Textile

বালুচরি, তাঁত ও জামদানি

Baluchari, Tant and Jamdani

Baluchar (Murshidabad) and Bishnupur; Shantipur, Phulia and Dhaniakhali; Dhaka

Where it stands

Evolving

Amitava Pal, Bishnupur, weaver leading the revival of old-style Baluchari; and the Phulia and Shantipur weaver clusters in Nadia

A Baluchari sari from Bishnupur, with the framed figurative registers on the pallu that copy the local terracotta plaques.Sumita Roy Dutta, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Durga Puja is Bengal's fashion season, with a calendar of its own, collections arrive around Rath Yatra in midsummer and the rush peaks in the fortnight before Mahalaya. Three cloths carry it. Baluchari, a Bishnupur silk brocade whose pallu is woven with figurative panels of the Ramayana, court life and colonial officers, copied from the terracotta temples down the road. Tant, Bengal's crisp everyday handloom cotton, and the red-bordered white tant sari of Ashtami morning is, after the idol itself, the most recognisable image of the festival. And Jamdani, supplementary-weft figured muslin in which every motif is inserted by hand, thread by thread, with no jacquard and no shortcut.

ইতিহাস History

Where it came from

Three cloths carry the Bengali festival wardrobe, and they have separate histories.

Baluchari is the youngest and the most literary. It is named for Baluchar, a village in Murshidabad near the Nawabi capital, where a figured silk brocade was woven in the eighteenth century under court patronage. Its pallu carries framed narrative panels — the Ramayana and Mahabharata, but also nawabi court scenes, women smoking hookahs, Europeans in carriages, and railway engines — and the strongest reading is that the weavers were copying the terracotta plaques of the temples they knew. Floods on the Bhagirathi in the nineteenth century destroyed Baluchar and dispersed the weavers. The craft was effectively dead by the early twentieth century, and was reconstructed at Bishnupur: the artist Subho Tagore brought the master weaver Akshay Kumar Das to learn jacquard weaving, and Das returned to Bishnupur and rebuilt the cloth on jacquard looms with the backing of Hanuman Das Sarda of the Silk Khadi Seva Mandal. Bishnupur is now effectively the only place authentic Baluchari is woven. It received a geographical indication in 2011, under application number 173.

Tant is the everyday cotton handloom of Bengal, and its centres are older than any of this. Weaving at Shantipur in Nadia is documented from the fifteenth century — the oldest date usually cited is 1409 — and it is mentioned in Advaita Mangal, the life of the Vaishnava teacher Advaita Acharya (1460–1558). Shantipur exported through the Mughal and early colonial periods. After 1947, weavers displaced from Tangail in East Bengal settled around Shantipur and Phulia and brought the Tangail idiom with them, which is why Phulia now weaves a jacquard-and-jamdani hybrid rather than pure Shantipuri cloth. Santipore saree took a GI in 2009 (application 138), Dhaniakhali saree in 2012 (application 176).

Jamdani is the oldest and the most technically extreme: figured muslin, woven around Dhaka, patronised by imperial Mughal warrant and probably named in Persian under Akbar or Jahangir. UNESCO inscribed the traditional art of jamdani weaving in 2013; Bangladesh gave it the country's first geographical indication in 2016.

Weaving a Baluchari at the loom; since the 1950s revival the figured pallu has been produced on jacquard.PRITAMDUTTA20, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

সংস্কৃতি Culture

Who does it, and who used to

Weaving in Bengal is the work of the Tanti caste and, in the eastern districts and in Bangladesh, very largely of Muslim weaver families; the Dhaka jamdani trade has been overwhelmingly Muslim for centuries. It is household production. A loom sits in the house; the weaver at the loom is usually a man, and almost every preparatory process — winding, warping, sizing, filling bobbins, drawing the naksha graph — is done by women and children who are not counted as weavers. The Fourth All India Handloom Census of 2019–20 found that nearly seventy-two per cent of handloom workers in India are women and that 88.7 per cent of weaver households are rural.

