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Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, filling in for Brian today. Now, we'll end today's show with a look at a new exhibit at The New York Historical that honors the history of South Asians in the five boroughs. The New York Sari: A Journey Through Tradition, Fashion, and Identity traces how the sari and those who wear it found a home in New York City. Once seen as a marker of distance and exoticism, the sari has become woven into the city's cultural fabric, embraced by new generations of artists, dancers, entrepreneurs, community leaders, scientists, and change-makers. Visitors to the exhibit will see more than 50 objects, photographs, ephemera, and, of course, saris.

Joining me now to preview The New York Sari is one of the co-curators, Salonee Bhaman, curatorial scholar at the Center of Women's History at The New York Historical, and S. Mitra Kalita, co-founder of URL Media and CEO and publisher of Epicenter NYC. Salonee and Mitra, welcome back to WNYC. Salonee, I was distracted by your Peace, Love, and Bryan Lehrer T-shirt there for a moment. It's so great to have you.

Salonee Bhaman: It's wonderful to be on. Thank you.

Brigid Bergin: Salonee, when we were thinking about New York City history and the people who have immigrated over the last few centuries, South Asians aren't always the first groups we think of. When did people from this region begin to make their home in New York City and under what circumstances?

Salonee Bhaman: Well, Brigid, I'm glad you asked. It's really interesting. The story that we often hear is that South Asians really come to the United States after 1965. It's true that that's when you have the largest waves of migration, in part because immigration laws change to enable it. As we were researching the show, some of the first South Asians and South Asian women at that we saw came in the late 1700s, in the 1790s, first as performers, later as entertainers who performed at Coney Island.

Many South Asian migrants came because they left ships that had docked on New York Harbor, and they just didn't go back. Some came as students. Others came as scientists. Many came to learn from African American activists about what they might take back for the Indian freedom struggle. The diversity of immigration stories we found was really astounding to all of us.

Brigid Bergin: Mitra, you wrote about your struggles putting on a sari. Why is it so difficult? What are the memories that come up for you?

1. Mitra Kalita: Oh, sure. Well, I feel a little sheepish confessing because this garment is something that my ancestors wore, my grandmother, my mother. They put it on seamlessly. Every morning, it just goes on in a matter of seconds. Here I am. That's not my reality. I don't wear it to work. I'm not wearing one now, but for our traditional functions. If we have a prayer service, or I was just at a bridal shower on Sunday, and I wore a sari, but my truth is that I find them as six yards of fabric, six to nine-long yards of fabric. I find them pretty difficult to maneuver, and yet I want to maintain this history of my family and our culture.

My secret is that I just find somebody to help me put it on. I'll get the thing around me. I'll walk in a very awkward fashion to whatever function or event I'm going to. I find a woman, usually, who will look at me and take pity on me. We run into the bathroom and they fix it. I think I wear more saris than most of my friends. That tactic has worked for me. I guess I've been wearing them for-- I'll be 50 next year, so more than 35. I started wearing these in high school for events and things that my family would take me to.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, we can take your calls on your sari memories. Can anyone listening relate to that painstaking process of dressing yourself? What is your workaround? Do you have a community who can help you dash into the bathroom? Maybe you wore sari to a specific occasion and represented your culture on a special day. Did you inherit a sari from a family member that you admired as a child? What do you call saris in your region's dialect? You can call or text us at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Salonee, Mitra was describing a little bit about what a sari looks like. For those who are completely unfamiliar, who don't know what we're talking about, what does a sari look like? What is the garment itself?

Salonee Bhaman: Sure, so it's usually six and a half yards of fabric. It can be up to nine yards of fabric made of any material. We have cotton saris, silk saris, brocade saris, and it's basically wrapped around the body. There are over 100 ways to wrap it. Part of the challenge of curating the show is even trying to represent what range of things people mean when they say, "I'm wearing a sari," or "This is what I think of in a sari." Traditionally, it's wrapped around your waist and then over a shoulder, either coming from the front or from the back. As Mitra will tell you, there are communities in the subcontinent that wear actually two pieces of fabric as a sari, too, so there's a range.

Brigid Bergin: How did this garment weave itself into New York City's cultural history?

