Kalamkari is EVERYWHERE. You'll find it everywhere now. On kurti sets in malls, on tote bags at airports, on Instagram reels with trending audio, I mean I love Kalamkari and have been selling it for years. But which one is true kalamkari?
That its two most distinct forms are almost opposites of each other in their process, and that the name, which means pen work, technically applies to only one of them. And yet. Here we are.
Let me start at the beginning.
What Kalamkari Actually Means
Kalam is Persian for pen. Kari is craftsmanship. Together: pen work. The word came into use during the reign of the Golconda Sultanate, when Persian influence ran deep through the Deccan, through its architecture, its court language, its aesthetics to name a few. The artisans who created these fabric paintings were called qualamkars by the Mughals, and over time, the craft took the name of the tool at its centre.
Before it was called kalamkari, it seems like this art form went by other names. In Telugu, it was vraata pani translating roughly to “writing work”. Before that, it was pattachitra or “cloth picture” (explained in detail in the last blog post). It is one of those crafts old enough to have outlived several of its own names.
Two towns in Andhra Pradesh carry it now, each with a distinct identity, a separate GI tag, and a technique that could not be more different from the other. Srikalahasti and Machilipatnam. One using the hand and the latter using the block.
Srikalahasti
Srikalahasti is a temple town in Tirupati district. It is the birthplace of what I consider kalamkari in its truest, most literal sense. Kalamkari started off as a freehand painting on fabric using a bamboo or date palm kalam, dipped in natural dye, drawn directly onto cloth.
The process
The fabric is first treated with a mixture of cow dung, water, and buffalo milk, then dried in the sun. It acts as a mordant that allows the cloth to take the natural dyes The entire process involves somewhere between seventeen and twenty steps, depending on whom you ask, and a single piece can take weeks to complete.
The themes in Srikalahasti kalamkari are predominantly devotional. Scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Portraits of Shiva, Vishnu, Durga. Temple hangings, chariot banners, narrative scrolls that chitrakattis (communities of singers, painters, and storytellers) would carry from village to village, unrolling myth into movement.
The colours in original Kalamkari are earthy as the use Natural dyes - indigo, madder root, turmeric, iron acetate for the black outlines.
Machilipatnam
And then there is Machilipatnam.
Also in Andhra Pradesh, in Krishna district, closer to the coast. Also ancient. Also GI-tagged. Also called kalamkari. But here, the kalam is actually a block particularly, a hand-carved wooden block, pressed into natural dye and stamped onto the fabric.
Machilipatnam kalamkari, also called Pedana kalamkari after the nearby town where much of the craft is concentrated, grew under Mughal and Golconda patronage. The Islamic influence is visible everywhere - in the Persian-inspired florals, the symmetrical vines, the architectural borders.
So technically, there is no Kalam here.
Which brings us to the question. So… Is It Really Kalamkari?
Isn't it, though? Isn't it kalamkari?
This is the thing that nags at me. If the name means pen work, and the Machilipatnam style is primarily block-printed, then what exactly are we calling it? The purists will tell you the Srikalahasti style is the true kalamkari, that the pen is the point, that everything else is an extension, a liberality, a naming convention that got away from itself. There is logic in that.
But I find myself on the other side of the argument, or at least in the middle of it.
Because Machilipatnam kalamkari is hand-made. Deeply, painstakingly, irreducibly hand-made. The blocks are hand-carved. The dyes are natural. The printing is done by human hands reading the fabric, adjusting for texture, correcting for shift. In the Srikalahasti tradition, there is a version of the craft where block printing is also used for some parts of the pattern, with the kalam coming in for detail. The line between the two styles is not always a wall. It is sometimes a question of proportion.
The word kalamkari was given to this craft during a period of Persian and Mughal cultural dominance. It named the pen because the pen was what defined the art in the regions the namers were looking at. Machilipatnam's block-printing tradition existed alongside and in dialogue with that pen-based tradition, not as an imitation of it but as its own complete thing. The name stretched to cover both. Perhaps not precisely. But honestly.
Language does this. Names are always a little wrong. They capture one moment in a thing's evolution and hold it still while the thing keeps moving. Kalamkari is the pen. Machilipatnam knows this, has always known this, and has never stopped being kalamkari anyway.
Why Any of This Matters
There is a reason I keep returning to questions like this. The question of what something is actually called and why, of where a name comes from and what it forgets to mention. It matters because when we shop without this knowledge, we flatten. We call everything kalamkari and mean nothing specific by it. We buy the screen-printed imitation with synthetic dyes and think we have the real thing because the motif looks familiar.
Authentic Machilipatnam kalamkari smells faintly like the earth its dyes came from. Authentic Srikalahasti kalamkari carries the slight asymmetry of a hand that drew it. Neither is interchangeable with the fast-fashion version that borrows the visual language and discards everything that made the visual language worth borrowing.