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Ajrakh: The Kutch Print That Has to Work on Both Sides Sixteen stages, three months of patience, and a blue that may have given the cloth its name There is one test for Ajrakh, and it takes a second. Turn the cloth over. If the pattern on the reverse is as deep, as sharp and as complete as the pattern on the front, you are holding the real thing. Very little else in Indian block printing will pass. Printing both faces in exact register is the hardest thing a block printer can be asked to do. Every block has to land twice in precisely the same position, across fourteen to sixteen stages of resisting, dyeing, washing and drying that can stretch to three months. There is no forgiving stage in that sequence. A block set down two millimetres out on the eleventh pass undoes ten passes of work behind it. The printers are the Khatri families of Kutch in Gujarat, with related work carried on in Rajasthan. Very few surviving textile traditions anywhere demand this much precision of the person doing them. The block meets the cloth. Every impression is placed by hand, on both faces. A Name With Two Stories Behind It The explanation you will hear most often traces Ajrakh to the Arabic azraq, meaning blue — which suits a cloth built on indigo. The second explanation is local, domestic and rather more charming: aaj rakh, roughly “keep it today”, said to be what the printer tells the customer who has come to collect a cloth that needs one more day. Both are told in Kutch. Neither has been settled, and the printers do not seem especially troubled by that. The geography, on the other hand, is not in dispute. Ajrakh belongs to the dry belt running across Kutch and Sindh, where the water chemistry, the strength of the sun and the local cultivation of indigo all happened to line up in the craft's favour. None of this was purely decorative. Among the Rabari, Maldhari and Ahir pastoral communities the cloth was worn as a turban, a lungi, a shoulder wrap, and it passed between families as a gift at weddings and at Eid. It said which occasion you were at, and it said whose people you were. A Craft That Has Had to Move to Survive Ajrakh's recent history is largely a history of relocation. Indigo cultivation across the region was disrupted through the twentieth century, and the printing villages themselves have had to follow clean water rather than the other way round. For generations the work was concentrated in Dhamadka. The Bhuj earthquake of 2001 damaged both the village and the water it relied on, and several printing families responded by building somewhere new a short distance away. They called it Ajrakhpur — a settlement that takes its name from the cloth produced in it. Work continues in both places, and in Bhachau and Rapar besides. When a whole community relocates to stay near the correct water, it is telling you something about the process. Counted honestly, Ajrakh spends far more of its life being rinsed than being printed. Four Colours, and Where Each One Actually Comes From The traditional palette is short on purpose, and nothing in it is abstract. Each colour has a physical origin you could go and stand next to. Indigo — the foundation of the cloth. Applied in a fermentation vat, from which the fabric emerges yellow-green and turns blue in open air. Madder red — from the root, fixed with alum, and traditionally deepened by boiling the cloth with alizarin and tamarix flower. It is the warmer, earthier red that separates Ajrakh from brighter printed cottons at a glance. Black — from iron liquor, made by fermenting scrap iron with jaggery and water, which reacts with the tannin held in the cloth. White — not a dye at all, but ground protected from beginning to end by a resist paste of lime and gum arabic. The vocabulary of shapes is architectural before it is decorative — eight-pointed stars, trefoil arches, lattices that lock into one another, jaali grids borrowed wholesale from the carved stone screens of Islamic building. None of it is improvised. The field of an Ajrakh cloth is worked out like a plan, and the borders exist to resolve it rather than to frame it. Preparation begins before any pattern appears. The greige fabric is washed with camel dung, soda and castor oil, then steeped in a myrobalan solution that supplies the tannin the iron needs and leaves the cloth faintly buff. Only then do the resist pastes go down, the colours follow in sequence, and the cloth returns to water and sun between every stage. Some of the blocks still in daily use are around a century old. “An Ajrakh is finished when both sides agree. Until then it is only half a cloth.” Why Ajrakh Settles So Easily Into a British Wardrobe The appeal here has nothing much to do with sentiment about India. Indigo, madder, black and undyed white already describe most people's neutral wardrobe. The geometry lands as graphic design rather than as costume. And the cloth underneath is usually plain cotton, which is straightforward to wash and comfortable to wear in a climate this damp. Then there is what time does to it. A printed imitation dulls uniformly; naturally dyed indigo lightens where it is used and holds where it is not, and the cotton softens while that is going on. Three years in, an Ajrakh kurta is usually the one you reach for first. How Fabindia