How the Sari Came To Define New York

Lalitha Krishnan wore a sari on the plane from the south Indian state of Kerala to New York, where she was traveling to look for a job after her Ph.D. Krishnan would go on to do pioneering work developing pharmaceutical drugs that combat multi-drug resistant infections.

When Dr. Krishnan finally received an award for her work in 1991—as a rare woman of color in her field, often witnessing others take credit for her research—once again, she wore a sari.

34 years later, that dazzling yellow zari-lined silk is part of The New York Sari exhibit at the New York Historical Society. The initial idea for the exhibit came from journalist S. Mitra Kalita and Shekar Krishnan, who is Dr. Krishnan’s son and the first Indian American to be elected to New York’s City Council.

The sari, one of the oldest documented forms of garment, is a long, unstitched piece of fabric that’s traditionally five to nine yards long; its expanse holds the stories of female empowerment, political rebellion, and global movement. Historically, the stories of South Asian immigration are often dominated by male protagonists, and this exhibit hopes to spotlight South Asian stories from the perspective of women using the garment. As Councilman Krishnan tells Vogue, it is “a powerful symbol of the sacrifices of generations of South Asian women coming to this country and helping make our community what it is today.”

The sari, says Krishnan, is also a piece of clothing that can authentically tell the stories of women in the diaspora who traveled to new cities and places, like New York, where they remade their lives from scratch. The exhibition celebrates the many grandmothers and aunties Krishnan met on his campaign trails and keeps meeting in his constituency in Queens, who did just that. These are women, like his mother, for whom the sari is “a reminder of a home that is 10,000 miles away.”

“I wanted to make sure those stories were told,” Krishnan says, “and as the first Indian American ever elected to New York City government, I couldn't be prouder of what we have created together in New York as a community.”

“We’re always looking for ways to uncover women’s stories and history of women’s material experiences,” says Anna Danziger Halperin, the show’s co-curator and director of the Center for Women’s History at New York Historical Society. “We thought: what if we did that through a sari? How can we use this object that has so many different meanings to so many different people to really ask: ‘Who wears the sari?’”

Looking around a city home to 600,000 South Asians, the clear answer to that question was simple: “New Yorkers.”

The concept of the sari as a New York piece dates back further than the wave of South Asian immigration to the United States that took place in and after 1965. As the trade between the East and the West developed, so did a long-standing Western fascination with the East’s fabrics and patterns. In 1903, a grand recreation of the Delhi Durbar became an amusement park spectacle at Coney Island’s Luna Park—men and women, dressed in Indian fabrics, were viewed as objects of curiosity amid pathetic labor conditions. Over the decades, the Indian struggle for independence from the British inspired South Asians in the United States to start organizing. Spinning cotton became an act of resistance against the heavy duties levied on Indian fabrics by the British. Women, dressed in saris, led the charge.

Today, the sari has emerged even more as a tool for political organizing among diasporic South Asians in New York. As a gender neutral garment that was marketed largely as traditional wear for cis women in the homeland, the sari takes on a grand and queer persona in the city, with drag queens like New York’s RuAfza and LaWhore Vagistan incorporating saris into their looks. “Some of the most fabulous people to wear saris in New York are drag queens,” says co-curator Salonee Bhaman. A section of the exhibit is dedicated to South Asian queer history in the U.S., telling the story of the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association, whose members demanded to strut in their saris in the 1997 India Day Parade, and were denied.

“It felt important to give voice to some of these inter-community struggles,” Bhaman says, “and not pretend like there has not been struggle within the diaspora.”

A frilly grey sari and a bejeweled silver blouse on display speaks to the story of Shahana Hanif, the first Bangladeshi and Muslim woman elected to the New York City Council, who wore the garment when she was sworn in in 2022. Another photograph shows lawyer Chaumtoli Huq signing a settlement check wearing a sari. Beside her in the picture is her client Shamela Begum, a domestic worker who had accused her employer of labor law violations. The Center for Women’s History continues to collect these personal and political histories that highlight unwritten, undertold legacies woven into cloth.

The earliest instances of women wearing a sari can be traced back to the Indus Valley civilization. Across over 5,000 years, the sari has travelled, adapted, and lived many lives—but seems to have found a true home in New York, reimagined and reclaimed with each pleat and swirl, reshaping the city's history.

New York Sari is on view at a time when immigrants are being demonized and political crackdowns on migration continue to flex. As councilman Krishnan says: “If we don’t, in these moments, make sure that our stories and the literal fabric of our community ties in with the stories and fabric of other immigrant communities, we are really in danger of being erased from the history of this country.”

The New York Sari exhibit is on display at the New York Historical Society through April 26 2026.