So what was I doing in India? Well, the nominal excuse for travel was to see Indian fabric printing processes, thanks to two friends, one of whom who imports the wooden blocks and does custom block designs, and the other designs and imports block-printed quilts. (I am just amazed at the many cool things my friends do!)

You’ve had some glimpses of the workshops in the post on Bagru, but here’s a more detailed look at the whole process.

First, you need to carve the block. This man is a master carver giving a demonstration at the Anokhi Museum of Hand Printing in Amber, Rajasthan. The white coating on the block helps the carver see the design develop and is washed off before the block is used for printing. He holds a fairly heavy metal bar in one hand and his chisel in the other, striking the chisel precisely to make these incredibly fine incisions.

If you look carefully you can see how the design is penciled onto the whole block.

The small paisley design and the flower in the top photo are from the Anokhi Museum. (The largest block is an antique, and the other three are from The Indian Block Company.) All the workshops we visited had piles of fantastically textured blocks that were just begging to be photographed, so here are some unedifying but pretty pictures:

The next step is for the printers to prepare the fabric. Sometimes it is dyed beforehand, but usually it is prepared with a mordant, then the blocks are used to print the pattern for resist-dying. The fabric is prepared in vats like this:

Here is the entrance to one of the “factories,” which are really extended family homes devoted to the fabric printing process:

(Tourists do not go here. We had a train of fascinated children following us the entire time.)

This gentleman is sitting in an alcove just inside the door. He has printed the fabric with a gluey mix that sticks to the fabric while it is dyed. The mixture is washed off afterward, and wherever you see a pattern now will be white in the end. In the photo he is dusting ground wheat (some sort of sandy-textured grain that has spoiled and is no longer good for food) over the freshly-printed resist. Here is the courtyard just past his alcove:

Notice the fabrics hung over the balcony to dry. Upstairs there is a room with long tables for more printing

and several women sitting in a sort of balcony-hall at low printing tables.

They align the blocks without hesitating, strike once with the heel of the hand to set and loosen it, sweep the block back to the dye tray, and smoothly align it again. Thunk, swish, dab, thunk. Smooth as dancers.
Next the fabric goes to the dye bath. In this case, an indigo bath.

 A white silk resist-printed sari.

 Into the indigo vat.

 Rinsing.

Laying out to dry after 3 dips in the dye bath. See how the parts that were printed are now white? (Well, whitish.)

When they want to get the white parts really white the cloth is soaked in tubs with (judging by the smell) some small amount of chlorine bleach. They also use lime for something, but I didn’t understand that part. Sorry! A lot of cloth goes back to the printers at this point and gets a second or third color added, and another layer of detail goes into the design. You’ll see what I mean when I show you the fabrics that I bought.

So there you have it, the basic process by which block-printed fabric is produced. Whew! I still dislike those bedspreads, but I’m awed by the amount of work that goes into them

Let’s see, I last wrote the night before we left Jaipur for the Camel Fair. The next morning I woke up feeling a bit off, and half an hour before we were due to get on the bus for a 5 hour ride, “Delhi belly” hit with a vengeance. God bless the doctor at the Bangor Immunization Clinic who politely insisted that I take some Cipro with me ‘just in case.’ I took it immediately with Immodium, as instructed, and made it all the way to Pushkar without incident. Discomfort, yes. For about two days I ate nothing but nan (bread) and water. But I only lost one day to illness. Thank you doctor!

I don’t know how to describe Pushkar to you. Imagine a State Fair, with livestock competitions, handicrafts, vendors, fried dough, snacks…. but instead of sheep there are camels. Thousands of them. All decorated and dressed to the nines.

Some had patterns shaved all over! (The light brown is hair, the black is camel skin.)
There are horses and cows, too, by the hundreds. And instead of 4H groups and farmers, there are nomads from the Thar Desert.
There were three ferris wheels

camel cart rides

monkeys

and a parade of men doing a Rajasthani camel dance

and in the evening there were fireworks over the sacred lake.

The lake is surrounded by ghats, which are essentially marble stairs going down to the water. This is a very holy place in the Hindu religion – one removes one’s shoes before descending. The ghats were lit with small oil lamps. All the little yellow lights in the photo above are these:

It was our first peaceful moment in India and we savored it.

The next day we drove back to Jaipur, but detoured through Bagru. See, we’re textile fiends on this trip, and Bagru is a center of block-printed fabric production. It is not a tourist destination. Twelve foreign women stuck out as if there had been a spotlight on us. We saw the block-printing “factories”

and silkscreening

and indigo dyeing

and tailoring.

The children discovered us almost as soon as we got off the bus, and I apparently have some magnetic attraction for them. While waiting to go into the first house, I noticed they were interested in the screen on my camera, so I took a picture of one of them and showed it to him.

He thought that was marvelous, and his friends laughed and laughed and then everybody wanted their photo taken.

And then we realized that nobody in the village has a camera, and they’ve never seen themselves before. It was the most marvelous parlor game! I wished desperately there were some way to give them prints.
After that, in every house we visited (because the factories are actually people’s homes) we made friends with our cameras. In the last house the women were preparing fabric for tie dyeing.

They would put a grain of rice under the cloth, then wrap a string tightly around it so it made a little bump.

One by one various family members slipped in to the tiny courtyard

and had their photos taken. Even the grandmothers came out!

When I took this woman’s photo

she was so excited she seized my camera and ran off to show a woman across the room. The camera strap, of course, was still around my wrist, so I got dragged along in her wake!
When it was time for us to go, the children brought out their parrot to pose for photos. The bird would not cooperate, which led to much confusion and shrieking and laughter.

About twenty people eventually stood on the front steps waving goodbye to us. I will never forget the children of Bagru.

Some other time we’ll talk about the raw sewage in the street and the feral pigs rooting in the garbage piles outside the houses and how those ancient grandmothers are probably only 50 years old and the diseases and parasites those lovely children have and how tiny and damp and empty the houses were.

But only if we really have to.

This is my first chance to post since arrival, and it will be two days before I get another internet connection, so it will be a long post.

Since arriving in India I have seen two baboons, several monkeys, two wild peacocks, horses, camels, sacred cows, water buffalo, mynah birds, Indian chipmunks,

wild parrots, a funeral procession, a (different) funeral pyre, a religious parade,

one person pooping by the side of the road, numerous men peeing on walls, rubies, emeralds, gold embroidered saris,

birds feeding on a dead dog, a traveling puppet show,

finely detailed sandalwood carving, marble inlaid with gemstones in intricate patterns,

bicycle-powered rickshaw taxis, natural-gas-powered minicabs,

trucks painted in cheerful patterns,

rapacious salesmen, trickles of foul water seeping from under piles of garbage, incense burned on the fruit vendor stands to keep the bugs away, hovels, straw huts, shacks, houses, walled cities,

palatial hotels

and ruined palaces.

And the Taj Mahal.

I am traveling with a pack of Brits, and we all agree that we are GOBSMACKED.

Tomorrow we leave Jaipur for the Pushkar Camel Fair in the Thar Desert.