From Draupadi’s endlessly extending sari in the Mahabharata—a moment that lays bare power and violation—to Indira Gandhi’s starched cottons enveloping authority, and Raveena Tandon’s iconic yellow chiffon in ‘Tip Tip Barsa Paani’, dripping with sensuality, the sari has clothed women across myth, politics and spectacle.
For most women, the relationship begins early: a dupatta from the mother’s wardrobe becomes a makeshift sari in childhood games, before giving way to bridal silks, daily cottons, and eventually a garment reserved for special occasions. Not a static tradition, the sari is a living archive of Indian womanhood.
It is this intimate, lifelong relationship that Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri explores in ‘The Sari Eternal: A Tribute’ (Aleph Book Company)—a deeply personal memoir by the former diplomat on six yards of cloth that have travelled with her across continents and careers.
‘The Sari Eternal’, Puri insists, is neither an academic text nor a coffee-table book. “I’ve looked at a sari not as a subject but as a companion,” she said at the launch of her book at the 2026 Jaipur Literature Festival, reflecting that she was “meant to write this book”.
“I’ve worked as a diplomat, lived in several countries, and in many ways, I’ve also been an ambassador of the sari,” she said.
The tridevi & the Ganga
Part of Aleph’s Eternal India series, ‘The Sari Eternal’ is structured across six chapters: Sari Love, The Sari Eternal, The Sacred and the Mundane, The Sari in Epics and Classical Literature, The Bollywood Effect and The Future of the Sari. While it is neither the first nor a definitive book on the garment, Puri deliberately steers clear of the academic route, focusing instead on the sari’s constancy across history, mythology and popular culture even as it continues to evolve.
Central to the book is the idea of the sari as a sacred form. Indian goddesses—Parvati, Lakshmi and Saraswati, the tridevi—are almost invariably depicted draped in temple saris, just as India’s rivers, from the Ganga to the Yamuna, are imagined as sari-clad goddesses. The imagery extends from Draupadi’s attempted disrobing in the Mahabharata to Abanindranath Tagore’s early 20th-century painting of Bharat Mata, where the nation itself is rendered as a sari-wearing woman.
Reading from the book, Puri underlined why unstitched cloth occupies such a central place in the Indian imagination. “In the Indian cultural and spiritual imagination, unstitched cloth has always been associated with sanctity, completeness and transcendence. Stitching was considered a profane, violent act that ruptured the spiritual wholeness and integrity of any fabric.”
During her session, Puri also spoke about the modern “sheroes”—from Indira Gandhi and Sucheta Kripalani to contemporary women politicians—who continue to choose the sari. Popular cinema, too, has long romanticised the garment, a relationship Puri explores in an entire chapter. Just think of the expanse: from Raveena Tandon’s rain-drenched yellow chiffon in ‘Tip Tip Barsa Paani’ to Sridevi’s iconic saris in the 1989 film ‘Chandni’.
Gen Zs and the six yards
Puri then talks about the relationship the Gen Zs share with the sari, and how in the metropolitan cities, people are moving away from it. “However, in smaller towns and villages, it’s still a garment of choice as much as a necessity.”
And finally, for whom the book is. “To all those women who have adapted the sari from a garment of necessity to a garment of choice,” she said. “Sari has stood the test of time.”
