i. Kalamkari
Kalamkari (from the Persian ghalamkari) refers to the thousands-of-years-old textile tradition of putting a pen (kalam) to cloth and working (kari) it. Practiced largely along what came to be referred to as the Coromandel Coast, the art form eventually diverged into Srikalahasti and Pedana Kalamkari, after the respective areas where it was practiced. The former involved the conventional methods of pen and dye, and often involved the circulation of Hindu motifs (lotus, peacock, etc.). The latter used block-printing and imbued works with Islamic themes and influences that were owed to Mughal patronage of the craft between the early sixteenth and mid eighteenth centuries.
This history is further complicated by the colonization of India by the Dutch and then the British in quick succession. Soon, the markets were inundated with exports of what came to be called chintz (from the Hindi chint, meaning ‘spotted’ or ‘speckled’). While chintz diverges from kalamkari to encompass any fabric with mordants or resists applied to enable the adherence of dyes to it, the Coromandel Coast was certainly one of the main exporters of the popular cloth. In catering to popular demands, combining French design sensibilities with Chinese porcelain motifs and Dutch aesthetics, kalamkari was an iterative, versatile fabric. It was adaptable to the needs of an ever-shifting market not just because of the artistic brilliance of its painters, but also because of the more fundamental need to survive.
As textile scholar Rta Kapur Chishti has said in her TED Talk about Indian fabrics and the sari,
“it is a garment capable of being refashioned constantly.”
Later, writer George Eliot unintentionally coined the use of “chintzy” to refer to a gaudy, tasteless fabric—thus, with one broad stroke, erasing centuries of Indian and South Asian histories. This aligns with V&A senior curator Dr. Rosemary Crill’s explanation that in the late seventeenth century, chintz was used as ornamentation or decoration of domestic settings, as it “was mainly seen as a feminine, informal, fabric”.
As Harvard historian Dr. Sven Beckert puts it,
“[Chintz] tells a story that is much larger, and often much less pleasant [than writers and European sources like to tell] A tale of armed trade, colonialism, slavery, and the dispossession of native peoples.”
Perhaps all that needs to be said on the state of kalamkari today is that, when I went to visit the artisans (spoken for by one of the descendants of the long line of kalamkari artists, Pitchuka Srinivas) in a remote village called Pedana, near Bengaluru, they would never be able to afford dresses by designers like Ritu Kumar and Gaurang Shah, adorned by their own chintz designs. Instead, they showed me the Christmas tree blocks and prints inspired by the McDonald’s wrappers they’d seen littering the earthen floors, where once natural dyes were extracted, and plants flowered around the rich soil.
That is all to say that today, this so-called feminine fabric is dying slowly but steadily. In these stories, in these slideshows of textiles, in these personal, familial, and national histories, I will tell you a different story. One that cannot be found in European textbooks or Western collection catalogues. I will tell you the tale of the kalamkari I know—the textiles I grew up with.