The Sartorial Is Political in “The New York Sari”

You’ll hear The New York Sari before you see it.

Anoushka Shankar’s sitar, Arooj Aftab’s voice, and Alice Coltrane’s harp spill into the hallway outside the one-room exhibition, on view at the New York Historical through April 26. Suchitra Mattai’s “she arose (from a pool of tears)” (2024), a Bharatnatyam dancer made from used and loved saris, greets visitors at the entrance. The small but mighty show serves as a primer on South Asian history in New York, framed conceptually and visually through the sari in all its infinite pleats, drapes, and patterns.

Co-curators Salonee Bhaman and Anna Danzinger Halperin, director of the Center for Women’s History at the museum, did not set out to craft a definitive history of a decidedly complex garment and community. “I knew going into working on this show that there was no singular story of the sari, and that there were particular things that a diaspora experience brings out of the garment,” Bhaman told Hyperallergic in an email. That self-awareness frames the exhibition not as an airtight artifact but as a site of living, breathing contemplation.

A scholar of social movements and founding member of the Asian American Feminist Collective, Bhaman first moved to the city from India to attend Columbia University. She recalls that professor Gayatri Spivak “frequently appeared in a sari while grading papers or meeting with students on campus,” a deliberate choice that reminded her of home and fueled her imagination as a historian.

“There is always a battle for self-definition within any diaspora,” Bhaman said. “In my experience, there’s a lot of asking, ‘Who are we to the outside world and to each other?’ It’s important to allow the full richness of that conversation to come through in a history exhibition.”

With pieces by artists like Chitra Ganesh and Shradha Kochhar mingling with saris, printed ephemera, videos, and other historical materials, the result is not a static archive; it’s an unfinished weave of South Asian life in New York City. The show reminds us that the garment is a living art form, an heirloom, a document, and a political statement in one. 

The sari’s traditional form makes relatively few appearances, which seems to be by design. We see the elegant sari worn by Shahana Hanif, the first Muslim and Bangladeshi woman to serve as a New York City councilmember, during her swearing-in ceremony in 2021, and a zerzet sari from Nepali-American organizer Narbada Chhetri. Nearby is an orange-and-red silk sari belonging to Malayali immigrant Dr. Lalitha Krishnan, whose son, Councilmember Shekar Krishnan, originated the idea for the exhibition over two years ago in dialogue with museum staff and journalist S. Mitra Kalita. All are framed in the context of the craft itself, practiced primarily by women whose labor goes chronically overlooked at best and exploited at worst.

These drapes converse with a display across the room on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the sari, a crucial component of the garment’s ongoing life that, like LGBTQ+ history in general, too often gets erased in South Asia and its diaspora. A remarkable double-sari owned by Brooklyn-based photographer and drag artist RuAfza, who joined two Ajrakh saris from Gujarat as a single garment and embellished it with sequins. A portrait from Indian-Canadian photographer Sunil Gupta’s groundbreaking series The New Pre-Raphaelites (2008) takes aim at the now-overturned British colonial law criminalizing homosexuality, replacing figures in paintings from the 19th-century English art movement with queer Indian people.

Retellings of South Asian American history too often gloss over the very real strains of conservatism in the diaspora or erase the meteoric rise of the global Hindu right. The sari itself is entangled in these movements, often wrongly characterized as a symbol of “Hindu identity.” In the 1970s and ’80s, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq discouraged Pakistani women from wearing saris due to their false association with Hinduism and the nation of India, prompting younger generations to reclaim the garment in recent years.

While some of the displays and wall texts include familiar flashpoints in South Asian American history, like the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the curatorial framework of saris as storytellers disrupts the many forms of oppression that fester in the diaspora — casteism, patriarchy, Islamophobia, homophobia — by pulling on a single common thread.

“We knew that there was no way we could capture the full breadth, the full multiplicity of what a sari means in the city,” Danzinger Halperin told Hyperallergic in an interview. “It was really important to us to have a call for participation as part of the exhibition.” That invitation to submit personal stories and photos through a Google Form — some of which appear in a slideshow in the exhibition — reflects the project’s animating force.

Among these community-sourced testimonies is one from Bangladeshi-American artist and organizer Sharmin Hossain, who said in an email to Hyperallergic that The New York Sari is a rare chance to see South Asian femmes celebrated as “protagonists.”

“The sari is woven into the history of Queens, where in that borough alone, we are more than 8% of the population,” Hossain said, adding that the show emphasizes the power of South Asian progressive organizing in New York City. “Zohran [Mamdani]’s win was only possible because of the grassroots organizing led by organizations like Desis Rising Up and Moving and CAAAV.”

Mamdani’s historic win was indeed preceded by decades of advocacy, including by NY Taxi Workers Alliance Director Bhairavi Desai, captured donning a sari in front of Manhattan’s Haandi restaurant in a 2011 photograph by Martha Camarillo. Elsewhere, Philadelphia comic artist Shebani Rao narrates Indian activist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s 1939–41 visit to the United States in a series of panels, highlighting her efforts to connect the struggle against British colonialism with the Civil Rights movement. She was also an outspoken advocate for the scores of artisans across India, mostly women, who carry craft and textile traditions forward yet have few rights and protections, if any.

Ganesh, whose 2018 linocut series Sultana’s Dream unfurls a sci-fi epic across one wall, was struck by the way “interweaving archival materials with contemporary art refuses exoticism and nostalgia” across the exhibition.

“This incredible mix of queer archival materials like posters and drag performance … extends well beyond the sari itself,” Ganesh reflected.

Danziger Halperin recalled that the curatorial team originally inquired about Kochhar’s sculpture “I’m cocooning” (2021), but the artist wanted to make something new. “Rest/Release” (2025), the show’s gravitational center, is a “meditation on rest, refuge, and the quiet architectures migrants build for themselves,” as Kochhar described it in an email. The artist says she handspun and hand-knitted the piece using kala cotton, a strain endemic to India that declined after the British colonial market decimated local textile industries, to make “a vessel large enough to hold a body.”

Kochhar’s quietly defiant sculpture echoes the movement implied in Mattai’s, as well as footage of performances by the Nadanamandalam Collective (നാടനമന്ദലം). In a short film by Nikita Shah, drag artist LaWhore Vagistan dons a chest mold by Misha Japanwala and hypnotically intones, “The textiles perform with me. They move under the light. They tell their own story.”

“Having this work in a shared space feels like a small reclamation; a way of saying that our materials, our griefs, our joys, and our politics are here, and they will continue to take up space whether or not the world makes room for them,” Kochhar added.

Writer Christina Dhanuja, co-founder of Dalit History Month, contributed what she calls a “prophetic” portrait of herself wearing a sari and facing the expanse of the New York City skyline. 

“Perhaps I anticipated the condescension that would come my way, and the plain, pink saree symbolizing my resilience, even as I’d stand facing a city’s intimidation,” she said in an email to Hyperallergic, referencing the discrimination she faced as a Dalit woman in corporate America. Dhanuja has long been outspoken about casteism as “deeply alive” yet routinely erased and denied in South Asia and the diaspora.

“Caste, intertwined with class, is what shapes access to creative spaces. Which is why naming it is crucial,” Dhanuja continued. “It allows us to sit with the discomfort of South Asian histories being complex, and often complicated, struggles for equality, status, and self-determination.”

The New York Sari offers just that — one attempt to honor the complexity of a kaleidoscopic garment “without smoothing over the rough edges that are part of all honest history work,” Bhaman said.

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