Salonee Bhaman: Great question. Some of the first dancers that I mentioned were sari wearers. They actually came to perform at the intermission of an opera in the 1790s and faced quite a bit of racism, actually. Audiences were not ready for them. Those kind of performances were relegated to Coney Island. While those people were marginalized, the fabrics that made up the sari became incredibly popular among the well-to-do people of New York.

Being able to afford textiles or palampores from the East became a marker of luxury and participation in global empire. Many of the objects we actually had in our collection at The Historical were from that era. They belonged to wealthy New Yorkers and were unattached to South Asians. As you move on into the 20th century, you do have these snippets of the sari that pop up here and there. We found a picture of the activist, Agnes Smedley, wearing a sari because she had met some radicals in New York City who opened her mind up to the possibilities of socialism and resistance. She adopted the sari as one of her garments.

We tell a wonderful story of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, who is often thought of as the mother of Indian handicrafts and the handicrafts movement in a sari, traveling through New Deal era America to learn about how the Roosevelt administration had essentially lifted the US out of the Depression. She's actually stopped in the South and asked to move to the back of a bus because she's seen as a colored woman. It's her sari that actually stops them because there's a question. Maybe she's a foreign person. She actually says, "Treat me like you would anyone else. I'm actually from New York."

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Salonee Bhaman: It's a lie. She's not from New York, but it is this exercise of solidarity. The sari functions in this funny way. It is, at once, a marker of real difference. It's a striking garment, but it's also found its home here. We talked to a bunch of people who told us about how, when their parents first moved to the US, their moms would flag down anyone they saw on the street in a sari because they weren't used to it. They knew that that was someone they had to talk to. They would ask them, "Where can I find the right grocery store?" or, "Are there other Indians in Connecticut?" Stories like that well into the '80s.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. Mitra, you mentioned that you wore one to a bridal shower this weekend, but what would be some of the other occasions in your life where you might wear one?

1. Mitra Kalita: Well, this is my most active season for my sari closet because we are in-- I have a wedding next weekend. It's a dear friend actually of my father's who immigrated at the same time as him in the 1970s. The granddaughter. The third generation in America is getting married. I have six outfits. Five of them are saris that I'll be wearing and a mekhela sador, which is the Assamese two-piece that Salonee mentioned.

We have a Bengali and Assamese holiday, Durga Puja, which is a prayer ceremony. We wear them for that. I wear Bengali saris, which have a lot of peacocks and birds and humans on them. They're just adorned in other ways, different from other regions in India. Right now, I think we're in the middle of Navaratri. Salonee, check my--

Salonee Bhaman: It's the second day of Navaratri.

1. Mitra Kalita: Yes, it's the second day of a holiday. It's a nine-day festival. That would be one where a lot of New Yorkers who are listening might be getting their saris together. In our community, because we convene around our culture, so we're from the state of Assam, even American moments like a bridal shower, a baby shower, a birthday party, these are like American holidays and milestones, a 50th birthday party. We largely wear the outfits of where we're from to these events.

Brigid Bergin: I want to get some of our callers in who want to share their stories as well. Let's start with Rita in Somerset, New Jersey. Rita, you're on WNYC.

Rita: Hi, good morning. I just wanted to say, I came to the US when I was about 32. I was practicing as a doctor in India as a dentist. I remember wearing saris to work because your patients would not respect you if you didn't wear a sari. I used to wear and I found it effortless. After coming here, having been used to wearing other western-style dresses, I find it very hard to wear a sari to work. I wouldn't imagine it. It's hard.

The other thing I wanted to say is that I don't know if you're people have touched on it, but different parts of India, people have different kinds of saris. It's amazing the variety and the way people drape it in different parts. I come from the South. Usually, it's a nine-yard sari people wear traditionally. In parts of Maharashtra, they do the same thing. There's Karnataka, where people wear it in a different fashion. It's fascinating how the sari itself in different parts of India where people wear it different ways. It's just so mind-boggling when you think about the complexities of the whole thing.

Brigid Bergin: Rita, thank you for that. I want to sneak in one more caller before I have my guests react. Let's go to Rupam in Great Neck, Long Island.

Rupam: Hello?

Brigid Bergin: Hi. You're on WNYC.

