Rajasthan, printed by hand

OSRI started with a small irritation. Growing up in Rajasthan, hand block printed cotton was simply what the house was made of — bedsheets, razais, the cloth over the table. Ordinary, everywhere, and made about forty kilometres away.

Then you move to a city like Bengaluru and find the same cloth sold as a curiosity: three times the price, described as artisanal, folded in tissue paper. Or you find the opposite — a screen printed imitation of a block print, at a price no hand printer could survive on.

We wanted a third option. Real block print, from the places that have always made it, at a price that lets you put it on the bed you sleep in every night rather than the one you keep for guests.

Where the cloth comes from

Block printing in Rajasthan is not one craft but several, and they do not look alike.

• Sanganeri — from Sanganer, just south of Jaipur. Fine floral repeats printed on a pale or white ground, with delicate outlines and a lot of small detail. This is the print most people picture when they picture Rajasthan.
• Bagru — from Bagru, west of Jaipur. Earthier, printed with natural dyes on a dyed ground, so the palette runs to madder red, indigo, black and cream rather than pastels.
• Buti work — the small repeating motif, printed across a plain ground. The most everyday of the three, and the hardest to place evenly, because every impression has to line up with the last one.

A single bedsheet takes hundreds of individual impressions, each one placed by hand against the last. That is why no two pieces match exactly, and why a slightly heavier print at one edge is the signature rather than the flaw.

How we sell it

In short runs. A design is printed in a limited batch, checked piece by piece, washed so it arrives soft and pre-shrunk, then folded and packed. When a batch is gone it may return months later, or not at all.

We would rather do that than hold a warehouse of stock and discount our way out of it. It does mean things sell out.

What we will not do

• Sell a screen printed imitation and call it hand block print.
• Blend polyester into something described as cotton.
• Inflate an MRP so a discount looks larger than it really is.
• Squeeze the printers to hit a price point. The craft only continues if the people doing it can make a living from it.

Where we are

The cloth is printed in Rajasthan. Orders are packed and shipped from Bengaluru, which is where you will reach a person if you write to us.

The first collection is being finished now. To hear when it goes live, leave your email on the homepage — or just write to us.