Journey

Craft and industry — where things are made and why there

Stops (36)

1. Banaras brocade · Banaras brocade — the kadhua weave

   Silk brocaded with gold and silver zari, woven on drawlooms by Muslim weaver families in the city's Madanpura and Alaipura quarters for Hindu wedding saris. The kadhua technique works each motif separately so no float runs behind the cloth, which is slow and is why a real Banarasi takes months rather than days.

2. Kanchipuram silk · Kanchipuram silk — the three-shuttle join

   The body and the border are woven separately in different colours and interlocked by hand at the join, so a Kanchipuram sari can be pulled apart at the seam and will not fray. The weight comes from doubled silk thread and heavy zari. The weavers are Devanga and Saligar families settled there since the Vijayanagara period.

3. Patan patola · Patan patola — double ikat

   Both warp and weft are tie-dyed to the finished pattern before weaving, so the design has to exist in the dyer's head and register perfectly on the loom. Three or four families in Patan still do it. A sari takes months, has no wrong side, and the technique exists in only two other places in the world.

4. Paithan (Paithani) · Paithan — the Paithani border

   A Godāvari town that was a Sātavāhana capital and has woven silk with tapestry borders since antiquity, the motifs — peacock, lotus, parrot — worked with separate small shuttles rather than by brocading. The Peshwas patronised it heavily, and a Paithani border is reversible because there is no float behind it.

5. Maheshwari handloom · Maheshwar — Ahilyabai's weavers

   Ahilyabai Holkar brought weavers to Maheshwar on the Narmada in the eighteenth century to make saris as gifts for visiting dignitaries, and the motifs are traced to the carving on the fort and ghat walls above the river. The cloth is light, with reversible borders and geometric stripe and check patterns.

6. Sualkuchi silk, Kamrup · Sualkuchi — the golden silk of Assam

   A Brahmaputra village weaving muga, a wild silk produced only in Assam and nowhere else on earth, which is naturally golden and gets glossier with washing. Almost every household has a loom, the weavers are mostly women, and the Ahom court's patronage is what concentrated the craft in this one place.

7. Pochampalli ikat, Yadadri · Pochampalli — ikat as a village industry

   A Telangana cluster that took up ikat in the twentieth century and industrialised it, producing the tie-dyed geometric patterns that became the standard Indian handloom look. It was among the first Indian crafts to get a geographical indication, and the technique is single ikat rather than the far harder double of Patan.

8. Kutch Ajrakh, Ajrakhpur · Ajrakh — the sixteen washes

   A Kutch block-printing tradition using natural indigo, madder and iron, in which the cloth is printed and washed through as many as sixteen stages, resist-printed on both sides so the pattern registers exactly. The Khatri families who do it moved to Ajrakhpur after the 2001 earthquake destroyed their village.

9. Jamnagar Bandhani · Jamnagar bandhani — tied by fingernail

   Tie-dye in which thousands of tiny points are tied off with thread by women who grow one fingernail long for the purpose, then dyed and untied. Jamnagar's water is held to fix red particularly well, which is why the craft concentrated there. The pattern density is the measure of the work.

10. Śrīkālahasti kalamkari · Srikalahasti kalamkari — drawn with a pen

    Free-hand narrative painting on cloth with a bamboo kalam and natural mordants, telling epic episodes in panels for temple hangings. The Srikalahasti line is the temple tradition; the Machilipatnam one is block-printed for export, and the two have been distinct since the seventeenth century.

11. Machilipatnam kalamkari · Machilipatnam kalamkari — the export trade

    The block-printed half of the tradition, made for Persian and European markets through the Dutch and English factories on the Coromandel, with floral and Persianate motifs rather than narrative panels. The chintz that changed European dress in the seventeenth century came largely from this coast.

12. Wootz steel region, Telangana · Wootz steel — the crucible and the Damascus blade

    Telangana and Tamil country ironworkers made crucible steel from at least the early centuries CE, exported it as cakes through Coromandel ports, and it was forged in West Asia into the blades Europe called Damascus. The characteristic pattern comes from carbide banding; the process was lost by the nineteenth century and is still being reconstructed.

