Chitra Vastra: The Heritage of Painted Cloth

From the silver vase at Mohenjo-daro to a kalam drawing a Ramayana on cotton by the Swarnamukhi river, the story of Indian painted and printed cloth.

At Srikalahasti in Andhra Pradesh, a kalamkari artist holds a bamboo pen tipped with a wad of felted cotton, dips it into a pot of fermented iron and jaggery ink, and draws a thin black line onto a cotton cloth that has been soaked overnight in buffalo milk. The line is as thin as a hair. Over the next four to six months, he and his family will turn that white cotton into a nine-metre temple hanging painted with the whole Ramayana, one scene at a time. This lesson walks the four-thousand-year heritage of Indian painted and printed cloth, from the earliest madder-dyed cotton fragment at Mohenjo-daro, through the temple hangings of Srikalahasti and the court cloth of Golconda and Machilipatnam, through the European chintz craze and the colonial mill collapse, into the Madhubani women who kept a painting tradition alive on mud walls for centuries, and finally into the 21st century revival carried by the Calico Museum, Good Earth, and Dastkar.

The Kalam And The Cotton

At Srikalahasti on the coast of Andhra Pradesh, in a workshop that opens onto a lane behind the Kalahasteeswara temple, a kalamkari artist named J. Gurappa Chetty kneels over a long strip of cotton spread flat on the floor. It is a morning in 2019. In his right hand he holds a thin bamboo stick with a small wad of felted cotton and wool wound around the tip. This is the kalam, the pen. His left hand cradles a small brass pot. The liquid inside is the colour of wet coal: a thick black ink made from rusty iron filings, jaggery water, and tamarind seed husks that have been left to ferment in the pot for two weeks. When the pen touches the cloth, the fibre pulls the liquid off the tip by capillary action, the way a wick pulls oil into a flame. The black line that comes out of the pen is as thin as a hair.

The cloth has already been prepared. It is raw cotton that has been soaked overnight in buffalo milk mixed with powdered myrobalan nut, so that the fibre is ready to hold the iron ink without letting it bleed. The story that Gurappa Chetty is drawing on the cloth is the Ramayana. He has not sketched anything first. He is drawing the whole story straight onto the cloth, from memory, scene by scene. The temple has commissioned a hanging of nine metres. It will take him, his wife, and his son about four months to finish. At the end of the year, J. Gurappa Chetty will receive a Padma Shri from the Government of India. A year later, he will be gone, and his nephew and son will carry the workshop forward.

This is kalamkari. Kalam for pen, kari for work. The painted cloth of India. One of the slowest living textile traditions in the country, and one of the oldest.