Works With Ajrakh Block printing by hand has been in the Fabindia range since 1960, and the Ajrakh is governed by the rule the brand started with: protect the hand process, then design around what it gives you instead of imposing on it. In practice: cottons and silk blends that accept natural dye without muddying it, and cutting patterns that let a complete geometric repeat travel across a body rather than breaking it into pieces. That thinking is visible across the Ajrakh printed kurtas, shirts and dresses in the UK range, through the Ajrakh printed saris, and in the men's kurtas and shirts cut from the same cloth. It also means leaving the small irregularities where they fall. A repeat that steps fractionally out of line, one selvedge carrying slightly more indigo than the other — read these as a signature, not a fault. Wearing Ajrakh in the UK Treat Ajrakh as a neutral, because it behaves like one. Indigo and madder sit comfortably beside denim, ivory, camel and grey, and no third pattern is required. A full-repeat kurta wants a plain lower half. A narrow Ajrakh border, on the other hand, will happily carry a busier outfit. For British weather, one of the Ajrakh stoles and dupattas over a plain coat does more work than almost any scarf at a comparable price. The cotton tops and dresses layer the same way over a fine knit. Cold water, on its own, for the first few washes, then dried out of direct sun. A little colour will come away at the start. That is unfixed pigment leaving, and it settles quickly. Ajrakh reads as graphic rather than costume, which is why it settles so easily into a British wardrobe. Explore Ajrakh at Fabindia UK Fabindia UK brings hand block printed clothing and accessories to customers in Britain, drawn from print traditions that are still worked by hand in the villages where they grew up. About Fabindia Founded in 1960 by John Bissell to bring Indian textiles and artisan traditions to a wider market, Fabindia is now one of India's most established craft-led lifestyle brands. It spans apparel, home, personal care, organic foods and jewellery, and remains built on handcrafted technique and long working relationships with the artisans behind it.

  Kalamkari: Three Thousand Years of Drawing on Cotton A bamboo pen, a palette grown from the ground, and twenty-two steps between plain cloth and finished panel Kalamkari: Three Thousand Years of Drawing on Cotton Andhra Pradesh has been putting colour into cotton for something close to three thousand years. What survives of that long practice — in a form you can still hold, buy and wear — is Kalamkari, a craft whose name is also its method. Kalam is the pen. Kari is the work of the hand. The pen is not a figure of speech. It is a length of sharpened bamboo, bound near the tip with a wad of cloth that soaks up dye and releases it slowly, the way a reservoir feeds a nib. The artisan draws with it across cotton in long, unhurried strokes, and the cloth keeps a record of every one. You do not need any training to see the result. Look closely at the blossoms along the border of a Kalamkari dupatta and none of them will match exactly, because the hand that drew the first had travelled a long way by the time it reached the twentieth. That small unevenness is the craft telling you the truth about how it was made. The stages behind the cloth — carving, washing and drying in open sunlight. Where the Craft Comes From, and What the Name Carries The underlying idea — masking part of a cloth so that dye cannot reach it — is very old in the subcontinent, and fragments recovered from Harappan sites suggest it was understood here thousands of years ago. Kalamkari is one refined branch of that inheritance, and it took its mature shape in what is now Andhra Pradesh. The Persian word arrived a great deal later, with the Mughals, who met the painted cottons of the Deccan and gave them a name that travelled better than the local ones. In Telugu the older term was vraata pani — writing work — which describes the craft just as accurately and rather more plainly. For most of its history the cloth had work to do. Great painted hangings stood behind temple deities, and travelling narrators carried rolled panels between villages, opening them out episode by episode and telling the Ramayana or the Mahabharata to whoever stopped to listen. This was not decoration placed beside a story. It was how the story was delivered. Two Schools, and Why the Difference Matters When You Buy There is no single Kalamkari. Patronage split it. Under Golconda and afterwards under the Mughals, one line of the craft left figures and deities behind and turned to Persian ornament — creeping vines, lattice repeats, the lotus rendered a dozen ways. The other line stayed sheltered inside temple economies and held onto its gods and its epic scenes. Neither absorbed the other, and both are worked today. Both hold Geographical Indication protection, and telling them apart is the single most useful thing a first-time buyer can learn. Srikalahasti — drawn entirely by hand. Outline and fill both go on with the kalam. The motifs are narrative: deities, epic scenes, temple architecture, densely peopled panels. You can see the hand in the line. Machilipatnam, also called Pedana — the mordant is block-printed and the cloth is then dyed. The motifs are ornamental rather