Every Madhavam bedsheet begins the same way it has for centuries: a hand-carved wooden block, a vat of dye, and a printer's steady hand. This is the story of that craft — hand block printing, as it has been practised in and around Jaipur, Rajasthan, long before it became a pattern on a bedsheet.
Where It Began
Block printing on cloth has been part of Rajasthan's textile history since at least the 16th century, when artisans worked with hand-carved teakwood blocks and natural, plant-based dyes. The Mughal courts took a particular interest in the craft, and block-printed textiles soon found their way into palace interiors and onto trade routes reaching Persia, Egypt and beyond.
Sanganer, a small town on Jaipur's outskirts, became one of the craft's great centres toward the end of the 17th century, when printers from Gujarat migrated there and settled in. Jaipur's position on India's trade routes, and the strength of its artisan guilds, helped the city grow into one of the subcontinent's major printing centres — a reputation it still holds today.
Two Courts, One Craft
Ask a printer in Jaipur and they'll tell you there isn't one tradition, but at least two. Sanganeri work is known for its delicate, closely spaced floral motifs — butis and butas — printed in soft pastels on a bright white ground, patterns once reserved for royal households and courtiers. Bagru, a town a little further from Jaipur, built its name on something bolder: geometric patterns in deep indigo and madder red, often finished with the dabu technique, where a mud-and-gum paste resists the dye to leave sharp, clean outlines. Two courts, two registers — one quiet, one bold — and both still very much alive.
The Making of a Print
A single block can take a carver days or weeks to finish, cut by hand from well-seasoned teak or sheesham. Printing itself starts long before any colour touches the cloth: the fabric is washed, treated and sometimes soaked in a mordant that will later help the dye bind and hold. Then comes the print table, the block, and a steady rhythm of hand and eye — a single length of fabric can take hundreds of individual impressions to complete, each one placed by hand against the one before it.
The dyes themselves come from the same sources they always have: indigo for blue, madder root for red, turmeric and pomegranate rind for warmer tones, iron for black. After printing, the cloth is sun-dried, steamed to set the colour, washed again, and pressed — a process that can take days from first block to finished fabric.
A Living Tradition
The craft has had to adapt. Cheaper machine-printed imitations and synthetic dyes have put real pressure on hand block printing over the past few decades, and many printing families have seen their incomes squeezed as a result. At the same time, there's been a renewed appetite — in India and abroad — for genuinely handmade, naturally dyed textiles, and Bagru's printing tradition was granted a Geographical Indication tag in 2024, formally recognising and protecting what generations of karigars have built.
That's the tradition Madhavam's own bedsheets come out of — hand block-printed cotton, made in and around Jaipur, by printers continuing work that's been passed down for generations. Every piece still starts the same way: a block, a steady hand, and a pattern that's older than any of us.
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