13. Bidar bidriware · Bidar bidriware — blackened zinc and silver

    Zinc alloy inlaid with silver and then blackened with a paste made from the soil of Bidar fort, which is held to work because of centuries of saltpetre in the ground — a craft that cannot be practised anywhere else without carrying the earth with you. The technique arrived with the Bahmani court from Persia.

14. Moradabad brass · Moradabad brass — the export city

    A Rohilkhand town that has worked brass since the seventeenth century and now exports most of India's brassware, with engraving, enamelling and electroplating divided between thousands of small workshops. Almost nothing is made under one roof; the city is a single dispersed factory.

15. Thatheras of Jandiala Guru · The Thatheras of Jandiala Guru — beaten, not cast

    A Punjab craft of making brass and copper vessels entirely by hammering sheet metal over successive heats, which produces a different grain and durability from casting. It is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list and is practised by a handful of families, most of whom have sons in other trades.

16. Firozabad glass · Firozabad glass — bangles from Mughal furnaces

    Glass has been worked here since Mughal times and the city now makes most of India's bangles, in small furnace workshops whose conditions and child labour have been the subject of litigation for decades. Craft geography is not always a story about heritage.

17. Jaipur Blue Pottery · Jaipur blue pottery — a body with no clay

    Quartz, glass, borax and gum fired at low temperature into a body containing no clay at all, with cobalt blue on white — a technique from Persia through Central Asia, brought to Jaipur in the nineteenth century and revived in the 1960s when it had almost stopped.

18. Channapatna lacquered toys · Channapatna and Kondapalli — lacquer and lightwood toys

    Channapatna turns soft ivory-wood on a lathe and colours it with vegetable lacquer, a technique Tipu Sultan is said to have had Persian artisans bring; Kondapalli carves poniki wood into figures and groups for Dasara displays. Both are household crafts organised by caste and both now compete with plastic.

19. Kutch Rann salt & embroidery · Kutch — salt from the Rann and embroidery from the villages

    The Agariya families who farm salt in the Little Rann live on the pans for eight months a year producing most of India's inland salt, and the same district's embroidery traditions — Rabari, Ahir, Mutwa — are among the most various anywhere. Two entirely different things a desert supports.

20. Qutb complex, Delhi · The Qutb complex — the iron pillar and the masons

    The fourth-century iron pillar in the courtyard has not rusted in sixteen hundred years because of a phosphorus layer that forms on its surface, and it is the standing evidence of Gupta-period metallurgy. The colonnade around it is built from the dismantled stone of twenty-seven earlier temples, carved by the same local masons who then cut the Qur'anic inscriptions.

21. Bābā Budangiri · Coffee — Chikkamagaluru

    India's coffee begins on this ridge, from the seven beans Bābā Budan is said to have carried out of Mocha. The plantation belt that grew from it — Chikkamagaluru, Kodagu, Hassan, Wayanad — is now the country's arabica map, and the same cave is worshipped as a Sufi dargah and as a seat of Dattātreya by two sets of pilgrims.

22. Madhubani / Mithila painting · Madhubani — Mithila

    Women's wall painting in the marriage chamber and household shrine, in earth and vegetable colour with every space filled. The 1966–67 drought turned it into an income: the Handicrafts Board sent an artist to buy paintings on paper as famine relief, and within a decade an anonymous domestic art had named painters and a market.

23. Paṭṭachitra, Raghurajpur · Paṭṭachitra — Raghurajpur

    Cloth painting in a fixed Odia line and five mineral colours, made by chitrakara families in a service village of the Jagannatha temple. When the wooden images are withdrawn for the anasara fortnight, these painted substitutes take their place on the throne and receive worship — the craft is part of the liturgy.

24. Kālīghāṭ painting and the Patuas · Kālīghāṭ — the Calcutta bazaar picture

    Fast watercolours sold for a few paise to pilgrims at the temple, painted by village Patuas who had moved into the city. Within thirty years the subjects had shifted from Kali to the babu, the courtesan and the Tarakeswar murder trial, sold as a series while the case ran. Lithography killed it in the 1890s.

25. Cheriyal scrolls, Telangana · Cheriyal scrolls — Telangana

    Vertical narrative scrolls on red grounds, carried and unrolled panel by panel by itinerant storytellers who sang the origin epic of the caste that had commissioned them — weavers, toddy-tappers, fishers. A genealogical document as much as a picture, and it stopped being ordered when the storytellers lost their audiences.