than narrative, and the repeat is regular, which is what makes it well suited to yardage and to garments. Neither ranks above the other. A drawn temple panel and a printed length of yardage were made to do different jobs, and comparing them on price alone misses the point entirely. Knowing which is in front of you simply explains the number on the ticket. Most of the Kalamkari kurtas, dresses and tunics cut for everyday wear come out of the Pedana tradition. Hand processes, kept intact. Fabindia has worked this way since 1960. A Palette Grown Rather Than Mixed Traditional Kalamkari uses nothing synthetic. Every shade comes out of a plant, a mineral, or a reaction between the two — which is also why the range is narrow. The natural world simply does not offer more. Black is not a pigment at all but a reaction. Iron filings fermented with jaggery make a liquor that turns black where it meets the tannin already held in the cloth. This is why the outline is drawn first: it is doing double duty as the mordant. Red comes from madder root and is fixed with alum. Where alum has been laid down, the cloth takes red in the dye bath. Where it has not, the cloth stays pale. Blue comes from indigo, either by dipping the cloth or by working it in by hand with the surrounding areas waxed against it. Yellow comes from myrobalan, pomegranate rind or turmeric, and is usually brushed rather than drawn. Green is rarely a dye in its own right. It is built by laying yellow over an area that has already gone blue. That warm, slightly irregular cream behind the drawing is not bare cotton either. Long before any colour appears, the cloth is steeped in a mixture of astringent myrobalan and buffalo milk. The milk keeps each dye from creeping outward past its line; the myrobalan supplies the tannin the iron reacts with. Neither washes out completely, and what stays behind is the ground colour. Twenty-Two Steps, and the Weather Gets a Vote Set out step by step, traditional Kalamkari comes to somewhere around twenty to twenty-two distinct operations. The cloth is washed, steeped, dried, outlined, rinsed, mordanted, dyed, rinsed again, laid out to bleach in the sun, given its next colour, rinsed once more, bleached again — and so on, returning to running water and open daylight between every colour it receives. The washing is the part people skip when they describe the craft, and it is the part that does the work. Repeated rinsing carries away everything unfixed; repeated drying in full sun drives what remains further in. A properly finished piece gets its clarity from water and daylight, never from bleach. It also explains why genuine Kalamkari cannot be hurried. A single length can take weeks, and if the sun does not come out, it takes longer. “Anyone can put the line down. It is the river and the sun that decide whether it stays.” How Fabindia Works With Kalamkari Fabindia has followed the same approach to Indian textiles since 1960: work directly with the artisans who hold the technique, leave the hand processes intact, and design clothes people will actually reach for on an ordinary Tuesday morning. In practice that means choosing fibres that carry natural dye honestly — cotton, mulmul, silk and silk blends — and cutting shapes that give the drawing room to be seen. A crowded panel needs a calm silhouette. A quiet border can carry something more structured. You will find the same thinking running through the cotton kurtas for women and the printed dresses and tops in the UK range. It also means letting variation stand rather than editing it out. A slight difference in the depth of colour between one panel and the next is the signature of natural dyeing, not a flaw in it. Wearing Kalamkari in the UK Let one Kalamkari piece lead and keep the rest quiet. A printed kurta sits best over plain kurta trousers and palazzos, and a single printed dupatta will lift an outfit that has no other pattern in it at all. Pull whatever accent you add out of the print itself. There is already a madder red and an indigo in there to work with; a fourth colour brought in from elsewhere rarely earns its place. British weather is easily handled. Put a fine polo neck underneath the kurta, or take one of the stoles and dupattas out over a plain wool coat and let the drawing do all the talking. Wash separately in cold water for the first few washes, dry in the shade, and leave the optical brighteners alone. Natural dyes are meant to soften gradually; detergent designed to whiten will strip them instead. Craft-led pieces worn as everyday clothing — the way Fabindia designs them to be. Explore Kalamkari at Fabindia UK Fabindia UK is now trading, carrying a selected range of hand-printed and handwoven pieces for customers here. If the painted-cloth traditions interest you, the broader hand block printed clothing range is the obvious next stop: much of it comes from the same families, drawing on the same dye pots and the same unhurried sequence. About Fabindia Fabindia ranks among India's best-established craft-led lifestyle brands. John Bissell started it in 1960, with the aim of opening a wider market to Indian textiles and the artisans making them. It now covers apparel, home, personal care, organic foods and jewellery, and is still built on handcrafted technique and long working relationships with the people behind it.