By Ines Keane
Cloth doesn’t turn blue in Bagru so much as it earns it, slowly, over days that involve mud before any dye touches the fabric.
The printers belong to the Chhipa community, a name tied to dyeing and printing both. Bagru sits about 30 kilometres from Jaipur, and printing has been practised there for more than four hundred years, though estimates run anywhere from 400 to 500. One local legend puts the start nearly five centuries back, when Chhipa families settled by the Sanjariya river because its clay suited the work. Treat that as legend, not record.
What sets Bagru apart from other Rajasthani block-printing centres is dabu, a mud-resist method. A paste of black clay, lime, gum and wheat chaff is pressed through carved wooden blocks onto the parts of the cloth that should stay undyed. Then the cloth goes into the vat. Wherever the mud sits, the dye can’t reach. Wash the paste away and the pattern appears as negative space, often with fine veining where colour has crept into cracks in the dried mud.
The traditional palette is earthy. Indigo gives the blues. Madder root, rich in alizarin, gives the reds. Black, called syahi, comes from iron scrap fermented with jaggery. Many printers today also use synthetic dyes alongside the natural ones, so a “natural dye” claim is a fair thing to ask about. In one printer’s account, printed cloth is laid out to dry for a day or two before it is boiled with alizarin to fix the colour.
The blocks are usually carved from sheesham, or Indian rosewood. Some sources add teak or rohida, sometimes called Marwar teak. A set of three blocks commonly builds a single floral motif: one for the outline, one for the background colour, one for the colour detail. Carving and seasoning a set takes about a week.
Bagru hand block print is a registered Geographical Indication.
Chhipa Mohalla is described as the community quarter and the centre of printing activity, and it is the place to start asking.