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Padma Shri awardee Sarat Kumar Patra has spent six decades pushing Odisha’s ikat weaving tradition to its limits, most spectacularly by weaving a 52 metre textile carrying all 900 verses of epic poetry. His work draws on a documented palette of more than fifty natural dye shades, and ranges from richly decorative scrolls to sarees, dhotis, and scarves that travel from local households to the sanctum of temples.
In Odisha, ikat weaving begins long before a single thread is set on the loom. The weaver first holds the design in their mind, then ties, dyes, and arranges the yarn in advance so the pattern emerges only in the act of weaving. Each knot, each colour decision, is carried forward into the finished cloth, and even a slight misalignment can blur the intended image.
In the cluster of villages around Maniabandha and Nuapatna near Cuttack, around 2,000 households still practise this demanding ikat craft. Master weaver Sarat Kumar Patra, recently honoured with the Padma Shri, has worked within this tradition for more than six decades.
Over the years, Patra has received several major honours for his ikat weaving, including the 1993 National Award from the Ministry of Textiles and the Sant Kabir Award in 2015. Some of his most striking pieces depict Gandhi, the Buddha, and the Dashavatara.
But his magnum opus undoubtedly is a colossal 52‑metre textile carrying all 900 verses of the epic poem 'Gita Govinda' in Odia script with illustrations. The Gita Govinda is a 12th‑century Sanskrit epic poem by Bhakti poet Jayadeva. From around the early eighteenth century, textiles bearing verses from the work were woven in the Cuttack region for ritual use and as part of the temple’s offerings.
Art historian Katherine Hacker in ‘Dressing Lord Jagannatha in Silk: Cloth, Clothes, and Status’ mentions that a royal decree by King Ramachandra Deva II in 1719 CE notes that the work to produce the Gita Govinda cloths would go to eight brother weavers in Nuapatna, who were paid by the Jagannatha temple at Puri in gifts.
Commissioned by Delhi’s Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, this particular roll of textile took Patra a laborious seven years of hard, devoted work to create. He uses natural dyes from fungi, seeds, roots, bark, mud, and rusted stones. Over the years, he has documented more than fifty such natural shades. He has also trained more than a hundred weavers from nearby villages, focusing especially on training underprivileged students so the craft can offer livelihoods.
Patra also produces sarees, dress materials, dhotis, and scarves in cotton and silk, which find buyers across India, and some pieces are used as offerings in the sanctum of the Puri Jagannath Temple.
Despite the recognition, the future of this craft is not certain. High raw‑material costs, a very limited export market, and reduced demand due to cheaper power‑loom prints have caused a decline over the years. The long production times are also a factor. It takes two to three days to weave simple sarees and up to a year for complex pieces.
His upcoming projects involve weaving a sari with verses by Bhima Bhoi, a 19th‑century Odia poet and social reformer. Speaking to ETV Bharat, he calls for schools, museums, and documentation centres, and wants the art to “reach the world” and survive beyond him.