Rupam: Namaste. I'm very happy that you are having a show and talking about sari, because when I wear sari and I'm walking outside on the streets of New York City, often people ask me, or I get the compliment, "Oh, it's so pretty. It's so nice." One thing very good about sari is that it can fit to anybody. You don't have to worry about fitting. You don't have to worry about sewing.

You just drape it. This is my identity. I'm from Bihar, from India. When I came here, I was 18 years old. In India, I didn't wear sari. Once or twice, but after marriage, I came here straight after 15 days of my marriage. Here, I started wearing sari more. [chuckles] One thing was that every time I wore a sari and I went to American events, and I got a lot of compliments, that has become my identity.

Brigid Bergin: Rupam, thank you so much for that call. I saw you both smiling and nodding to both of those callers. What are your reactions to what you heard there?

1. Mitra Kalita: Well, I just think the idea of wearing it after marriage is something that I was raised with. There's almost a progression of a woman's life, and the garment is a part of that. What I heard from both callers was kind of, "I put this on, and people respect me." I started wearing this after marriage. For a lot of the women who migrated, especially those I'm more familiar with in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they wore saris on the 20-hour-plus plane ride from India. That's, again, for me, not that comfortable, but that's a symbol of being married. Many of them, it's a transition. They're meeting their husbands in America. There's something about that transition from sari eventually into Western attire that I think is transition beyond clothing. It's one of adaptation as well.

Brigid Bergin: Sure.

Salonee Bhaman: What came up for me is so many of the stories we've heard have women who wear the saris on the plane, and then they land at JFK, and it's cold. The sari is sometimes not the garment for that. Many of my own experiences mirror these. I wore a sari to my senior prom, actually, and I remember it being this heavy, uncomfortable thing. Over the last 18 months, as we've been working on the show, I've been trying to wear the sari sometimes to work.

I was smiling because you do get stopped on the street, and people do want to talk to you about it. Something about wearing the garment. One, it does get easier, though I'm still not an expert. Two, I feel really connected to all of these other generations of women who've worn the sari and some of my own relatives who-- I found all these family photos of my great-aunt when she first came to the United States, where she's in Rhode Island in a sari, and then a heavy coat on top. It feels so, like you're saying, part of this adaptation.

Brigid Bergin: We have, of course, the smartest listeners. One listener texted in, "Mitra, you can get the pleats pre-sewn-"

1. Mitra Kalita: Yes, I know.

Brigid Bergin: "-on your saris, so they are easier to put on."

1. Mitra Kalita: I have tried this. It still doesn't do it as good as somebody who's just dressing me in that moment in whatever blouse- [crosstalk] There's nothing like someone adapting the garment to your body, but thank you for the-- The pre-pleats I have used for my daughters because just imagine, three women getting ready for all those events I just mentioned. It's a madhouse when we do that.

Brigid Bergin: We're going to sneak in one more caller. Very briefly. Malefa in Montclair, New Jersey, tell us your sari story for about 30 seconds.

Malasa: Oh, that's short time. Thanks so much for taking my call. My name is Malasa, which is an Indian name. Never correct, but I will say it because it's talking about Indian culture.

Brigid Bergin: Absolutely. Thank you.

Malasa: I'm South Indian and a first-generation, grew up here in New Jersey. I just want to talk about the diversity and the love-hate feeling of a first-generation kid of having cultural garments at a school function, or someone sees you on the street. It used to be such an embarrassing thing. I was actually going to talk about cultural diversity. Since there's so little time, I'm curious from the two guests because I had this experience, and many first-generation people do, of hiding their culture. Now, I struggle with cultural appropriation, whitewashing, and how I deal with that as a 40-year-old person who hid this thing that could create some racism or some judgment around the things that I was doing. Not necessarily only that, but my own personal fear of being different as a first-generation kid.

Brigid Bergin: Sorry, we had to cut you off there, Malasa. Thank you for the pronunciation. We are running out of time, so I'm going to let you give a quick pitch for the exhibit.

Salonee Bhaman: Absolutely, so the New York sari is now on view at The New York Historical until April 26th. Come see it.

Brigid Bergin: I want to thank you both. My guests were Salonee Bhaman and S. Mitra Kalita. We are talking about a new exhibit at New York Historical about the sari. Check it out. All Of It is next. Stay tuned.

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