Durga Puja is the industry's whole year compressed into eight weeks. Collections are timed to arrive around Rath Yatra in midsummer, orders peak in the fortnight before Mahalaya, and the specific costume of the festival is fixed and universally legible: the white tant sari with a red border, worn on Ashtami morning, is after the idol itself the most recognisable image of the festival. New clothes for everyone in the household are not optional — they are the observance, and a family that cannot manage them is understood to be in difficulty.

The trade's dependence on this single season is also its weakness. A bad Puja is a bad year, and the weaver, who sells to a mahajan and not to the wearer, is the person who absorbs it.

Jamdani weaving at Narayanganj: two weavers at one loom, inserting each motif by hand with pointed bamboo sticks.Wasiul Bahar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

তাৎপর্য Significance

Why this, and not something else

These are the three things a Bengali festival wardrobe is measured against, and each is a different argument about what cloth is for. Tant is the argument for the everyday: crisp, cheap, cool, worn to death and replaced, and carrying in its red-and-white Ashtami form the single most legible costume in the festival. Jamdani is the argument against efficiency. Every motif is inserted by hand with a bamboo point, thread by thread, with no jacquard and no punch card; the fabric is what supplementary-weft figuring looks like when nobody has permitted a machine to intervene. Baluchari is the argument for narrative — a garment that carries framed pictorial panels of the Ramayana, of nawabi courts, of Europeans in carriages, so that a woman wearing one is wearing a storyboard copied off a temple wall.

Together they make the point that Bengal's textile tradition is not decorative but documentary. It records what the weaver saw. And because the Puja is the season when everyone buys cloth, the tradition is renewed annually by ordinary purchase rather than by patronage, which is the only reason any of it still exists.

A Swarnachari from Bishnupur: the same narrative brocade as Baluchari, figured in gold and silver zari.Bodhisattwa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

কীভাবে How it is made

The work itself

Tant is plain-weave cotton on a pit loom (gorto tant), with the border and pallu figured by extra warp and weft; Shantipuri cloth runs to 100 by 100 counts and beyond, and keeps its reed marks. Jamdani is a discontinuous supplementary weft: two weavers sit at one loom with a paper naksha graph beneath the warp and insert each motif individually, interlacing a thicker thread into the fine ground with pointed bamboo sticks and separate spools, with no jacquard and no shuttle for the pattern. A sari can take months. Baluchari is a silk brocade: the pallu's figurative panels, the butidar field and the kalka borders were originally woven on a drawloom with a naksha-master calling the lifts, and are now produced on jacquard, which cut weaving time to about five or six days with two weavers working in shifts. Swarnachari is the same cloth figured with gold and silver zari. Bishnupur silk is degummed, dyed and warped locally.

তাঁতTant: Loom; by extension the crisp everyday cotton handloom sari of Bengal, woven chiefly in Nadia and Hooghly.
জামদানিJamdani: Figured muslin in which each supplementary-weft motif is inserted by hand with a bamboo point, with no jacquard.
বালুচরিBaluchari: Bishnupur silk brocade whose pallu carries framed narrative panels; named for Baluchar village in Murshidabad.
স্বর্ণচরিSwarnachari: Baluchari figured in gold and silver zari instead of coloured silk; the most expensive version of the cloth.
নকশাNaksha: The design, and specifically the graph or point-paper pattern laid under the warp that the jamdani weavers count from.
আঁচলAnchal / pallu: The decorated end panel of a sari, and the field on which Baluchari puts its pictorial registers.
গর্ত তাঁতGorto tant: The pit loom, sunk into the floor of the house so the weaver's feet reach the treadles.
মহাজনMahajan: The master-trader who supplies yarn on credit and buys the finished cloth; the reason the weaver rarely meets the wearer.