26. Ḍhokrā · Ḍhokrā — Bastar to Bankura

    Hollow brass cast by the lost-wax method in a continuous belt of Adivasi and artisan settlements, built from rolled wax threads that leave the metal ridged. The process is identical in every step to the one that produced the dancing girl of Mohenjo-daro four thousand years earlier.

27. Sañjhī, Mathura · Sañjhī — Mathura and Vrindavan

    Paper stencils cut freehand with fine scissors, used to lay coloured-powder images of Krishna's life on temple floors and on water during the pitr paksha fortnight. The stencil is only the means; the powder picture is swept away at the end of the day, which is the point of it.

28. Pardhān Gond painting and Jangarh Singh Shyam · Pardhān Gond painting — Mandla and Dindori

    A school barely fifty years old: the Pardhans were the Gonds' bards, not painters, until Jangarh Singh Shyam was found painting a village wall in 1981 and taken to Bhopal. He turned clan deities and Gond cosmology into a visual language that had not existed, and his relatives and pupils made it a tradition.

29. Rogan painting, Nirona · Rogan — Nirona, Kutch

    Boiled castor oil and pigment drawn into a thread on an iron stylus and laid onto cloth without the stylus touching it, then folded to mirror the design. It came from Persia, and by the late twentieth century one family in Kutch still practised it.

30. Sohrai and Khovar, Hazaribagh · Sohrai and Khovar — Hazaribagh

    Khovar scratched through white over black for marriages, sohrai painted in earth colours at the harvest cattle festival, by Kurmi, Santal, Munda, Oraon and Ganju women. The horned-animal motifs repeat those in the rock shelters of the same valleys; open-cast coal mining has taken several of the painting villages.

31. Thanjāvūr painting · Thanjāvūr painting

    Gesso relief, gold leaf and set glass stones on wood, made under the Maratha rulers of Thanjavur for houses rather than temples — a household icon built to catch lamplight, mixing Vijayanagara mural convention with Maratha taste and European shading learned from Company painting.

32. Araṇmuḷa kaṇṇāṭi · Araṇmuḷa kaṇṇāṭi

    A mirror cast in tin-copper alloy and polished for a fortnight, so the image forms on the metal itself and there is no glass and no secondary reflection. The alloy proportion has never been published; the moulds are made from Pamba river silt, which is why the craft cannot be moved.

33. Kondapalli toys · Kondapalli toys — the Krishna delta

    Figures carved from the light tella poniki wood of the hills behind Vijayawada, joined with tamarind paste and painted — village scenes, bullock carts, the ten avatars sold for the Sankranti doll display. The carvers are Aarya Kshatriya families, and the craft is constantly confused with Channapatna, which shares nothing with it but the word toy.

34. Kāshī kāri · from Kāshān, and then local

    The blue and turquoise glazed tilework on the shrines of Multan, Uch Sharīf and Thatta, and the pottery still thrown at Hala and Nasarpur. The name is Kāshān's, in Iran, which is where the technique came from — with Central Asian craftsmen, under the Ghaznavids and after — but the palettes are not Persian: the Sindhi and Multani versions lean far harder on cobalt and turquoise against white. Jaipur blue pottery descends from the same root by a different route entirely, through Mughal Delhi, so the two living traditions are cousins that have never met.

35. Baloch needlework (doch) · counted off the weave

    The embroidery on the front panel of the Balochi pashk, in silk floss, dense geometric fields with mirrors set in, and counted off the weave rather than drawn — which means the pattern lives in memory and is inherited within families, and can be reproduced exactly on new cloth without a tracing. Makrani, Kalāti and Rakhshāni work differ enough in palette and stitch density to place a garment by district. It is women's work, done at home, and one pashk front can take months.

36. Darra Ādam Khel · reverse-engineered by eye

    A craft where the material reason is a legal one. Afridi gunsmiths in the Kohat pass have copied firearms by hand since the late nineteenth century — any weapon brought to them, from the object itself rather than from drawings — and the skill is real: files, a lathe, and a working knowledge of what a mechanism has to do. The trade grew where it did because the Frontier Crimes Regulation put the tribal belt outside ordinary law, and it contracted sharply when that ended in 2018.

Sources

• Wikipedia