Bengal Saree Artisan Goes From Making Rs 2.5 Per Day to Running a Rs 50 Cr Venture
Biren Kumar Basak from West Bengal remembers the days when he earned Rs 2.5 to now establishing a Rs 50-crore venture, employing 5,000 artisans. His sarees have won several awards including Padma Shri.
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As I congratulate India’s fourth-highest civilian award, the Padma Shri winner, for his exceptional contribution towards bringing global fame to the traditional art of Jamdani and Tangail sarees, a humble voice replies, ‘Thank you’. The 70-year-old weaver, Biren Kumar Basak, from West Bengal’s Phulia village is soft-spoken, and just like the Jamdani prints he weaves, he is humble and occasionally explodes with vibrancy.
Kasturi Gupta Menon speaks about Kamala with a quiet maternal pride. She is conducting a tour of the landmark handloom and handicrafts store in the city that she has been looking after since 2010. The store is only one large L-shaped room at the ICCR building in Ho Chi Minh Street, but the tour takes long, because Menon stops at every shelf, every display, and describes every handpicked sari and object in detail, and every description ends in a story.
The Bengal taant saris alone come in at least three varieties: Phulia (for Tangail) and Shantipur in Nadia and Begampur in Hooghly. Some customers will drop in only for the Barmer curtains with their delicate applique work of white on white, which also hang in the store, illuminating the glass front.