Ahmedabad Textile & Block Printing
Carved teak blocks tapping colour onto cloth, one repeat at a time, in the old textile capital of Gujarat.
Ahmedabad and its surrounding villages form one of the oldest cotton-printing and textile-trading centres in the world. Craftsmen print yardage, dupattas, sarees, bed covers, quilts and garments using hand-carved wooden blocks, working in two broad families of technique: mordant styles, in which a printed metallic salt fixes a dye that develops in a later bath, and resist styles, in which a paste, wax or mud is printed to keep dye away from parts of the cloth. Designs range from tiny buti sprigs and geometric jaals to the sprawling flowering trees and paisley butas that European buyers once ordered by the shipload. The city's Calico Museum of Textiles, one of the finest textile collections anywhere, grew directly out of this trade.
Craft at a Glance
Origin
Ahmedabad, Gujarat
Also Known As
Gujarati block print, Ahmedabad chhapai, hand-printed calico
Craft Type
Hand block-printed textiles (mordant and resist)
Practising Community
Chhipa and Khatri printer-dyer families; the Gajjar block-carvers of Pethapur
Materials
Mill and handloom cotton, and some silk and wool; carved teak and sheesham blocks; natural dyes and agents such as alizarin, indigo, pomegranate rind, myrobalan, alum and iron-jaggery liquor; and modern pigment and reactive colours for volume work.
Known For
Mordant- and resist-printed cottons for garments, furnishing and export
Where It's Made
Ahmedabad city and its outskirts; the printing villages of Pethapur, Jetpur and Rajkot supply blocks and allied work
Time to Create
Three to seven days for a printed and washed length; longer for multi-colour mordant work
GI Status
Not separately GI-registered (related prints such as Kutch Ajrakh are registered individually)
Process Steps
Carving the blocks
A designer draws the motif and separates it into outline, filler and background layers; a carver cuts each as a separate block, drilling fine air holes and adding registration pins.
Preparing the cloth
Greige cotton is boiled and washed to strip starch and wax, then soaked in a myrobalan or scouring bath and dried so mordants and dyes will strike evenly.
Fixing the cloth to the table
The cloth is stretched and pinned onto a long padded printing table so it cannot shift during the many block impressions.
Printing the outline
The rekh block is charged with mordant or colour on a tray pad and struck along the cloth, each impression aligned to the last by the block's corner pins.
Printing fillers and grounds
Datta and background blocks add the fills and field colour in register, one colour and one block at a time, with drying between passes.
Dyeing (for mordant work)
The printed cloth is immersed in a dye bath — alizarin for red, an iron liquor for black — which develops full colour only where the matching mordant was printed.
Boiling and washing
The cloth is boiled to brighten and set the colour and then washed repeatedly in running water so the unprinted ground clears to white.
Finishing
The dried cloth is calendered or lightly starched, checked for register faults and cut to length.
Technique Glossary
Mordant printing
Printing a metallic salt that has no colour itself but bonds a dye permanently to the fibre wherever it is applied.
Resist printing
Printing a paste, wax or mud that blocks dye, so the covered areas stay their original colour.
Rekh and datta
The outline block and the filling block; a printed motif is usually built from both, in register.
Dabu
A mud-and-lime resist paste block-printed onto cloth before an indigo or madder dye bath.
Bhatti
The copper vessel and the dye-boiling stage in which printed mordants are turned into fast colour.
Pethapur block
Blocks from the Gujarat village of Pethapur, whose Gajjar carvers supply printers across India and beyond.
Chintz
The European name for the mordant-painted and printed Indian cottons that Gujarat exported in bulk.
Calendering
Pressing finished cloth between rollers or with a heavy mallet to give it a smooth, slightly glazed surface.
A Craft Through Time
Before 1000 CE
Traded across the Indian Ocean
Printed Gujarati cottons reach Egypt, East Africa and Southeast Asia; fragments survive in the rubbish mounds of Fustat.
15th–17th century
Sultanate and Mughal boom
Ahmedabad becomes a major textile entrepôt, its printed and painted cloth prized from Persia to the Spice Islands.
17th–18th century
The chintz craze
European trading companies buy Gujarati printed cotton in bulk, feeding a fashion for Indian chintz across Europe.
19th–early 20th century
The mill city
Ahmedabad industrialises and power looms and roller printing displace much of the hand trade.
Mid-20th century
Museum and design revival
The Calico Museum and design institutions document and support hand block printing as a living craft.
Present
Fashion and furnishing supply
Design-led workshops sustain hand block printing for Indian labels, export buyers and interiors.
Did You Know?
Block-printed Gujarati cotton found in Egyptian excavations has been radiocarbon-dated to before 1000 CE, making this one of the world's longest continuously traded textiles.
Every craft has a story. Every story begins with tradition.