কাহিনি The stories

What people tell each other about it

A dead cloth brought back on a jacquard

By the early twentieth century Baluchari had stopped being woven. The Murshidabad village that gave it its name had gone to the Bhagirathi's floods and the weavers had scattered. The revival was deliberate and documented: the artist Subho Tagore arranged for the master weaver Akshay Kumar Das to learn jacquard weaving, and Das took the technique back to Bishnupur, where Hanuman Das Sarda of the Silk Khadi Seva Mandal put it on the local looms. The cloth that resulted is not identical to the eighteenth-century original — jacquard replaced the drawloom — but it is the reason Baluchari exists at all, and Bishnupur is now the only place it is authentically made.

Temple walls on a pallu

Baluchari's narrative panels are the only Indian sari tradition that reads like architecture, and the likeliest explanation is that it is architecture. The Malla temples at Bishnupur are faced with terracotta plaques set in framed registers — battle scenes, court scenes, boats, the Ramayana — and Baluchari's pallu arranges exactly the same subjects in exactly the same framed registers. Later Murshidabad pieces added what the weavers were actually looking at in the nineteenth century: nawabs on cushions, women smoking hookahs, Europeans in carriages, and a railway engine. The sari is a portable record of what Bengal saw between the seventeenth century and the arrival of the train.

Two weavers, one loom, no machine

Jamdani is figured by discontinuous supplementary weft, which means that every motif on the cloth is inserted separately by hand. Two weavers sit at one loom with a paper graph, the naksha, laid under the warp. For each motif they count the ground threads, lift them with a fine pointed bamboo stick, and lay in a thicker thread from a small individual spool. There is no jacquard, no punch card and no pattern shuttle. A dense sari takes months. UNESCO inscribed the practice in 2013, and Bangladesh made jamdani its very first geographical indication in 2016; senior weavers there are reported earning 2,500 to 3,000 taka a month.

The red border on Ashtami morning

The single most reproduced image of Durga Puja after the idol is a woman in a white cotton tant sari with a red border, holding anjali flowers on Ashtami morning. The cloth is ordinary — plain-weave Bengal handloom from Shantipur, Phulia or Dhaniakhali, the kind that used to cost a few hundred rupees — and its authority comes entirely from its association with the rite rather than from any expense. It is one of the few garments in India that functions as a uniform without ever having been prescribed, and it sustains the Nadia and Hooghly looms through the eight weeks that decide their year.

দেখুন Watch

Weaving Tales of Cloth: Baluchari Saree of West BengalCCRT OFFICIAL CHANNELDocumentary made under the Centre for Cultural Resources and Training, a Ministry of Culture body; covers the Bishnupur looms in detail.

Traditional art of Jamdani weavingUNESCOUNESCO's own nomination film for the 2013 inscription, showing the two-weaver supplementary-weft method at working speed.

Baluchari: History on SilkPeepul Tree WorldA short, accurate account of the Murshidabad origin, the floods, and the Bishnupur revival, useful as an overview.

এখন Now

What state it is in

The Fourth All India Handloom Census (2019–20) recorded 2,83,404 handlooms in West Bengal supporting about 6,39,332 people, with roughly 3.4 lakh weaver households — one of the four largest concentrations in India. The individual centres are thinner than that sounds. Dhaniakhali had about 733 working weavers in 2007–08 and 333 by 2013–14, with more recent figures of around 900 weavers and 1,000 ancillary workers across Hooghly. Bishnupur's handloom sector supports about 15,000 people. GI protection exists — Santipore saree 2009, Baluchari 2011, Dhaniakhali saree 2012, and jamdani in Bangladesh from 2016 with UNESCO inscription in 2013 — and has done little for wages. Bangladeshi jamdani weavers are reported earning 2,500 to 3,000 taka a month, which pushes the young into garment factories. Powerloom and mill-printed copies of tant and Baluchari are sold openly in the Puja market. The GI tag protects the name; nobody has yet made it protect the weaver.

Sources for this page

Beforeকাঁথা ও নকশি কাঁথাKantha and Nakshi Kantha After যাত্রাJatra (Folk Opera)