Town of mud-resist block print
Bagru
A small town near Jaipur where the Chhipa community prints cotton by hand in indigo, black and red.
Why Bagru is bagru indigo
Bagru lies about thirty kilometres west of Jaipur. For several centuries its Chhipa families have printed cotton by hand with carved wooden blocks. Bagru prints sit on a cream or dyed ground, not on bright white. Two colours are traditional: a black made from iron and jaggery, and a red made with alum and madder. For indigo cloth the printers use dabu, a paste of clay, lime and gum. The paste is stamped on, dusted with sawdust and dried in the sun. When the cloth is dipped in the indigo vat, the covered parts stay pale. Lengths of printed cloth drying on the ground are a common sight around the town.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Colours tied to Bagru
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Bagru" on Wikipedia. If you know Bagru and we have it wrong, tell us.
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The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Jodhpur In: Lavpatel2008, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Jaipur In: Chainwit., CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Udaipur In: Gerd Eichmann, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Jaisalmer In: Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, source
- Varanasi In: Marcin Biaลek, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Vrindavan In: Biswarup Ganguly, CC BY 3.0, source