Kalamkari (Telugu: కలంకారి) or Qalamkari is a type of hand-painted or block-printed cotton textile, produced in parts of India. The word is derived from the Persian words kalam (pen) and kari (craftmanship), meaning drawing with a pen.
The craft made at Pedana near by Machilipatnam in Krishna district, Andhra Pradesh, evolved with patronage of the Mughals and the Golconda sultanate.
There are two distinctive styles of kalamkari art in India - one, the Srikalahasti style and the other, the Machalipatnam style of art. The Srikalahasti style of Kalamkari, wherein the "kalam" or pen is used for free hand drawing of the subject and filling in the colours, is entirely hand worked. This style flowered around temples and their patronage and so had an almost religious identity - scrolls, temple hangings, chariot banners and the like, depicted deities and scenes taken from the great Hindu epics - Ramayana. Mahabarata, Puranas and the mythological classics. This style owes its present status to Smt. Kamaladevi Chattopadhayay who popularised the art as the first Chairperson of the All India Handicrafts Board. Only natural dyes are used in Kalamkari and it involves seventeen painstaking steps.
The J. J. School of Art, Mumbai is one such beneficiary. They are presently experimenting with this art form on Silk Ikat (i.e., tie and dye textiles popular in Pochampally, Andhra Pradesh).
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Kalamkari craft is very old. This art knew its apogee in the wealthy Golconda sultanate, Hyderabad, in the Middle Ages.
Kalamkari art has been practised by many families in Andhra Pradesh and has constituted their livelihood.
IntroductionKalamkari is the ancient art of decorating cloth with the aid of a Kalam or pen. A term mainly used to describe cotton fabrics patterned through the medium of Vegetable dyes by free-hand painting and block-printing, this category of fabric now covers a wide range of textiles produced in many regions of India. The term Kalamkari is however applied to the fabrics produced in the Southern districts only because the ancient tradition of patterning with the Kalam is still practised here. Even where the fabric is block printed the Kalam is used to draw finer details and for application of some colours. The Mughal who patronized this craft in the Coromandel and Golconda province called the practitioners of this craft "Qua-lamkars" and the distinctive term “Kalamkari", for goods produced in this region persists even to this day.[1]
In ancient times, groups of singers, musicians and painters, called chitrakattis, moved village to village to tell the village dwellers, the great stories of Hindu mythology. Progressively, during the course of history, they illustrated their accounts using large bolts of canvas painted on the spot with rudimentary means and dyes extracted from plants. Thus,the first Kalamkari had been born. In the same way, one found in the Hindu temples large panels of Kalamkari depicting the episodes of Indian mythology, akin to the stained glasses of the Christian cathedrals.
Kalamkari had a certain decline, then it was revived in India and abroad for its craftsmanship. Since the 18th century the British liked the decorative element for clothing.
The cotton fabric gets its glossiness by immersing it for an hour in a mixture of myrabalam (resin) and cow milk. Contours and reasons are then drawn with a point in bamboo soaked in a mixture of jagri fermented and water; one by one these are applied, then the vegetable dyes. After applying each color, the Kalamkari is washed. Thus, each fabric can undergo up to 20 washings. Various effects are obtained by using cow dung, seeds, plants and crushed flowers.
Myrobalan is not a resin. Myrobalan, because of its high tannin content is used along with buffalo milk to fix the natural dyes on cotton.
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