The History of Block Printing in India: The Craft, Its Journey & Revival

From ancient textile traditions to the workshops of Bagru and Sanganer, the history of block printing in India is a story of migration, royal patronage, regional identity and generations of artisans keeping an old craft alive.

There is something rather wonderful about the fact that one of India's most recognisable textile traditions begins with such a simple idea: carve a design into wood, dip it in colour and press it onto cloth. Of course, nothing about doing it well is simple.

The history of block printing in India stretches across centuries, regions and communities. It has travelled with artisans, adapted to changing tastes, moved from royal courts into everyday homes and, more recently, found its way into contemporary fashion and interiors.

The flowers on a block printed cushion may look decorative, but behind them sits a much longer story of trade, migration, craftsmanship and survival.

How Old Is Block Printing in India?

The exact beginnings of block printing in India are difficult to pin down. Textile printing has an ancient history across Asia, and India developed its own rich traditions over centuries. Government craft documentation places the practice in India at least as far back as the 12th century, while some sources suggest much older connections between printed textiles and the Indian subcontinent.

One of the traditions often discussed in this context is Ajrakh, the elaborate resist and block printing tradition associated with Sindh and, today, Kutch in Gujarat. Its history is deeply intertwined with communities who migrated across the region, carrying their knowledge of dyeing, printing and pattern-making with them.

This is one of the things that makes the history of Indian textiles so fascinating.

Craft rarely stays neatly inside a border.

Techniques travelled with people. They changed with geography, adapted to local materials and water, and developed different visual languages depending on who was buying the finished cloth.

What we now think of as “Indian block printing” is therefore not one single tradition, but a collection of regional practices that evolved over time.

The Mughal Influence

If earlier textile traditions laid the groundwork, the Mughal period had a profound influence on the visual language we now associate with Indian printed textiles.

The Mughal courts were great patrons of textiles, gardens, architecture and decorative arts. Floral motifs became particularly important, inspired by the natural world but rendered with a formal elegance: flowering plants, vines, leaves, paisleys and intricate repeats.

That influence can still be seen in Indian block prints today.

The Mughal period also coincided with India's growing importance in international textile trade. Indian cottons, particularly the finely printed and painted textiles known in European markets as chintz and calico, were prized across Asia, the Middle East and Europe for their colour, detail and relatively light weight.

India wasn't simply making textiles for itself. It was making textiles the world wanted.

That demand helped sustain an ecosystem of specialist craftspeople: block makers, printers, dyers and traders whose knowledge was passed from one generation to the next.

From Gujarat to Rajasthan

Many of the block printing traditions we associate with Rajasthan today have stories of migration behind them.

Sanganer is one of the clearest examples. Government craft records trace the development of Sanganeri printing to the late 17th century, when printers from Gujarat migrated to Rajasthan. The community that developed there helped establish Sanganer as one of India's major centres for hand block printing.

The craft developed a distinctive visual identity of its own:

• Fine floral motifs and delicate lines
• Butis, butas, vines, leaves and paisleys
• Fine cotton and silk fabrics
• Often a bright white or light-coloured ground
• Harmonious, relatively intricate repeats

Sanganer's location also mattered.    The availability and quality of water was important because textile printing involves repeated washing, drying and colour fixing. Even geography becomes part of the story.

Then there is Bagru, another celebrated printing centre near Jaipur.

Bagru became closely associated with the Chhipa community and developed a very different visual vocabulary. Earthier colours, natural dyes and resist techniques such as Dabu, where a mud mixture prevents dye from reaching certain parts of the fabric, became hallmarks of the tradition.

The difference between the two is part of what makes them so interesting.

Two towns in the same region, two very different ways of interpreting the same basic craft.

Indian Block Printing Is Not One Craft

It is tempting to talk about “Indian block printing” as though it were one uniform technique.It isn't.

Across India, different communities developed their own combinations of blocks, dyes, resists, motifs and methods. Some of the best-known traditions include:

• Sanganeri printing, Rajasthan: Fine floral motifs, delicate outlines and lighter grounds.
• Bagru printing, Rajasthan: Earthier colours, natural dyes and resist techniques including Dabu.
• Ajrakh, Gujarat and Sindh: Complex resist and dyeing processes, deep indigo, red and black, and highly geometric designs.
• Bagh printing, Madhya Pradesh: Known for rich natural colours and distinctive geometric and floral patterns.
• Farrukhabad printing, Uttar Pradesh: Particularly associated with fine floral and botanical designs.
• Kalamkari, Andhra Pradesh: A related hand-painted and block-printed textile tradition with its own long history and visual language.

The important thing is not to treat these as variations of exactly the same craft.

Each one is a record of a particular place, its materials and the people who made it.

The People Behind the Prints

It is easy, especially when looking at a beautiful finished textile, to imagine that block printing is simply a matter of carving a pretty wooden block and stamping it onto fabric.

There is an entire ecosystem behind that one impression.

There are designers who create the motifs, block makers who translate those designs into carved wood, printers who build the pattern onto cloth, dyers who understand how colour behaves, and families who carry this knowledge forward.

The blocks themselves are another craft entirely. Traditionally, they are carved from seasoned woods such as teak and sheesham. Government craft documentation describes the blocks being carefully carved, drilled for airflow and then soaked in oil to condition the wood and improve its durability.

And the printing itself requires extraordinary repetition and precision.

A single design can require several blocks, each responsible for a different part of the pattern. In Bagru printing, for example, government documentation describes sets including Rekh for the outline, Gadh for the background and Datta for detailing.

