Bandhani: The Thousand-Dot Artistry of Gujarat & Rajasthan
From the Ajanta wall paintings to the whitewashed workshops of Bhuj, the story of a 1,500-year-old tie-dye craft carried by nine generations of the Khatri community.
Bandhani is the thousand-dot tie-dye tradition of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Its practitioners, the Khatri community, have tied and dyed cloth in western India for at least 1,500 years. Their work is painted on the walls of the Ajanta Caves. It is described in Banabhatta's Harshacharita in the seventh century. It was worn by Mughal noblewomen and by Rajput queens. Today, it is carried by a few thousand Khatri families in Bhuj, Mundra, Jaipur, Sikar, and a handful of other towns, who tie fifty thousand knots by hand on a single saree. This lesson follows their story: the Sindh origins of the Khatri community, the slow three-step process of tying, dyeing, and untying, the earthquake of 2001 that destroyed their workshops, the Shrujan and Khamir institutions that rebuilt them, the 2009 Geographical Indication tag, and the contemporary designer labels that now commission authentic bandhani directly from named masters in Bhuj.
A Whitewashed Workshop in Bhuj
In a whitewashed workshop in the old town of Bhuj, in the Kutch region of Gujarat, a master tie-dyer named Abdul Jabbar Khatri is folding a three-metre length of fine cotton into a neat rectangle. The cloth is about to become a saree, but first it has to become a map. He smooths it flat on a low table with the flat of his palm. He dips his fingernail into a small cup of fugitive red dye and begins marking dots across its surface, one by one, in a pattern he has carried in his head since he was a child. The marks are smaller than grains of rice. By the end of the morning, there will be several thousand of them.
Abdul Jabbar is a ninth-generation bandhani artist. His brothers work beside him. His sisters, cousins, and aunts tie the actual knots, one for each dot he has marked, with a fine cotton thread wrapped tightly around a pinch of cloth. Each knot becomes a tiny resist when the cloth is dipped in dye. The dye seeps into the open areas of the cloth and stops at the knots. When the knots are finally untied, each one reveals a perfect white circle, surrounded by a halo of colour. On a classic bandhani odhni for a Gujarati bride, there can be fifty thousand of these circles. A single odhni can take two masters and four women four to six weeks to finish.
The craft Abdul Jabbar's family practises has been recorded in India for at least 1,500 years. It appears on the walls of the Ajanta Caves, in paintings completed in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. It is described in the Sanskrit prose of Banabhatta, the court poet of Emperor Harsha, who around 650 CE wrote a biography of his king and mentioned the bride at a royal wedding wearing an odhni of tied-and-dyed cloth. Between those Ajanta paintings and this Bhuj workshop lies an almost continuous line of Khatri families, tying knots and dipping cloth, for close to sixty generations. This lesson is about what that line has carried, and about the morning of 26 January 2001 when, for a few terrible minutes, it looked like it might break.