‘Out there, hundreds of metres of freshly dyed cloth are drying.’
‘Can I see the finished product?’
‘Madam ji, why don’t you come to my house? We do block printing there,’ Sandeep offered. ‘You can see the finished product.’
I agreed and followed him as he walked across the road.
It was around two in the afternoon. After a meal, Sandeep’s family had got back to work on the textiles on the first and second floors of their three-storey home. At that hour, only his aunt was in the mood for tea, and I agreed to accompany her. As we sat together on a charpoy sipping tea, she explained how six generations of the family had been block printing on cloth in this very house. Earlier, they made cloth for kings, and now their cloth was sold all over India and to Indians abroad.
Downstairs, there were about two dozen men at work. They were busy at a narrow table about 50 metres long, tightly spreading reams of cotton cloth freshly dyed in bright pink, indigo, purple and shades of green.
‘We are Rangrej,’ explained Sandeep.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Rangrej is our caste. We are people who colour cloth in the sinks outside,’ he said. ‘They are Neelgari,’ Sandeep pointed to the men spreading the dyed cloth on the table. ‘And those over there . . . you see them, the ones printing the motifs on the cloth with their blocks of wood?’
I nodded.
‘They are of the Chippa caste,’ he continued. ‘The son of a Chippa is always a Chippa,’ he added and laughed.
‘So you can only do the work that your father did? A baby born in the Rangrej caste cannot grow up to become a Neelgari?’ I asked.
‘It is rare, but it is happening,’ Sandeep said. ‘Nowadays, people are marrying across castes here. There are hundreds of castes.’
I looked at the bundles of finished block-printed cotton cloth stacked in columns. The motifs ranged from flowers and creepers to animals and human faces as well as figurines.
‘Utterly complex, winding and intricate designs,’ I remarked.
‘These are our traditional designs, from the days of the maharajas,’ a workman standing beside me said.
Sandeep interrupted with, ‘Have you seen the new Rs 2000 note issued by Modi?’ referring to the currency issued by the Indian government in November 2016, after the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 rupee notes were demonetized.
‘Yes, I have.’
‘That note is American design. But the design we make here in Sanganer is Indian,’ he said with pride.
The traditional ware sold in the calm village of Sanganer was just as embellished with complex motifs of geometric designs, flowers and creepers as those in the frenetic lanes of Johri Bazaar in Jaipur. Local aesthetics—or the perception of beauty—did not show much influence of the sights, sounds and smells in their immediate surroundings. Silk or cotton, wedding attire or regular clothing, ‘plain’ was looked down upon with disdain, and ‘simple’ was clearly undesirable in both of the two contrasting environments.
I spoke to people in Delhi and found that the more patterns sewn into the design or the threadwork, the better the dress is considered. A classic, simply cut salwar kameez without any work is unlikely to be found worthy of praise. A plain sari risks being disdainfully looked down on as ‘simple’. On the ramp and off it, clothes in India, especially for women, are ‘effortfully’ intricate, not effortlessly chic. In fact, even in other mediums, the love for embellishments is evident. The detailed Islamic calligraphy embellishing the walls of Delhi’s Jama Masjid is unforgettable. Be it the tombs of the Mughal emperors, the temples, or the palaces on the border of Delhi and Rajasthan, the most celebrated architectural masterpieces of the city flaunted distinct styles of scrupulously intricate works of murals and frescoes, carvings and mosaics. The greater the abundance and intricacy of the designs, the more spectacular the structures were considered to be.
A few months later, I travelled east to Kolkata and its outskirts, hopping across more than three dozen shops selling traditional attire. The motifs on the Dhakai jamdani handwoven cotton saris were distinctly different from what I had seen in the south or the north, but a full body of work all over the sari was a tradition. Floral designs ran amok on the Baluchari sari, with the aanchal extending to one quarter of the entire length of the garment, resplendent with scenes from mythological texts. I also found here various butti and patta designs on tussar silk, and the intricate kantha stitch dazzlingly filling up a six-metre sari.
In each place I went to, the length and width of the sari varied with the region and quality of yarn. Materials such as muslin, cotton and silk cotton with zari woven in a range of techniques were embellished with embroidery, print or paint, with different motifs and designs—from human to animal figurines and from birds to floral patterns.
I visited several towns in the south of India—silk weavers in Madurai and large showrooms in Chennai. Intricate gold motifs were woven on the side border, the field (the body of the sari) the aanchal (end panel), or on the entire sari. The small shacks in Tirupati also sold similar aesthetics in different quality of silks.
When I lived near the temple of Lord Venkateshwara atop the Tirumala Hills. I found that here, and in other temples in India, the gods are also adorned. The Meenakshi temple of Madurai stands out with its wondrous collection of colourful statues of deities in traditional clothes and jewellery. In the sculptures at the Khajuraho temples, erotic imagery—women performing fellatio on men, men performing cunnilingus on women, men having sex with men, women having sex with women, men with many women, women with many men, and even men and women with animals—are detailed in the extreme, and each figure wears traditional jewellery, even if they don’t have much clothes on.
In fact, an essential component of the daily ritual in temples is the placement of jewellery on
