Collection: Kalamkari

Kalamkari is a hand-painted and block-printed textile art from Andhra Pradesh, named from kalam (pen) and kari(craftsmanship). The "pen" is a sharpened bamboo or date-palm stick wrapped with wool or cloth at one end, which holds dye and releases it as the artisan squeezes it.

There are two distinct schools, and they look and feel quite different:

Srikalahasti is entirely freehand. It grew out of temple traditions, so the imagery is narrative — episodes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, Krishna's life, deities framed by dense floral borders. Panels were made as temple hangings and scroll-stories for travelling bards. The linework is fine and the compositions are crowded in a deliberate, storytelling way.

Machilipatnam (Pedana) is block-printed, with hand-painting used for detail and fills. Persian influence shaped it under Golconda patronage, so you see trees of life, vines, buteh motifs, and mihrab-like arches rather than mythological scenes. This is the style most commonly used for saris, dupattas, and yardage.

What defines both is the dyeing, not just the drawing. It is a natural-dye craft with roughly 20+ stages. Cloth is first steeped in myrobalan (harda) and buffalo milk - the milk stops dyes from bleeding, the myrobalan acts as a mordant base. Black comes from fermented iron filings and jaggery. Red comes from alum mordant drawn onto the cloth, then boiled with madder or manjistha. Blue is indigo, yellow from pomegranate rind or myrobalan flower. Between each colour the fabric is washed - traditionally in running river water - and sun - dried, which is why the palette has that slightly earthy, sunbaked quality rather than flat saturation.