It is the hand that draws, but named after the pen
Kalamkari’s problem of plenty
Copies, fakes, imitations may be inevitable part of life. But, in the field of art the disruptions created by imitations have a long term impact. More the merrier, but not in the case of screen printing or block prints imitating the hand drawn pen kalamkaris.
Srikalahasti’s pen kalamkari, the hand drawn, hand filled paints on
fabrics has been flourishing having been resurrected twice in the last century.
First the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya’s art revival lifted it out of extinction
in the 1950s, and later in the century when it moved out of being a wall art to
adorning the sarees and later fabrics. Today it is a problem of plenty
for Kalamkari. There are many trained artists involved in the craft at
Srikalahasti, a small town around 40 kilometers from Tirupati on the banks of
river Swarnamukhi. Business has been good, visibility as good as it can ever
be, but threatened by the fake printed version that has proliferated from the
other places including Pedana near Machilipatnam on Andra Pradesh coast that is
famed for its wooden block printed organic kalamkaris. (The designs of
Srikalahasti and Pedana have been different, easily distinguishable till the
copying former’s designs on block prints and screen printing started)
Epic canvas begins with Ganesha's portrait
But, the challenges they face are the time, process, cost
involved in making the pen kalamkaris in a market that has seen a surge of
imitations in prints coming from Pedana and other places. If a pen kalamkari has
a detailed seven stage process that would take up to 20 days to complete one
saree by a person, block print can be done in a day and worse a screen print
can churn out a dozen or more. “How long you think the boom will last,”
asked a young saree designer recently in Mumbai. Well, it is an expensive art
to patronize and needs connoisseurs.
At Srikalahasti the story goes thus – the pen kalamkari, the popular name for the hand drawn version was left in the practice of just one family early 20th century. It was the generosity of one branch of that family to share the knowledge with few other students who could learn in Srikalahasti. Lakshmi amma, the lady many in metros might see as part of art and textile exhibitions narrates the story she knows and also rightly attributes the craft as it survives today to Gurrappa Chetty’s family.
Lakshmi herself can trace the art back only to the time when the training center in town started teaching many youngsters including her own son-in-law, a national award winner who died young leaving the legacy to her. She picked up the threads after his death, won a state award but soon got involved in marketing. “Kala padi poyindi, cheeralu vachina taravata malli business vachindi” (the art fell into bad times, but the business picked up after it came up in sarees), says Lakshmi. For 15-years now, since the art moved into saree designs business has been good. Right now the popularity of Kalamkari is at its peak, and the quick acceptance of the fakes may also be a pointer to that.
Artist drawing basic background on the fabric at Lakshmi amm's unit
Since Lakshmi couldn’t explain much beyond the processes
of Kalamkari I prodded her, asked her if she can take us to Gurrappa
Chetty’s house.
Luckily Lakshmi agreed to send her daughter with us meet the
grand old man of art Padmasri Jonnalagadda Gurrappa Chetty. At around 80,
recovering from a recent heart surgery, Chetty is happy to talk about his art,
though halting every now then, taking a sip of water to gain energy. A learned
man, with vast knowledge in Puranas, Chetty takes the art of Kalamkari back
in time by 5000 years. Many things in this country, many temples and structures
are associated with Mahabharata … from Kashmir to Kanyakumari many places would
claim the Pandava brothers constructed a particular temple.
Do you know of the Arjuna’s chariot, asks Chetty, and after noticing the assenting nod he continued, didn’t the chariot have a flag with Hanuman as the symbol? What was the flag made of, of course cloth with the figure of Hanuman painted. That was the beginning of kalamkari. The Indian calendar goes by the calculation of yugas and by that calculation it has been over 5000 years since the kaliyuga began and so Mahabharata happened just before that.
Padmasri Jonnalagadda Gurrappa Chetty
If the Purana is quoted to trace the history of Kalamkari,
Chetty also goes further to Amarakosa to authenticate the cloth and the painted
flag – this time the ketanamu (flag) of Manmada which carried the symbol of
fish. He doesn’t want to say kalamkari, but gives the Telugu names to
distinguish between the block print version of Pedana as adhakamu and the hand
drawn version of Kalahasti as vratha pani. Srikalahasti as he would insist we
call the town and not just Kalahasti, even today has a street called Vratha
Pani Veedhi, perhaps a testimony to the times a street where Kalamkari artists
lived, flourished.
“Kalahasti style was more than just an art. It was rather a
form of worship. It was a craft rooted in religion and flourished around places
o pilgrimage, which artistically portrayed mythological events either in
isolation or in a whole series relevant to the text” Mulk Raj Anand wrote I
Marg terming it an extension of temple art. (As quoted in Fabric Art:Heritage
of India by Sukaadas)
Today there are many who have learnt the art, practicing it
either as owners of small units that mass produce wall hangings, sarees,
stoles, fabrics, some who do is a daily wage earners or for monthly salaries,
and a handful who go on for national exhibitions with the status they have
earned as a national or state award winners.
This was all possible because of the small start made by
Jonnalagadda Lakshmanayya in 1957 starting a training center teaching five
students along with his son. With the association of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya
and national efforts to revive the art the training centre continued for
decades to train till it shut down as it was felt many have been trained and
the art form would survive through those who have already been trained.
