Chikankari & Zardozi: Lucknow & Agra's Thread Arts
From the white-on-white muslin shawls Empress Nur Jahan brought to Jahangir's court in the early seventeenth century to the wooden adda frames of Lucknow's old city where thirty-six distinct stitches still live in the hands of women working by morning light, the story of two Mughal-era embroidery crafts that dressed emperors and then were nearly crushed by the middlemen who inherited the emperors' markets.
Chikankari is white cotton thread embroidered on white muslin in thirty-six distinct stitches, each with its own name, its own wrist motion, and its own ritual place on the body of a kurta or saree. Zardozi is gold and silver thread couched on silk or velvet with a hooked ari needle, stretched across a wooden adda frame, on commissions that once filled the wardrobes of the Mughal court and now fill the shelves of couture houses in Delhi, Mumbai, and Dubai. Both crafts came to India with the Mughal court from Persia and Central Asia in the seventeenth century. Both were kept alive by the women and men of Lucknow and Agra through three centuries of court patronage, colonial indifference, post-independence near-extinction, and a slow, patient late-twentieth-century revival led by two cooperatives, two master ustads, and a handful of designer labels willing to pay fair prices. This lesson walks into the Chowk quarter of old Lucknow at seven in the morning, where a grandmother is finishing the last bakhiya shadow stitches on a kurta commissioned through the Ada label for a Lucknow girl marrying into a Delhi family, and asks what it takes to keep thirty-six stitches alive through an entire century of indifference.
A Morning in Old Lucknow
It is a quarter past seven in the morning in the Chowk quarter of old Lucknow, a few lanes from the Rumi Darwaza and the Bara Imambara. The winter sun has just cleared the rooftops of the old city. In a first-floor veranda above a small jewellery shop on a narrow lane called Nakkhas, a woman we will call Zareena Begum, a composite drawn from the older generation of women embroiderers who still live and work in the Chowk and Bakshi ka Talaab neighbourhoods, sits cross-legged on a thin cotton dari with her back against a whitewashed wall. Her hair is grey. Her glasses are thick. In her lap is a folded length of Lucknow mulmul cotton, pulled taut across her thigh with a small wooden hoop. In her right hand is a fine steel needle. In her left is a spool of untwisted white cotton thread she holds the way a calligrapher holds a pen.
She is finishing the last of the bakhiya shadow stitches on the hem of a kurta. The kurta has been on her lap on and off for twenty-three days. Her daughter-in-law Sabiha did the taipchi running stitches that laid out the pattern across the yoke. Her granddaughter Safia did the phanda knot work on the neckline and the cuffs. Zareena has been doing the bakhiya, the hardest of the thirty-six stitches and the one that requires the steadiest hand. The kurta was commissioned by a Lucknow woman named Farah, who is marrying into a Delhi family next month. The order came through Ada, a label that runs a showroom on Hazratganj and a website that takes orders from Delhi, Mumbai, and the Indian diaspora in London and New York.
Ada will pay Zareena's family a little over eleven hundred rupees for this kurta. That is roughly three times what a traditional middleman would have paid her twenty years ago. It is still a fraction of what the kurta will sell for in the Hazratganj showroom, but it is a fraction that allows Zareena's family to buy food, pay the electricity bill, and send Safia to college. This lesson is about the thread that runs from Nur Jahan's Persian embroiderers in the court of Jahangir four hundred years ago to the eleven hundred rupees that will reach Zareena's household on Friday.