The pattern may repeat, but the hand doing the repeating never becomes mechanical.

When the Craft Began to Disappear

For centuries, block printing survived because there was a market for it. Then the market changed.

Industrial manufacturing brought machine-made textiles that could reproduce patterns faster and more cheaply. Traditional patronage systems declined, consumer preferences shifted and handmade printing became increasingly difficult to compete with on price.

By the 1970s, Jaipur's block printing industry was described as being at a particularly low ebb. Modern manufacturing had marginalised handmade practices, traditional patronage had largely disappeared and customers were diminishing.

The craft itself had not disappeared. The problem was that the people making it could no longer depend on it to make a living. And this is where the story takes an interesting turn.

The People Who Helped Bring Block Printing Back

The survival of block printing was not inevitable. It depended partly on people who recognised that the answer was not to preserve the craft in a glass case, but to find it a place in contemporary life.

Two names are particularly interesting here: Anokhi and Brigitte Singh.

Anokhi: Giving the Craft a New Market

In 1970, John and Faith Singh founded Anokhi in Jaipur, at a time when the city's block printing industry was struggling. Rather than treating traditional printing as something that belonged only to the past, they began working directly with block carvers, printers, dyers, embroiderers and other craftspeople around Jaipur.

The idea was relatively simple but important: create contemporary products around traditional skills and, in doing so, create sustained work for the people who possessed those skills.

Anokhi began with small clothing collections, taking traditional techniques and giving them a more contemporary design language. The brand eventually expanded into home furnishings and built a wider audience for Jaipur's handmade textiles.

Anokhi helped create a market for the craft at a time when that market was disappearing.

The story continued with the Anokhi Museum of Hand Printing, which opened in 2005 and created a dedicated space for documenting and celebrating the history and techniques of hand printing.

Brigitte Singh: A New Way of Seeing Sanganer

Around the same period, another story was unfolding in Jaipur.

Brigitte Singh, a French art student, arrived in Jaipur in 1980 to study Indian miniature painting. While looking for handmade paper, she encountered the traditional textile printing of Sanganer and became fascinated by the craft. She eventually established her own studio and stayed on in Jaipur.

Her work developed a very distinctive vocabulary, drawing particularly on the botanical and floral traditions of historic Indian textiles and Mughal painting. She became known for extraordinarily fine block printing and an almost quiet precision in her designs.

Singh's contribution was different from Anokhi's.

Where Anokhi helped create a contemporary market, Brigitte Singh helped show how far the visual language of traditional block printing could evolve.

Her work demonstrated that a craft could remain painstakingly handmade while looking entirely at home in a modern context. Her own account of arriving in Sanganer describes learning from both historical textile examples and the living craft skills of the artisans who could still recreate them.

Neither story, of course, exists without the artisans themselves.

The designers could create new demand and new ways of seeing the craft, but the knowledge still belonged to the printers, dyers and block makers who had carried it forward.

Revival is never the work of one person. It is what happens when an old skill finds new people who value it, new uses for it and, most importantly, a reason to keep making it.

Why Block Printing Survived

There is something particularly satisfying about the fact that block printing did not survive by remaining frozen in time. It adapted.

Traditional motifs were reworked. New colours entered the vocabulary. Prints moved from saris and odhnis into dresses, scarves, cushions, quilts and table linen. What was once made for royal households and local communities found new audiences around the world.

And yet the fundamental process remained remarkably unchanged.A design is carved into wood. Colour is prepared. The block is pressed onto fabric.Then it is lifted and positioned again.And again. And again. That tension between repetition and individuality is perhaps the heart of the craft. f you want to see what actually happens between the carved block and the finished textile, we’ve gone deeper into how block printing is actually done.

Every impression is intended to match the one before it, but no two are ever completely identical. A tiny variation in pressure, colour or alignment remains visible to the eye. Today, that is precisely what many of us value.

Why We Love Block Prints at Deodar

We love block printing for its history, certainly. But we also love what happens when an old craft is allowed to move forward.

Our approach has always been to take the beauty and character of traditional Indian crafts and give them a more contemporary place in the modern Indian home.

That is the thinking behind most of our collections, traditional Indian craft interpreted through a more contemporary lens, designed for the way we live now.

You can see this approach across our of Cushion Covers, Bed Linen and Table Linen collections, where hand block printing sits alongside different fabrics, colours and silhouettes. Our Block Print Cushion Covers, for instance, range from floral prints on slub cotton to linen to richer cotton velvet versions, while our Bed Linen collection brings the technique into quilted bedspreads and contemporary bedding.

We aren't drawn to block printing simply because it looks beautiful. We like what it brings with it: a sense of history, a little irregularity and the feeling that something was made rather than manufactured.

A block printed cushion can sit on a modern sofa. A printed bedspread can soften an otherwise simple bedroom. A tablecloth can make an ordinary Tuesday dinner feel slightly more considered. We’ve written  about the power of textiles to transform a room block prints just happen to do it beautifully.

Block Prints are versatile like few other crafts, slipping just as easily into English Country, Cottage and Farmhouse interiors as they do into French Country, rustic, coastal and more contemporary homes.

That is perhaps why block printing continues to feel so relevant. It has survived because it has remained useful, beautiful and adaptable.

The blocks have changed. The colours have changed. The fabrics have changed. The homes they enter have certainly changed.

And after all these centuries, perhaps the best way to honour the tradition is to let it find new expressions in the homes of today.