Tradition · export block-printing craft · India
Machilipatnam kalamkari
Also known as Masulipatnam chintz, Pedana, block-printed kalamkari
The block-printed branch, made at Pedana beside the old Coromandel port of Machilipatnam for export rather than for temples — Persian and Mughal floral repeats cut into teak blocks, printed in madder and indigo, and shipped to Iran, Burma and the Indonesian islands.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 16.190, 81.140
Worth knowing
This was the chintz that Europe went mad for in the seventeenth century and then banned: France prohibited printed cotton imports in 1686 and England in 1721, to protect their own weavers, which is a fair measure of how good it was. The designs were drawn to the buyer's taste, so Persian orders and Thai orders from the same workshop look nothing alike.
Connections (1)
- Trade routeTranquebar (Tharangambadi)
Block-printed cotton from the Coromandel — chintz — was the single largest manufactured export of the seventeenth-century world, and it changed what Europeans wore: washable, colourfast, printed cloth at a price wool and silk could not meet. England banned its import in 1700 and 1721 to protect domestic weavers, which is a reasonable measure of how completely Indian printing had taken the market.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kalamkari”. Geographical Indications Registry (Government of India) filings; Ministry of Textiles and Sangeet Natak Akademi craft documentation.
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