Carrying on the legacy of grandfather Lakshmanayya and Gurrappa Chetty is Niranjan
Jonnalagadda who is the best known practitioner today and runs fine Kalamkari units in Srikalahasti.
Heartening such legacies continue. Lakshmi’s grandson has
also joined the family business, coming back to practice Kalamkari after
earning MBA degree from Tirupati.
The river waters of Swarnamukhi and the Krishna at Pedana
have important role in the process of Kalamkaris. The fabric needs to be washed
many a times in running water and without the water source to keep the organic
painting and printing on fabric difficult. Organic is no easy deal – the
ingredients have to come from an ayurdevic products dealer in Chennai. The
starting point for the fabric is a dunking in milk and karakka pindi
(Myrobalan). Two different pens or kalams made of bamboo sticks are used, one
for making the initial sketch and the other attached with a small bundle of
cloth for filling in the paints.
“You know there is science in this,” says a proud Chetty.
The butter in milk prevents colour from smudging when drawn on the cloth and
the black comes through a chemical reaction. The black colour used for drawing
the initial sketch comes from charcoal made of tamarind stems, and black for
highlighting and filing from a solution made of iron scrap and jaggery.
The black dye reacts with the Myrobalan in the fabric to give the pitch black
needed.
The colour scheme for them is the standard VIBGYOR – blue
from indigo to yellow from pomegranate peels to myrobalan flowers, the colours
used are all natural colours. Now, demand for brighter colours have induced a
units or artists at Srikalahasti to use chemical colours and even those who
stick to natural colour add a chemical colour of orange.
Srikalahsti as well as Pedana Kalamkaris have obtained Geographical Indicator (GI) tag and in fact both have a fight against those who use chemical colours. Threatened by the copy of hand drawn designs being produced on block prints from Pedana, Srikalahasti kalamkari workers are looking at legal option to save their craft.
Pedana’s block printing itself came up as a means to ramp up production to meet the demand of overseas buyers as Portugese and Dutch traded in Indian textiles from Coromandel Coast. The Qutb Shahi rulers of Golconda patronized the Pedana craft and the intricate floral motifs are attributed to Persian influence. Probably a period when the craft of Pedana and Srikalahasti diverged, latter being patronized by the Vijayanagara and later Nayaka rulers continued to be temple art. Or they could have been stylistically two separate streams as no written record on Srikalahasti are available prior to the early 19th century. (Sukaadas - Fabric Art:Heritage of India)
“Painted and printed calicoes constituted the most important class of Indian fabric exported from Surat in the seventeenth century. They coveted a wide range of quality, the best and more expensive being painted rather than printed. To the textile historian, the distinction is an important one. In the former case, dyes and mordants were applied to the cloth, not with a wood-bock, but free-hand with brush. Thus, each painted design had the character of individual drawing with the human and sensuous touch, instead of being limited to the repeat pattern imposed by the print-block. Sometimes painting and printing techniques were combined, but the finest decorative calicoes from both Western India and the Coromandel Coast were of the painted kind,” wrote John Irwin (Indian textile trade in the seventeenth century Western India – The Journal of Indian Textile Industry : Vol I, 1955).
But, Srikalahasti kalamkaris may not have been those
favoured Pintadoes, as Portugese called the painted calicos. “Unlike the
secular trend which attracted foreign attention for trade potential, the scope
of Kalahasti style wa confined to local consumption for its religious base,”
says Sukaadas.
The closeness of the Srikalahasti designs and the Nayaka
murals can be seen at places like Lepakshi. Number of temples around Srikalahasti
itself was large to be a captive market for kalamkari artists. The
way Srikalahasti Kalamkaris were used in temples has its equivalence in the
Pichhwais of Nathdwara in Rajasthan or Mata Ni Pachedis of Gujarat. Pedana’s
block print continued using predominantly floral designs and Srikalahasti
continued to paint images of Gods and Goddesses, scenes from Mahabharata and
Ramayana. Large canvasses on cloth continue to be painted showcasing entire
Ramayana or Mahabharata. The small room at Lakshmi’s was struggling with a 100
meter cloth where Mahabharata was being painted at the time of our visit. The
starting point for a canvas is always the image of Ganesha as is seen in a picture shared above.
After it moved from being temple art to adorning fabrics of ordinary mortals, artists like Chetty used their imagination to draw objects other than from the Puranas and Gods, like the traditional games, and even themes like a Cross. “It is a national and international craft … did Christian themes too,” says Chetty.
Lakshmi as someone marketing the products across cities worries about the duplicates and losing out to the fake, Chetty is looking at the issue of understanding and appreciation of the art. A Victoria & Albert Museum may still exhibit a grand painting of Chetty’s father or grandfather, but his own townspeople are not aware of the art. He wants to take it to the school children in his district and state, talk to them, show them what Kalamkari is, but who is willing to have a lec-dem on Kalamkari?
I can understand Chetty’s desire to connect with people to whom the art belongs – I lived all my school and college years less than 100 KMs from Srikalahasti without hearing a word about Kalamkari. Even today if you go to Srikalahasti the best way to buy a piece of Kalamkari is to go to the houses/units of one of the producers. It might be a temple town with lakhs of pilgrims visiting, but there aren’t any showrooms around.
Note: This is an unedited version of an article published earlier in the Creative Indiamag website. Sharing it here since the website is not functional anymore and the articles not archived.
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