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Chikan Embroidery on a Cotton Saree It isn’t clear how Chikan embroidery developed in India although it does appear that it came to Avadh, where Uttar Pradesh now roughly lies, in North India via Bengal in the East a few centuries ago. The embroidery itself may have originated in Persia and, after making its way to India, have found itself being used as an inexpensive alternative to Jamdani textiles: the Chikan embroidery of Dacca (in what is now Bangladesh) appears to predate that of Uttar Pradesh. That said, there is also a belief that Chikankari was developed under the patronage of the Mughals: ‘Chikan’ is apparently a derived from a word that means ‘intricate’ in Persian, while ‘Kari’ is the Hindi word for ‘work’. Early Chikan embroidery seems to have been entirely on fine white muslin in white cotton thread, with over 72 different kinds of stitches being employed. The embroidery of the highest quality could apparently only be seen from one side of the fabric, and generall...

‘Jamdani’, a word derived from the Persian, is believed to refer to flowers in a pot although the sarees may far predate Mughal times when the word was used often to refer to fine muslin fabric primarily featuring flowers and vines, the best of which was made in Dacca. Photo by A Junaid Alam Khan The term ‘Jamdani’ itself has come to refer to a technique of weaving where a patterned graph paper is placed underneath the warp instead of a pattern being marked on the warp, and each motif is separately woven into the fabric with supplementary weft threads thicker than threads used on the rest of the saree, creating the appearance (and feel!) of motifs grounded on to nothing but a light breeze. That motifs are ‘woven into fabric’ isn’t just a turn of phrase; each motif actually gives the appearance of having been woven within the fabric with a gauze of the saree’s main body over it. These sarees of East India are traditionally in muted colours although in contemporary times, the ae...