HOW TO WRAP A SARI AND WEAR IT

On our slacker tour of India, we stopped in New Delhi and found ourselves in one of the more fashionable shops for buying Sari's. Clothing designer and shop owner Mayanka Gupta was kind enought to show us how to wrap and wear a Sari. Thanks Mayanka!

A sari or shari,[note 1] is an Indian female garment[1] that consists of drape varying from two to nine yards in length and two to four feet in breadth that is typically wrapped around the waist, with one end draped over the shoulder, baring the midriff.

The sari is usually worn over a petticoat (called lahaṅgā or lehenga in the north; langa in Kannada, pavada, or pavadai Tamil, langa in Telugu; chaniyo, parkar, ghaghra, or ghagaro in the west; and shaya in eastern India), with a fitted upper garment commonly called a blouse or a choli or ravika. The blouse has short sleeves and is usually cropped at the midriff. The sari is associated with grace and is widely regarded as a symbol of Indian culture and Bangladeshi culture

The word sari is derived from Sanskrit शाटी śāṭī[8] which means 'strip of cloth'[9] and शाडी śāḍī or साडी sāḍī in Prakrit, and which was corrupted to sāṛī in Hindi. The word 'Sattika' is mentioned as describing women's attire in ancient India in Buddhist Jain literature called Jatakas. This could be equivalent to modern day 'Sari'.

In the history of Indian clothing the sari is traced back to the Indus Valley Civilisation, which flourished during 2800--1800 BC around the western part of the Indian subcontinent. The earliest known depiction of the sari in the Indian subcontinent is the statue of an Indus Valley priest wearing a drape.

Ancient Tamil poetry, such as the Silappadhikaram and the Sanskrit work, Kadambari by Banabhatta, describes women in exquisite drapery or sari. The ancient stone inscription from Gangaikonda Cholapuram in old Tamil scripts has a reference to hand weaving.[ In ancient Indian tradition and the Natya Shastra (an ancient Indian treatise describing ancient dance and costumes), the navel of the Supreme Being is considered to be the source of life and creativity, hence the midriff is to be left bare by the sari.

Sculptures from the Gandhara, Mathura and Gupta schools (1st--6th century AD) show goddesses and dancers wearing what appears to be a dhoti wrap, in the "fishtail" version which covers the legs loosely and then flows into a long, decorative drape in front of the legs. No bodices are shown.

Other sources say that everyday costume consisted of a dhoti or lungi (sarong), combined with a breast band called 'Kurpasika' or 'Stanapatta' and occasionally a wrap called 'Uttariya' that could at times be used to cover the upper body or head. The two-piece Kerala mundum neryathum (mundu, a dhoti or sarong, neryath, a shawl, in Malayalam) is a survival of ancient Indian clothing styles. The one-piece sari is a modern innovation, created by combining the two pieces of the mundum neryathum.

It is generally accepted that wrapped sari-like garments for lower body and sometimes shawls or scarf like garment called 'uttariya' for upper body, have been worn by Indian women for a long time, and that they have been worn in their current form for hundreds of years. In ancient couture the lower garment was called 'nivi' or 'nivi bandha', while the upper body was mostly left bare. The works of Kalidasa mentions 'Kurpasika' a form of tight fitting breast band that simply covered the breasts. It was also sometimes referred to as 'Uttarasanga' or 'Stanapatta'.[