Went down a rabbit hole of sorts, thinking about lungis, the sarongs worn in Pakistan, now largely by ancient farmworkers, at least in the urban imagination. There must have once been a whole spectrum of them, as they were handwoven. Each region with its own patterns? In Jhang I hear the weave could you tell you the sect a person belonged to, a form of lungi identification, very useful in pogroms I daresay. I asked my grandmother who, even in her failing condition, often surprises me, what she remembers from her childhood. Her own childhood was in Calcutta where her father was an industrialist (and they had a private train carriage to take them to Simla and Darjeeling, something mentioned quite by the by). Regarding lungis, in her family village (not quite her ancestral village, as that was cleared by the British to make an airbase) the women wore silk in bright colours, with a particularly fashionable and admired aunt wearing a bright blue lungi with a green shirt and a red dupatta. Not at all the standard picture one has of rural Punjab, but then this wasn’t really a representative family. On the other hand, this might well have been common in that region as there were historic ties to Balkh and Bukhara from where there was a constant flow of Silk Road fabrics, indeed my great-great-grandfather was a Bukhara trader descended (apparently) from a fleeing soldier in Ibrahim Lodhi’s defeated army.
I ordered a lungi from Multan, not silk, but a traditional style.