M. V. Dhurandhar's Textiles: Weaving a cross-border legacy

The States Reorganisation Act of 1956 imposed a linguistic boundary across a textile continuum that had existed for centuries between present-day Maharashtra and Karnataka, dividing the historically interconnected weaving region of Ilkal. M. V. Dhurandhar, however, belonged to an earlier generation. Working decades before this political demarcation, he would not have understood the region through the lens of linguistic states.

A Textile Continuum

Born in Kolhapur in 1867 into a Pathare Prabhu family—one of Bombay's oldest and most educationally progressive communities—Dhurandhar grew up within a cultural landscape that extended across what would later become the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka. His early years in Kolhapur exposed him to the shared material culture of the Deccan, including textile traditions that circulated across the region. When he moved to Bombay to study under John Griffiths at the Sir J. J. School of Art, this familiarity with regional dress was overlaid by the conventions of European academic realism. Academic training did not replace these earlier visual references; rather, the two coexisted.

Throughout his career, Dhurandhar repeatedly depicted textiles such as the Ilkal sari, distinguished by its contrasting borders and pallu woven separately and joined through the characteristic tope teni technique; the Chandrakala, a lustrous black silk sari with coloured borders that was especially popular among Pathare Prabhu and other elite Bombay households; and the Navvari Paithani, the nine-yard drape associated with Maharashtrian ceremonial life, often woven in richly coloured silk with gold zari and elaborate peacock or floral motifs. Although these garments were rendered with the anatomical modelling, perspective, and naturalism of European academic painting, their forms, drapes, and cultural meanings were rooted in the textile traditions of western India that had long transcended the linguistic borders imposed after Independence.

Pathare Prabhu Lineage and Educational Advancement

The Pathare Prabhus are among the earliest recorded settlers of Bombay Island. Community accounts trace their migration from Patan and the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, through Devagiri (present-day Daulatabad), and finally to the Bombay archipelago, where they settled in the late thirteenth century under the ruler remembered as Raja Bimbdev. Dhurandhar's own branch of the family had, by the time of his birth, put down roots specifically in Kolhapur, one node within this wider network of Pathare Prabhu settlement across western India.

Under successive rulers of Bombay, first Gujarati, then Portuguese, then British, the Pathare Prabhus worked as clerks, revenue officers, and municipal administrators. This administrative role gave the community an early and sustained exposure to English-medium education. It also produced a domestic culture that supported female literacy earlier than most other communities in the region. This is the environment in which Dhurandhar's daughter, Ambika, would later train formally as a painter, at a time when very few women in India had access to institutional art education.

The women of Dhurandhar's community appear repeatedly in his domestic portraits, dressed in the nine-yard nauvari sari, draped in the kashta style, often patterned with peacock and butterfly motifs handed down through generations of weavers. Jewellery in these portraits follows a consistent set: broad kaap earrings, a mangalsutra anchored by a single gold bead, and a pearl nathni worn in the nose. On formal occasions, a shawl was added across the shoulder, marking both modesty and social standing within colonial Bombay's layered urban society.

Classical Drapery and Academic Realism

The transparent, body-revealing drapery that Dhurandhar employed in his figure studies belongs to a much older visual tradition in South Asian art rather than being a borrowing from European academic painting. While Gandhara sculpture adapted Hellenistic conventions of modelling the body through drapery, it was in the contemporaneous Mathura tradition and later Gupta sculpture that artists developed a distinctive idiom of diaphanous garments clinging to the figure. Yakṣī and śālabhañjikā figures from sites such as Bharhut and Sanchi, as well as later temple sculpture, often render thin textiles through lightly incised hems and contours that allow the body's form to remain visible beneath the cloth. Although art historians use the term draperie mouillée (‘wet drapery’) to describe a comparable convention in ancient Greek sculpture, the South Asian treatment emerged within its own artistic lineage and persisted for centuries as a distinctive sculptural and pictorial language. Dhurandhar's transparent drapery therefore resonates as much with these indigenous precedents as with the conventions of European academic realism.

