The Craft

Rajasthan is not one craft. It is a few dozen, most of them worked in a specific town by families who have worked them for generations — and the specificity is the point. This is what is behind the things we sell, and how to tell the real from the printed-to-look-like.

Why we keep mentioning GI tags

A Geographical Indication is a legal protection tying a craft to the place that makes it, in the way Champagne is tied to Champagne. For Indian crafts it is the strongest ordinary evidence of authenticity available: it means a body has examined the claim that this craft belongs to this place, and upheld it.

Several of the crafts below hold one. Where they do, we say so. Where they do not, we do not imply it.

Hand block printing — Sanganer and Bagru

Motifs are carved into teak blocks and struck onto cloth one impression at a time, by hand, block after block, colour after colour. Sanganeri printing, from Sanganer just south of Jaipur, is the fine floral style, worked on a pale ground; it goes back roughly four hundred years and holds a GI tag. Bagru, to the west, is its earthier sibling — geometric, and worked with mud-resist and natural dyes.

The tell is registration. On hand-block cloth, the impressions do not line up perfectly, the pressure varies, and the colour sits slightly differently across a length. A machine print is flawless and dead. When a rajai arrives and the border does not quite meet at the corner, that is not a defect — it is the only proof you get.

Bandhani — Jodhpur

Cloth is pinched into thousands of tiny points and each one tied off with thread before the whole piece goes into the dye. Where the thread was, the dye does not reach; untie it and a field of small circles is left. Jodhpur bandhej holds a GI tag.

It is counted in the number of knots — more knots, finer pattern, longer at the frame. Because every knot is tied by a person, no two lengths resolve identically, and the dots vary in size and spacing across the cloth.

Leheriya

From leher, a wave. The cloth is rolled diagonally into a rope, bound at intervals and dyed, so it opens out into diagonal stripes running corner to corner. Traditionally worked in Jaipur and Jodhpur on fine cottons and silks, and unmistakable once you have seen it.

Gota patti

Flat metallic ribbon, applied to cloth and worked into borders, floral motifs and edging. It is the gold you see on Rajasthani festive wear at a distance, and it is appliqué rather than embroidery — the ribbon is laid and stitched down, not threaded through.

It does not survive a washing machine. Everything with gota on it is dry clean, and we would rather say that here than in the small print.

Kota Doria

A weave, not a print: cotton and silk in alternating threads, producing the fine square check called khat and a cloth light enough to see through. Woven around Kaithoon near Kota, and GI-tagged. It is the fabric to reach for when a garment has to survive an Indian summer or a crowded hall.

Molela terracotta

In Molela, a village on the Banas river near Nathdwara, families have been making hollow-relief clay deity plaques for around a thousand years. The clay is local, the figures are pressed and modelled by hand rather than cast, and the craft holds a GI tag.

That lineage is what stands behind our clay Ganpati: undyed shadu clay, hand-formed, made to dissolve in water. It is also why they are not painted — pigment is exactly what you do not want going into soil afterwards.

Jaipur marble carving — Murti Mohalla

Between Kishanpole and Chandpole in Jaipur’s walled city is Murti Mohalla, the largest centre in India for carved marble deity statues, working Makrana marble. A marble murti is carved to be kept — it is an altar piece, permanently. It is not, and cannot be, an immersion idol, and we never sell one as though it were.

Pichwai painting — Nathdwara

Large devotional cloth paintings made to hang behind the deity at Nathdwara, worked in dense pigment with lotus ponds, cows and monsoon skies. Also GI-tagged, also Rajasthani, and not yet something we sell — but it is where a good deal of our understanding of Rajasthani colour came from, and it is why this site looks the way it does.

The thing they have in common

Every craft above is worked by hand, which means every piece carries the evidence of the hand that worked it: a block struck slightly heavier, a knot tied slightly larger, clay pressed by a thumb. Machine production removes all of that, and what it removes is the only thing that tells you which is which.

So when something arrives and it is not perfectly uniform, that is the craft. We would rather tell you in advance than have you wonder.