A real handloom Banarasi has a particular hand-feel. Before you have registered the motif or the colour, your fingers register weight. A six-and-a-half-yard Katan silk weighs somewhere between 700 and 900 grams. If you lift one and it feels feather-light, you are holding a power-loom imitation — Katan-style polyester with viscose zari, finished to look the part.
Banarasi is a family of weaves, not a single one. Katan is the heritage line, woven from twisted mulberry silk threads. Kora is Katan that has not been degummed — stiffer, paler, lighter in the hand. Jamdani-Banarasi is the inlay tradition, where the motif is woven warp-by-warp into the body. Tissue Banarasi is the gold-bodied lightweight cousin, woven on a silk core with brocade thread. Every one of these has a real version and a power-loom version, and the test is the same.
Four things to look at.
The back of the pallu. A real handloom carries floats — the gold threads visible on the reverse, showing the path the weaver chose, with small irregularities that say a human hand was on this. A power-loom Banarasi shows clean, identical cuts on the back, because the machine cuts every excess thread to the same length. The reverse of a real Banarasi looks like it has a memory. The reverse of a power-loom one looks engineered.
The weight of the zari at the border. Real zari in a Banarasi is silver wire, coated in gold, wrapped around a silk core. Bend the border. Real zari has a particular springiness — it bends and recovers. The cheap imitation is a metallic film over polyester yarn. Bend that, and the colour cracks; you will see the white core showing through. That saree has six months in the cupboard before the gold starts to flake.
The selvedge. A real handloom Banarasi has a selvedge thick enough to feel between two fingers — the loom's natural finish, denser than the body. Power-loom Banarasis have a thin selvedge, sometimes barely distinguishable from the cloth around it. The selvedge is where the weave gets honest. If it disappears into the body, the rest is unreliable.
The dora. The small terminus where the gold thread is locked off. A handloom Banarasi has a visible, deliberate knot or tie. The power-loom version has a heat-sealed terminus — sometimes lacquered, sometimes melted flat. Once you have seen the difference, you cannot unsee it.
Power-looms exist for reasons. They keep families fed in towns where the looms have moved out. We are not against them. We do not sell them, because the customer who pays handloom prices is not buying the print of a saree — she is buying the cloth her daughter will borrow. A power-loom Banarasi will not survive three weddings. A real one will.
When my mother taught me to look at a Banarasi, she did not point to the motif. She made me weigh it in both hands, flip the pallu over, fold the border between two fingers, find the dora at the corner. Forty years later, I still do all four before I tell a buyer it goes up on the site.