Chandni Chowk Bazaar

Delhi’s sprawling Chandni Chowk Bazaar is a profusion of everything useful and decorative. Among other things, its multi-colored markets sell jewelry, bindi, fabrics, plumbing fixtures, wire mesh, cooking pots, spices, street food, text books, calendars and elegant wedding invitations.

A chaos of electric wiring arches over the narrow streets.

Kalpana Paper Factory -- A Feast for the Eyes

We visited the Kalpana Handmade Paper Factory in Sanganer, a village just outside Jaipur. Cotton remnants from textile producers are sorted and sifted  by hand.

The remnants are shreddded in this machine and then churned in water to make paper pulp to which dye is added.

Two men handle each screen, scooping up the heavy pulp from deep vats and depositing the sheets in a pile in a backbreaking rhythm. It is a wet and grueling job, freezing in the cooler weather. 

This machine’s roller flattens out the dried paper. One of the owners of this three-generation family-run factory, lost his forearm in this machine when he was younger.

This seed-flecked paper will be made into birthday cards that can be planted in the  garden.

Less-than-perfect papers are discounted or recycled back to pulp. From the room of imperfect papers I buy cilantro paper.

Papers are outsourced to a silk-screening business in the village to be printed. Silk-screened envelopes are ready for folding.

Mr. Saini with some of the patterned, screen-printed papers.

Trucking to Rajasthan

On our long drive to Jaipur a couple of weeks ago, we saw trucks decorated with colored tinsel, artificial flowers and stenciled, taped and painted decorations. I kept trying to photograph the truck fronts, their most decorated part, from the car, but was unable to snap a full frontal view of a prime specimen. 

Textile Research

We took the metro (women only in the first car) to see Threads of Change, Textile Cultures of North East India at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. The show featured woven fabrics from remote tribal areas. The instinct to make something beautiful seems universal. Why else go to the trouble of dyeing cotton and silk and weaving intricate and sophisticated patterns when simply functional cloth would suffice?

Then on to a great lunch at the Craft Museum. The Museum’s textile collection is fabulous, but sadly is terribly lit, and poorly labelled and displayed. I especially liked the diamond-gridded embroidered Punjabi Phulkari patterns, many in glorious marigold hues, but photography wasn’t allowed…. Here’s a sample in white from Sanskriti’s Textile Museum along with a few other fabric excerpts.

Starting with What's at Hand

I am here at Sanskriti with artists Adria Arch from Boston and Hartash Dale from London.  We have started to explore the grounds by making rubbings of some ceramic tiles and an unusual asymmetrical sewer grate. 

    

    

The shapes from the sewer grate suggest tri-cornered teeth, dog biscuits or cartoon trilobites.

The wonderful shadow puppets on display in the Sanskriti gallery are mostly from Andrah Pradesh. They are made from painted leather and jointed at head, limbs, wrist, elbow, shoulder, ankle, knee and hip for ease of animated action.