At the Sir J. J. School of Art, Dhurandhar trained to achieve this same effect of transparency using oil paint, chiaroscuro, and academic life drawing. A photomechanical reproduction of one such painting, held in the DAG archive, shows a woman in Bombay wearing a sheer Chandrakala sari, its fine cotton weave marked with the small polka-dot motif that gives the textile its name. The academic training gave Dhurandhar the technical means to model the body beneath the drape; the subject itself, an ordinary sari worn in an everyday Bombay setting, kept the image grounded in observed life rather than studio invention.

A later oil painting, Women Dressed at a Wedding (1943), records a shift in draping habits that had taken hold by the final years of Dhurandhar's career. Some women in the composition still wear the full nine-yard nauvari; others wear the shorter six-yard sari that was becoming more common among younger, urban women. Dhurandhar painted the two side by side, without comment, simply as the dress of the period he observed.

M. V. Dhurandhar, Women Dressed at a Wedding, Oil on canvas, 1943. Collection: DAG Archives

When in Bombay

Dhurandhar’s When in Bombay (1920) is a composite study in ink, gouache, and watercolour, functioning as a visual record of the port city's population. Bombay by 1920 drew migrants from across the subcontinent: Gujarati and Marwari merchants, Konkani and Goan Christians, Parsi traders, and labourers from the Deccan interior, all part of a single urban economy built by colonial trade. Dhurandhar recorded this population not by name but by dress.

On the recto, an older Christian man from Andheri wears a Western tailored jacket over a traditional dhoti and carries a walking stick, combining both dress codes. Beside him, a fully modern gentleman appears in a fitted suit, boots, and flat cap, smoking a cigarette, dressed in a style that gives no indication of regional origin. Among the women on the same sheet, one walks barefoot with her sari wrapped plainly at the waist; another wears heeled shoes with her sari, a marker of the colonial fashion adopted by Bombay's settled elite; a third carries a water vessel on her head, her sari tucked up for physical labour. The verso of the sheet carries sketches made in Palitana, Gujarat, showing that Dhurandhar kept this same habit of recording dress and setting while travelling. Taken together, the sheet works as a record of religion, region, occupation, and class, made visible through the specific cut and drape of each figure's clothing.

Archiving Maharashtra: Life and Legacy

Dhurandhar's watercolours of Pandharpur document the annual Wari pilgrimage, during which Varkari devotees journey on foot from across Maharashtra—and from the Kannada-speaking districts of northern Karnataka—to the temple of Vithoba and Rakhumai. In Bhajan in the Temple of Shree Vithoba (1919) and The Glory of Pandharpur (1923), pilgrims clad in white gather in devotional song, keeping time with hand cymbals and the double-headed mridang drum. Rather than depicting the pilgrimage as a singular religious spectacle, Dhurandhar records its collective rhythms, preserving a tradition that has long transcended the linguistic boundaries formalised only decades later.

Elsewhere in his sketchbooks, Dhurandhar depicts women performing the fugdi, a traditional Maharashtrian folk dance in which partners clasp hands and whirl in circles, their saris tucked up to facilitate movement. His fluid watercolour technique conveys the centrifugal motion of the unstitched drapery while retaining the anatomical modelling and observational precision of his academic training.

The verso of the 1919 Bhajan sheet carries a coloured pencil sketch, inscribed by Dhurandhar as the work of his daughter, ‘Ambu’, aged eight. Ambika Dhurandhar went on to become one of the earliest women to complete the painting course at the school where her father taught, the Sir J. J. School of Art. She travelled with him across India and later to Europe, an arrangement made possible by the family's means and by the Pathare Prabhu community's comparatively progressive attitude toward women's education and professional achievement.

The linguistic boundary created in 1956 did not sever the cultural continuities that had long bound the Deccan together. Across both Maharashtra and northern Karnataka, the region's semi-arid climate fostered a shared culinary tradition centred on jowar bhakri—an unleavened sorghum flatbread accompanied by garlic and groundnut chutneys, seasonal vegetables, and thin, spice-inflected curries adapted to limited rainfall. The same continuity is evident in dress. The Ilkal sari, distinguished by its cotton body, silk pallu, and the traditional interlocking weave that joins the two, often finished with the characteristic red gomi border, continues to be woven and worn on both sides of a political boundary that did not exist in Dhurandhar's lifetime. Painted decades before linguistic reorganisation, his works preserve a regional visual culture that exceeded later state boundaries, recording patterns of dress and everyday life that remain recognisable across the Deccan today.