When Alankar House of Sarees first opened on what is now Manchester’s Curry Mile in 1977, its only neighbours were a grocer’s and the Indian-Pakistani restaurant Sanam. As the years went by the shop was joined by scores of rivals, competing for custom from the area’s growing south Asian community. Forty years later, as many young British Asians are turning away from the sari as an everyday form of dress, the business is one of the area’s few surviving traditional sari shops.
Sitting in the store, surrounded by piles of intricately embroidered fabrics, 34-year-old Poonam Modha says she had never planned to dedicate her life to the family business. She is the granddaughter of Gokuldas Modha, who founded the shop after arriving in Britain from Tanzania. “When I was growing up my mum and dad used to bring me to work during the holidays when all I wanted to do was play,” she says. “But as I grew up and got into my late teens I fell in love with the clothes.”
The Manchester shop, and the family’s store in Leicester, provide the settings for Handlooms, a new play by writer Rani Moorthy and her company Rasa Theatre, made in collaboration with Manchester’s Contact theatre. Handlooms seeks to explore the changing experiences of British south Asian communities, telling the story of a mother and son who disagree about how to deal with a crisis in their sari business.
Audiences in Manchester and Leicester will watch the performances in the shops themselves. Much of the performance will take place on the traditional raised, cushioned platform that shop workers stand on to demonstrate the fabrics to their mostly female customers, who sit drinking masala tea. Audience members will be given headphones so they can listen to interactions taking place out of sight, and hear a specially compiled score.
“People will think it’s a gimmick, because site-specific [theatre] is the thing now,” says Moorthy. “But really it’s completely germane to the themes of the play. When you enter the space immediately you are sensing this is slightly different. You can’t really recreate the smells and the sounds elsewhere.”
Moorthy says she became fascinated by how the intimate atmosphere of the shops saw gender divisions broken down. “I was very aware growing up that men sold the sari, dictated what we wore, designed the saris,” she says.
“I was also conscious of the language used when encountering female clients; sensuous, intimate, about the women’s body, the drape – the gestures – so contrary to the strict social rules we had between genders in the south Asian community. It took me a long time to understand this was something so unique – and that it was dying out.”
The play, directed by Alan Lane of the company Slung Low, depicts Rajesh, a 25-year-old man who loves to work in his family business. “Now ladies, I know you better than your husbands, at least when it comes to dressing you,” he says, speaking to the audience as if they were a group of older female customers. “When it comes to undressing you, I’ll leave that to them.”
Handlooms, Moorthy says, is in part about documenting and opening up a world under threat. “A lot of the sari shops are becoming more boutique style, looking aesthetically un-Indian and more westernised. I wanted people to experience that chaos of colour you encounter in these traditional shops.”
“In my memory there are about 20 sari shops on this road, but there aren’t any more,” she says. “You struggle to find one person walking around and doing her everyday chores in a sari, whereas when I first came here in 1996 there were women in saris everywhere, doing daily chores, doing shopping, going to the post office.”
Modha says that running the shop is in her “whole family’s blood”. Can she see a time when Alankar House of Sarees will close? She immediately shakes her head. “We will adapt and change and do whatever is needed. But we’ll definitely always continue.”
- Handlooms is at Alankar House of Sarees, Manchester, 12-24 March. Box office: 0161-274 0600. Then at Anokhi House of Sarees, Leicester, 10-22 April. Box office: 0116-242 3595.
