Kalamkari

Srikalahasti style of Kalamkari, where the "kalam" or pen is used for freehand drawing of the subject and filling in the colours, is entirely hand worked.

The style owes its present status to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay who popularised the art as the first chairperson of the All India Handicrafts Board.

[6] Historically, Kalamkari used to be termed as Pattachitra, an art form still found in neighbouring Odisha and other parts of India and Nepal.

[12] Kalamkari is an ancient textile printing art form that evolved about 3000 years ago in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

The attractive blend of colours on the fabrics usually portrays characters from the Indian mythology, with the divinity figures of Brahma, Saraswati, Ganesh, Durga, Shiva and Parvati as the main source of inspiration.

The Kalahasti artists generally depict on the cloth the deities, scenes from the epic Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Puranas and other mythological classics mainly producing scrolls, temple backcloths, wall hangings, chariot banners and the like.

Progressively, during the course of history, they illustrated their accounts using large bolts of canvas painted on the spot with rudimentary means and dyes extracted from plants.

With the advent of the Mughal Empire, after Aurangzeb conquered the region in 1687, a new style emerged in Machilipatnam work which represented personal portraits of the emperors along with panels depicting sagas of their rule and daily life, and the richness of their courts.

[13] In the Middle Ages, the term was also used to refer to the making of any cotton fabric patterned through the medium of vegetable dyes by free-hand and block-printing, produced in many regions of India.

[16] Afterwards, the red, black, brown, and violet portions of the designs are outlined with a mordant and cloth are then placed in a bath of alizarin.

[18] Dyes for the cloth are obtained by extracting colours from various roots, leaves, and mineral salts of iron, tin, copper, and alum.

[19] In recent times, many aesthetically good figures such as musical instruments, small animals, flowers, Buddha and few Hindu symbols, like swastika are also introduced to Kalamkari.

Yellow dyes are made from dried flowers called aldekai (Telugu) or kadukai (Tamil) of the myrobalam, Terminalia chebula.

[citation needed] Nowadays, in India, silk, mulmul, cotton, and synthetic saris are also sold with Kalamkari print.