With the advent of technology and to keep up with growing demand, Kalamkari — the hand-painted or block-printed cotton textile art, is being replaced by mechanised production where chemical dyes and screen-printing are used. Instead of designing on the cloth using a pen, the mechanised technique involves creating digital prints and then making large stencils.
The reason for the shift to mechanised way of producing cotton textile is because crafting the material by hand takes a longer time. The fabric has to be first soaked in buffalo milk and cow dung before being washed. The colors used on the fabric are also natural and it takes four or five days to produce one original hand block-printed kalamkari durrie or saree. Now, its mechanised counterpart does not use natural colours, obviously to cut costs.
The tedious process in the natural hand block method also reflects in its cost. While a meter of hand block-printed Kalamkari fabric would cost Rs 150 to Rs 170, it would cost around Rs 80 for the screen-printed variety.
