Block Printing: Bagru, Sanganer, Bagh & Dabu

Four Centres, One 400-Year Conversation Between Wood, Mud and Cloth

Meet the Chhipa printer communities of Bagru and Sanganer, the Khatri revivers of Bagh, and the mud-resist masters of Dabu. Learn how a teakwood block, a river, and a family recipe can carry a tradition through 400 years of royal patronage, colonial disruption and industrial copy-print, and meet the brands and artisans keeping it alive today.

Ismail Khatri, Winter 1984

In the winter of 1984, Ismail Mohammad Khatri was nineteen years old and standing thigh-deep in the Baghini river in a small village in western Madhya Pradesh. The water was cold enough to sting his legs. He was holding a length of cotton cloth that he and his father had stamped at sunrise, and he was pulling it slowly through the river so the current could wash away the loose mud paste. The cloth was meant to end up the colour of ripe pomegranate skin. Right now, soaking wet, it looked like grey paper. Behind him, on the bank, his father watched without speaking. The family workshop was almost empty. Mill-printed copies from Ahmedabad had killed the market for hand-printed cloth three years before. Most of the other Khatri families in Bagh had already folded up and moved to Indore. Tonight his father would ask him the question Ismail had been avoiding for months. Would he keep printing, or would this be the end of the line?

Four decades later, Ismail is the reason Bagh printing is still alive. To understand why that matters, we have to understand what Indian block printing is, where it comes from, and why four small towns in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, each with a different signature, became the living centres of a craft the world once could not get enough of.

What block printing actually is

Block printing is the simplest kind of textile printing, and the most patient. A printer carves a pattern, in mirror image, into a flat piece of hardwood. He dips the block into a tray of dye or mordant paste. He lines it up against a stretch of cotton laid on a long padded table, and presses it down with the heel of his hand. Then he lifts, re-dips, and moves exactly one block-width down the cloth. A six-metre saree takes several hundred stamps. A single slip of the wrist ruins a day's work.