Chikankari Embroidery
Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh
Chikankari is the whitework embroidery of Lucknow: a floral trellis of creepers, buds and paisleys printed in washable ink on fine cotton or sheer fabric, then embroidered — traditionally in untinted white thread — so the pattern reads as texture and shadow rather than colour. Its vocabulary of roughly thirty named stitches falls into three families: flat stitches such as tepchi and bakhiya that lie on or just under the cloth, embossed stitches such as murri and phanda that sit up as tiny grains and knots, and openwork such as jali, where threads of the ground are teased apart with the needle to leave a fine net without cutting the cloth. Worked on pale mulmul, chikan kurtas, saris, dupattas and angarkhas stay cool and near-weightless, and the same piece often passes through several specialists — one for outlining, another for knots, another for jali.