A real honour and pleasure to learn a centuries old craft from Master Sufiyan Khatri who caries his art from several generations of masters in Ajrakh printing. Along with his son and Parmeet Kaur Tesson, they tought us the steps and the concepts. While Block printing is an age old art in many part of India, the technique of Ajrakh printing differs from others by applying resist pastes and dying in vats instead of direct printing.
The technique involves three passages of blocks printing the same area inserted one into each other. Just as if that wasn’t hard enough, the traditional cloths are printed on both sides. This all seems literally impossible to do, until you watch master Sufiyan and his son do it with a surreal ease!! Every block has a different resist paste: simple resist for the outline, resist with alun for the second colour, iron for the black outline.
A first passage in the indigo vat, followed by another in a different colour and a final rinse reveals the final result: a patterned cloth with four different colours, the original from the cloth, blue, red (for the traditional cloths), and black. When you have practised vat colouring, this is akin to magic!
