26
Nurturing Traditions
Our tryst with hand-block printing goes back
several generations. Being from the Khatri
community from Kutch in Gujarat, my
forefathers specialised in hand-block printing
as a hereditary craft alongside looking after
their fields. My great grandfather migrated to
Mumbai about a century ago, and established
one of the earliest hand-block printing units
in the city in Mohammad Ali Road. The family
members continued the practice and I grew
up watching all the activities related to block
printing around me. When in my teenage years,
my father became seriously unwell, I started
assisting with the process and thus learnt the
technique and its finer details first-hand from
my grandfather and father.
Just like me, my son Sarfaraz, now 38, also
grew up seeing all the activities related to hand-
block printing. Today, we and our team of
artisans have a busy unit in the same area and
carry forward our family’s tradition of hand-
block printing. Our unit is named Pracheen,
that means ancient in Hindi, and this alludes to
the ancient practice of hand-block printing that
our family has traditionally practised.
Change for Progress
However, there is a difference in our practice
from that of my grandfather’s and father’s
generations. In about the mid-20th century,
with the ease of availability of acid dyes and
the ease of using acid dyes, they came to be
used for hand-block printing. In the mid-
1990s, a client seeing our work suggested we
try hand-block printing with natural dyes. As I
was always keen to experiment I was intrigued
by the idea. So I went to Mr Nisar Sikandar, a
supplier of natural ingredients and got some
natural dyes and basic recipes from him.
Enthused by the possibility of working with
natural dyes, I experimented with the dyes
using
madder
or
mangishtha
for obtaining a
deep red,
catechu
for brown,
mehendi
for green,
pomegranate skin for yellow, and natural
indigo for shades of blue. Over the following
two weeks I made a few sample hand-block
printed textiles with motifs using natural dyes. I
returned to Nisarbhai with the samples eager to
