Editor’s note: This article was published before the coronavirus pandemic, and may not reflect the current situation on the ground.
In a small corner of northern India, generation after generation of families are keeping the art of Rajasthani block printing alive. Lorna Parkes visits the village of Bagru to see how tradition and modernity are merging to maintain this centuries-old craft.
It’s the hammering that guides me to the Chhipa Ka Mohalla printing community. It’s persistent and considered, interwoven with the equally dogged drone of high-pitched car horns that permeate life in Rajasthan.
The literal translation of ‘chhipa’ is ‘to print’. And here in the village of Bagru, the speciality is exquisite block-printed textiles, a craft that’s been passed down from generation to generation since the Mughal Empire. The tapping I hear is the genesis of an artisan journey that begins with a wedge of sheesham wood, a steady hand and a small steel chisel guided by a wooden hammer.
Sitting 30 miles outside of Jaipur’s pink city, Bagru is well known in Rajasthan for its dense concentration of textile artisans, who survive cheek-by-jowel in a dust bowl of concrete family compounds that house a thriving cottage industry.
Ranu Khan, who is tapping away in front of me, is a sixth-generation block carver whose career was destined from birth because of his caste and lineage; even in the 21st century, the villages around here do not partake in modern ideas of self-determination. He certainly looks suited to his trade, using astonishing muscle memory to sit cross-legged for hours while chiseling a complicated paisley design onto the block. The whole time we’re watching, he barely flinches.
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Jeremy is helping Bagru’s artisans negotiate the fuzzy world that lies between tradition and progress in modern India. He’s young, he’s American, and in his slacks and shirt he sticks out like a sore thumb on the backstreets of Bagru, where wild pigs are foraging in rubbish piles swamped with plastic (the scourge of India), and cows occasionally amble by with a swagger that suggests they own the place.
Following a university tour in 2009 that passed through Bagru, Jeremy moved here in 2010 thanks to a grant from the Minerva Fellowship from Union College in New York. The mission was to establish a social enterprise, helping Bagru’s artisans develop a community textile brand and directly link them with global designers and importers/exporters to increase their profit margins. You can sense his frustration when he talks of his first visit and discovered the humble source of exquisite handmade textiles that “I saw in Fifth Avenue selling for hundreds of dollars per meter.”
The block printing families whose workshops I’m seeing with Jeremy earn no more than 10 to 50 rupees (15 cents to 75 cents US$) per meter, depending on the skill involved in creating the pattern.
To meet the needs of the growing market, one trade-off has been a simplification of the traditional, intricate motifs and patterns, much like tribal tattoos, that once characterized the village fashions of chhipa/block printing communities across the northern belt of India from Gujarat to West Bengal.
In another concession to market forces, both international and domestic, Bagru’s chhipas are increasingly substituting Rajasthan’s natural earthy-hued dyes for chemical pigments that produce brighter colors in every shade under the rainbow. These pigments are often cheaper, but Jeremy believes there’s an environmental benefit to using them too.
“The biggest issue in Bagru is water scarcity,” he says. “In order to use natural inks a fabric often has to be washed four to five times [and boiled] before it’s finished, whereas with a pigment print, the fabric just has to be washed once.” Rajasthan is classified by the World Resources Institute as extremely water-stressed and Bagru no longer has a natural water source; the village’s river ran dry in the 1980s and these days, the water comes from an underground bore hole or is brought into the village by water tankers.
The Wabisabi Project is one Bagru workshop bucking the trend, working exclusively with natural inks and dyes derived from plants, roots, barks, seeds and flowers harvested in Rajasthan. The Jaipur couple that runs it, Avinash and Kriti, were not born into a chhipa community yet they are driven by a fascination with, and desire to preserve, the traditional motifs, dying recipes and artisanal manufacturing lore of the region.
Avinash points out that using natural dyes is still environmentally friendly because the water can be reused for purposes like agriculture (which it can’t with chemical dyes). “Everybody involved in the cycle of making a naturally dyed block-printed fabric is inter-dependent on each other—which encourages a collective and conscious approach to using natural resources,” he tells me.
At the end of my tour, walking back through the broad, walled drying field, I’m accosted by a group of school children. They want me to take their picture, and they want to take pictures of me taking pictures of them. Yet I’m by no means the first visitor they’ll have seen.
“Now, every day, Western people come, and even Indians,” Jeremy’s colleague Nirmali Patar tells me. These days, consumers are starting to question how and where Rajasthan’s artisanal wares are made—and the villagers of Bagru are eager to show them.
