Paithan today is a simple Taluka town in Aurangabad District. A quiet religious place on the northern banks of the river Godavari in Maharashtra.Gone are the days of palaces and kings, of Sanskrit pandits who held forth on the Vedas, of preachers and their religious discourses. Gone, too, are the days when Paithan was a prosperous trade center called Pratisthan and exported rich fabrics and precious stones to far of lands. Yet, something of the glorious past remains. Not handed down by kings and princes. Nor even by learned men. But by patient weavers working endlessly at their humble looms. A saree called Paithani. A poem in silk and gold.

          The Paithani derives its name from Paithan, the place where it has been produced for 2000 years. It is essentially a silk saree with an ornamented zari pallav and border. The motifs used are mostly traditional vines and flowers, shapes of fruits and stylized forms of birds and the saree is often known by the motif that dominates its border or pallav – Asavli (vine and flowers), Narli, Kuyri, Bangdi Mor (peacocks in the bangle) and so on.         

        A special feature of Paithani is that no mechanical means like the jacquard or Jala are used to produce the designs. Skilled weavers count the threads of the wrap for each part of the design and using tiny cloth pirns or “tillies”, interlock the silk or gold yarn on the weft with them. Even a 21/2-inch border might need 15 to 20 separate tillies depending on the nature of the design. And when the entire spread of the pallav is to be covered, there could be over 400 tillies arranged across the wrap to be used in turn. 

          The progress is slow; sometimes not more than half an inch in a 12-hour working day. It is as though the vine of the “ Asavli” motif were climbing slowly, almost imperceptibly, up the border like a living vine, putting out flowers every couple of inches till, having reached the trellis; it spread magnificently across the whole width of the pallav. 

           The price of such painstaking workman ship is bound to be high. It takes at least a month and a half to weave the simplest Paithani and from five to nine months to make the more elaborate (brocade) one.