Kalamkari

What is Kalamkari?

Kalamkari is a way of patterning cloth rather than a single weave. Cotton fabric is either painted freehand with a pen or printed from carved wooden blocks, and the colour comes from plants and minerals instead of chemical dye. The look is a drawn line: outlines filled in with flat colour, figures and foliage set against a pale ground. It belongs to Andhra Pradesh, to the towns of Srikalahasti and Machilipatnam with Pedana nearby. The people behind it are painter-printers, called chitrakars in the sources. Besides sarees, the cloth is sold as dupattas, blouse pieces, bed and table linen, curtains, cushion and bag covers and wall hangings.

Where does Kalamkari come from?

The craft is old. A resist-dyed scrap found at Harappa, from around 2600 BCE, is cited as proof that patterned cloth of this kind has a long history, and a fabric in a Scythian tomb of the 4th century BCE is said to show a vine border mixing Persian and Greek design. In the south it grew under the Vijayanagara empire, and later under the Golconda sultanate and the Mughals, whose Persian word qalam, a pen, joined with kari, craft, gave the name. Before that the Telugu name was Vraata Pani. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, first chair of the All India Handicrafts Board, is credited with its modern standing.

How is Kalamkari made?

Only natural dyes are used, and the full process runs through twenty-three steps. Cloth is first steeped in astringents and buffalo milk, then dried in the sun. Mordant is applied along the lines that will turn red, black, brown or violet, and the cloth goes into an alizarin bath. Wax covers everything meant to stay pale while the cloth is dipped in indigo; the wax is then scraped off and the rest painted by hand. The pen, or kalam, is a bamboo or date palm stick with a bundle of fine hair at its tip, dipped in jaggery water. Dyes come from roots, leaves and iron, tin, copper and alum salts; myrobalan helps fix them and takes away the smell of milk.

Colours, motifs and borders

Srikalahasti work is drawn, and its subjects are gods and episodes from the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranas, so Brahma, Saraswati, Ganesh, Durga, Shiva and Parvati appear on scrolls, temple backcloths, wall hangings and chariot banners. Machilipatnam work, shaped by Persian taste, kept away from Hindu religious figures. Its blocks carry a repertory of interlaced leaves and flowers, the cartwheel, several lotus forms, creepers, parrots and peacocks, and above all the tree of life. Recent work adds Buddha, musical instruments, small animals, flowers and symbols such as the swastika.

How Kalamkari is worn

Nothing in the sources describes a particular drape. What they do say is that the printed cloth reaches the wearer in several forms: sarees of silk, mulmul and cotton, and in recent years synthetic sarees carrying a Kalamkari print, along with dupattas and blouse pieces, which the article notes are popular with Indian women. The older hand-worked pieces were not made as dress lengths at all but as hangings and banners, so a saree is one use among many for this technique.

When Kalamkari is worn

The sources tie the cloth most firmly to temple settings rather than to a wedding or festival calendar. Srikalahasti panels served as backcloths, scrolls and banners carried on temple chariots, and travelling chitrakattis used painted cloth to tell stories of the gods to village audiences. Machilipatnam output went into household furnishing: table and bed linen, curtains, cushion covers, bag and file covers, dress material and scarves. No specific festival or rite is named for wearing it.

Styles of Kalamkari

There are two named styles, and they differ in method as much as in subject: freehand pen work at Srikalahasti and block printing at Machilipatnam or Pedana. The article also notes a middle usage, where cloth is block printed and the pen then adds finer detail and some colour. Modern practice has shifted: at Masulipatnam the mordant is now printed evenly with a block, wax resist drawn with the pen has gone, indigo dyeing has been dropped, and iron acetate has taken over the large black areas, though it is known to be corrosive.

What Kalamkari means

Both styles hold Geographical Indication registration from Andhra Pradesh, Srikalahasti from 2005 and Machilipatnam from 2008, granted under the 1999 Act covering handicraft goods. The registration matters because printing a design is far easier than the traditional work, and printed versions circulate widely. The craft also carries a religious role: it began as a way of showing ordinary people the gods and their stories, and the temple panels gave it a distinct devotional identity. Its present standing is credited in part to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay's promotion of the art.

Questions people ask about Kalamkari

Good reading and sources

• Malini Divakala’s research on KalamkariThe Hindu, Article

• Kalamkari on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data