Desh · Deccan Inland Plateau
Desh's dress is a plateau dress — draped, unstitched, and cut for walking and for work in a dry heat. The region's two documented dress crafts are a headwear and a footwear rather than a weave: the Puneri Pagadi, a Peshwa-era turban shape now worn ceremonially, and the Kolhapuri chappal, a vegetable-tanned leather sandal made with no nails or synthetic thread. The great Maharashtrian silk, the Paithani, is not from here — it is woven at Paithan on the Godavari, in Marathwada, and is bought here rather than made here.
What is worn
A nine-yard saree draped without a petticoat, with the central pleats passed between the legs and tucked at the back (the kasota or sakachcha drape), producing a trouser-like garment that allows squatting, field work and riding. It survives in daily wear mainly among older rural women and among Varkari women on the wari.
Worn for: Ritual, festival, and formerly everyday
A white cotton dhoti with a shoulder cloth. On the wari the uparne doubles as a sweat cloth, a head covering against sun and a bundle for carrying, which is why walking pilgrims still wear one.
Worn for: Everyday and ritual
A long unstitched cloth tied fresh each time, in saffron, red or gold. Its tying style shifts by district, and the Kolhapuri and Puneri ties are told apart by the angle of the tail.
Worn for: Weddings, festivals, political occasions
A stiff, ridged, pre-formed turban that developed in the Peshwa administration and became the standard marker of Pune's professional and literary class in the nineteenth century. It is now conferred as an honour rather than worn daily.
Worn for: Ceremonial and civic honour
White dhoti or saree, a Gandhi-style cap or pheta, tulsi beads at the neck and a bukka mark on the forehead. It is deliberately plain and deliberately uniform, and it makes a dindi of two hundred people legible as one unit on a road.
Worn for: The wari
Weaves and textiles
Registered as a geographical indication in 2009–10 — unusually, a headwear registered as a craft rather than a cloth. The shape is built over a form from a single length of fabric and holds itself without pins.
The heavy cotton-silk blouse fabric with a hard border, cut for the choli worn under a nauvari. It is woven at Ilkal and Guledgudda across the Karnataka line and consumed here, which is the ordinary condition of textiles on this border — the loom is on one side, the wearer on the other.
A coarse black blanket woven from Deccani sheep wool on a pit loom by Dhangar shepherd households, water resistant, used as bedding, raincoat and floor. Its wool is too coarse for the fashion market, which has kept it a working object rather than a craft revival.
Both registered as geographical indications in 2004–05. They belong to the Solapur belt on the boundary between this region, Marathwada and north Karnataka, and were built by Telugu-speaking Padmashali weaver migrants — a cluster that reads across the line rather than into Desh.
Jewellery
Traditional dress of Desh — garments, handloom weaves, GI-tagged textiles and jewellery. (9)