noteworthy when in 2000, Chennai-based costume designer Nalini Sriram dressed Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in it for the song Kannamoochi Yenada in Suresh Menon’s Tamil film Kandukondain Kandukondain. It triggered a trend in Chennai’s Pondy Bazaar. Even then Bachchan’s otherwise traditional outfit had been given a twist: The thavani (dupatta) had a small border, a new concept for the textile which had for decades just matched a synthetic length of cloth worn like a sari. The market was flooded with “Aishwarya pavadai-thavani sets”—silk-cotton blends for the skirt and blouse and a nylon dupatta with a border for the thavani.
“City girls didn’t wear half-saris, they wore Western outfits and churidar-kurtas in our time,” laughs Sriram, who treated it with some scorn herself as a teenager in the 1980s. “But for the village look or urban-Brahmanical girl look, nothing establishes that milieu like the half-sari,” adds Sriram, who also dressed actor Shriya Saran in the half-sari in the 2007 film Sivaji: The Boss.
“The music scene has pumped up interest in the outfit. The pavadai thavani that stays in the background otherwise comes to the fore in very traditional events like music events and also during festivals like Deepavali and Navaratri,” says Mala Manyan, creative head of the Tanishq Swarna Sangeetham, the competition that Iyer took part in. Manyan dressed all her female contestants in the programme in especially designed half-saris. “Some we sourced from stores and some we had custom-made by picking saris,” she says.
“I see young girls wearing half-saris at weddings as well,” says Sriram, pointing out that the pavadai thavani has undergone a change. “It’s not the traditional silk pattu pavadai (silk skirt); they are now matching silk skirts with cholis and brocade blouses,” she says of the outfit that is seen most often at mehendi ceremonies, a north Indian import into south Indian weddings that had earlier brought the ghagra-choli to the south.
Chennai-based designer Chaitanya Rao says that though the outfit never really went away, it has made a significant comeback in the past year. “I had one bride asking me to design a half-sari for a wedding mehndi ceremony,” he recalls. While designers like Rao are being asked to design unique combinations, Subramaniam’s 25-year-old daughter creates her own version. “I’ve seen her in silk skirts, with zardozi-work cholis from the north and a dupatta worn the half-sari way,” she says.
Stores like Nalli Silks, RMKV and Pothy’s sell unstitched sets in everything from cotton (starting from Rs.1,100) to Kanjeevaram and Banarasi silks (starting from Rs.11,000). “It is now the cool thing. The choices are so many, I see girls looking confused,” says Niranth Nalli, vice-chairman, Nalli Silks Group.
Vinita Passary, who runs Anonym, an alternative fashion store in Hyderabad, notes that even when the traditional silk skirt is not worn, the seedha palla is certainly back. “I prefer to dress heroines in the half-sari over the regular sari because the silhouette makes them look very slim,” says costume designer Vasuki Bhaskar. She designs for Kannada and Tamil films and swears by pleated skirts with flat fronts to flatter silhouettes. “Now that Deepika Padukone is wearing it, there is no stopping the half-sari,” she says.
