Kalamkari: four chemistries on one cloth

The word is Persian. Kalam, a pen; kari, work. It was applied to cloth made on the Krishna delta, and it describes the tool rather than the cloth — which is already a warning, because the tradition it names is only partly a tradition of drawing.

What makes this cloth difficult to explain is that it carries four colours, and the four are produced by four unrelated mechanisms. Red is a dye that needs a metal salt to attach it to cotton. Blue is a dye that has to be chemically reduced to dissolve, and then re-oxidises in the air to become blue again. Black is not a dye at all: it is iron combined with tannin, formed in the fibre by two solutions meeting. Yellow is a direct dye that simply stains. A single piece of cloth may carry all four, within a centimetre of each other, using nothing but plant matter, rusty iron, milk and river water.

The order is not a style

Because the four mechanisms interfere with each other, the sequence is fixed. This is the part of the craft that is least visible and most decisive.

The cloth is first scoured, then steeped in a liquor of myrobalan — a tannin-rich fruit — with buffalo milk. The milk fat keeps the dye from creeping sideways along the threads, which is what would turn every line into a blur; the tannin soaks into the fibre and gives the later iron something to hold. The outline is drawn with fermented iron liquor: rust dissolved over weeks in a solution of jaggery, which is dark and thin and behaves like ink. Where it meets the tannin in the cloth it forms a black complex inside the fibre.

Then the red. The areas that are to be red are painted with alum — a mordant, and invisible. Nothing about the cloth changes at this point; the design is being written in a substance that cannot be seen. The cloth is then boiled with madder root, and only the alum-treated areas take colour. This is why the red is the step that governs everything after it: boiling a cloth with indigo on it would strip the indigo, so the red must be boiled before the blue goes on.

Blue is added by hand, in an indigo vat that is alkaline and reducing. It cannot come earlier, and it cannot be followed by another boil. Yellow goes on last, because it is the weakest of the four — a direct stain that would be shifted by any of the treatments used for the others. Between every colour the cloth is washed in running water and dried flat in the sun.

Two tools, two economies

There are two traditions here, and they differ in the tool and therefore in what they can produce. At Srikalahasti, inland and around a temple, the cloth was drawn freehand with the pen — narrative panels, deities, scenes read across the surface like a scroll, made to hang in a shrine or be carried in a procession. There is no repeat, because there is no block.

At Machilipatnam, on the coast, the outline is stamped from a carved wooden block and the detail filled in by hand. That town was a port, and the port had customers: Persian merchants first, then European companies, who wanted patterns that could be reordered — a trellis, a paisley, a tree of life, in quantity, in the same design next season. The block exists because the buyer wanted the same thing twice.

Both are called kalamkari, and the confusion between them is not new. What separated them was never quality. It was whether the customer was a temple or a ship.

What the trade did to it

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this cloth was one of the great export goods of the Coromandel coast. The English word chintz comes from chhint, spotted, and the large painted bedcovers that reached Europe were hung on walls as much as used on beds. The colours were the selling point: they held through washing, which European dyeing could not reliably achieve.

That advantage ended in a laboratory. Alizarin, the red principle of madder, was synthesised in the 1860s; indigo was made industrially from the 1890s. Once the same molecules came out of a factory, a cloth whose value lay in slow natural chemistry had no cost advantage left, and the export trade went. What survived was the local demand — temple cloth, sarees, a market that wanted the object for reasons other than its fastness.

Then the look came back without the cloth

The twentieth-century revival is real, and it is mostly a revival of the appearance. Screen printing and digital printing can put a kalamkari design on cotton at a fraction of the cost, and a great deal of what is sold under the name is exactly that. Some sellers say so plainly — "kalamkari print", "kalamkari-inspired" — and some do not.

This is where the sequence becomes an economic fact rather than a piece of lore. A printed copy is not a counterfeit of the technique; it is a different product that shares the look, and it is honestly cheaper because it does in one pass what the original does in seventeen. The original's problem is that the part which took the time is the part nobody can see. A buyer comparing two cloths on a screen is comparing the only thing they can compare, which is the design, and the design is the one part the printer does perfectly.

So the craft's survival has depended on finding buyers who are purchasing something other than appearance: temples ordering narrative panels, the Geographical Indication giving a name that can be checked, a small export market, and collectors who want the line to wobble because a hand drew it. The registration protects the word. It cannot make anyone pay for the sequence.

The cloth is still made, in the same order, with the same four mechanisms, by families who can explain each step by what would go wrong if it moved. That knowledge is intact and is not in danger of being lost. What is in danger is the price — because a sequence of seventeen steps produces an object that looks like a one-step object, and markets have never been good at paying for the difference.

This is entry 11 of Arts and Performance in About India. The pillar's argument — that much of what is called tradition was assembled in the twentieth century — is set out on the pillar page.