I was on vacation with my grandparents in Jaipur, touring some local shops.  I was fascinated by the hand printed cotton fabrics.  On enquiring I was told that they were called Bagru prints, and were made in a village called Bagru which was about 2 hours away.  I convinced my grandfather to take me to the village as I wanted to see how these beautiful prints were made.  I spent the next 2 days learning the techniques of Bagru, Dabu and Ajrak print making from the villagers in Bagru.

The process starts with a block which is carved by a block making artisan.  I drew out a design for the artisan to carve into a block for me.  The design was traced onto a block of wood using charcoal and punctured tracing paper.  The process of preparing a block is quite long as after it is carved in wood, holes are drilled strategically and it is dipped in oil to help condition the wood to withstand the acidity of the paint and the humidity of the atmosphere (pic 3).

Through this experience I realised that block printing is similar to linoleum printing, where we also use relief carving.  Layers are added to make the design multi-coloured (pic 4.1).

In the Dabu process we used mud instead of colour, which acted as a resist in the Indigo dye process (pic 4.2).  The indigo dye is not able to reach the fabric below the mud prints, leaving them un-dyed.

Example of the fabric after the block printing process (pic 4.3).  The finished Dabu print (pic 1) and the finished Bagru prints (pic 2).

Batik on Cotton for Cushion Covers; Bandini on Cotton for dress material

Batik and Bandini are traditional textile processing techniques, very popular in and around my city Kolkata.  In these techniques, the cloth is primarily dyed with "the resist process" applied in different ways.  

In the Batik process, I first made the design on paper and then transferred it to cloth with the help of a light tracing machine.  This was followed by applying wax as an outline to the traced drawing using brushes.  In the absence of better batik application tools, we improvised using brushes.  The cloth was finally dyed by dipping in different chemicals (pic 1 & 2) and the cloth progressively developed the right shade.  The cloth was dried and stitched into cushion covers by me (pic 3 & 4).

In the Bandini process we used fine nylon strings to cover small parts of the fabric in a pattern.  The tied fabric was then dyed with the first colour (yellow).  the process was repeated, covering a little bit of the yellow in another pattern.  The dying process was repeated (green).  The fabric was cleaned and dried (pic 5).