Historically, the Indian subcontinent has been a source of many unique and innovative textiles, famed and desired around the world. It is only chintz, however, that earned itself the tag of having ‘changed the world’.
Chintz, polished cotton of verdant foliage and leaves coloured in multiple rich hues, was unlike anything Europeans had known. Its lustrous beauty evoked visions of strange cultures and unknown lands.
International Quilt Study Centre and Museum
Chintz, also known as kalamkari, is a hand painted mordant and resist-dyed cotton from India that achieved such heights of perfection in beauty and was so coveted around the world that it was banned in parts of Europe, in fear that it would bring local economies to collapse. In France women wore chintz in the face of severe punishment, even death. The quest to imitate this cloth in Europe sparked technical innovations that ushered in the Industrial Revolution.
In a broad sense, chintz denotes an Indian patterned textile, typically made of cotton. The intricate patterns are achieved through a series of stages involving painting and/or printing, along with various dyeing, mordanting, and resist-dyeing techniques. Over time, industrial processes began to imitate these traditional methods. Kalamkari specifically refers to the hand-drawn and painted variations of chintz.
From a technical standpoint, both chintz and kalamkari describe the multi-stage process used to decorate a plain textile, although these terms are often used interchangeably for the finished textile itself. The process involves the application of materials using a wooden block or bamboo pen known as kalam. This application either directly dyes the textile, encourages dye adherence through a mordant such as alum, or inhibits dye absorption by applying a resist, such as wax.
Finding a way of describing the chintz process succinctly but accurately is a continuing problem. 'Painted cotton' has traditionally been used to differentiate chintzes from printed textiles, but to western readers this implies the use of a brush rather than the blunt-ended bamboo stick of the kalam or pen with which the outlines of the designs are drawn and the mordanted areas filled in. 'Painting' also suggests the direct application of colour, which is not a major feature of these textiles - it is the mordant that is applied with the kalam; the dyes, both red and blue, are applied by immersion in a vat, with only yellow (and occasionally indigo) being painted onto the surface where necessary.
Rosemary Crill
Senior Curator for South Asia, V&A Museum
