The Mud That Refuses the Dye: Inside Dabu Resist Printing in Akola and Bagru
The second in a series on the people, places and practices behind hand block printed cloth in India.
The smell arrives before anything else does: wet earth, faintly sour, with a mineral edge underneath, like the inside of a well after rain. In a courtyard in Akola, a small town in Rajasthan's Chittorgarh district, a printer works a wooden block down into a shallow tray of black paste and presses it against stretched cotton. The paste is mud. Not decoration, not dye — mud, mixed to the consistency of thick batter, and its whole job is to stop colour from reaching the cloth.
Sawdust goes down next, flung across the wet print by the handful. It looks careless. It isn't. The sawdust draws moisture out of the paste, speeds the drying, and keeps a stray elbow or a gust of wind from smearing a pattern that took a full morning to lay down. By afternoon the printed shapes have dried to a hard grey-brown crust, and the crust has started to crack — fine, wandering lines, no two alike, running through the paste like a dry lakebed.
That cracking is not a flaw to be managed. It is the point.
The logic of not printing
Everything about ordinary block printing trains you to think of the block as the thing that adds colour. Dabu inverts that. The word comes from dabana, Hindi for "to press," and what gets pressed onto the cloth is a resist — a barrier applied exactly where the printer does not want dye to land. Everywhere the mud paste sits, the cloth stays whatever colour it already was. Everywhere it doesn't, the dye gets in.
The paste itself is simple in the way old technologies tend to be simple: get four cheap, local materials into the right proportion and you're done. Black clay — locally sourced, sometimes called kali mitti — gives the paste its body. Lime, chuna, helps it set hard. Gum, traditionally guar or acacia gum, binds it together and keeps it from crumbling before it's dry. And wheat — sometimes coarse chaff, sometimes flour left slightly spoiled on purpose — thickens the mixture and, printers report, helps produce the fine network of cracks that becomes the fabric's signature texture once dye has settled into every fissure.
Once the paste has dried and cracked, the cloth goes into a dye bath — usually indigo, sometimes a second colour. The dye reaches every uncovered thread, and it also seeps, faintly, into the hairline cracks in the hardened mud — which is why a finished dabu print doesn't show clean white against solid blue but a soft, veined marbling, like the surface of old stone. Only at the end is the paste scrubbed and beaten off the cloth, traditionally against river rocks, revealing the resisted pattern ringed by that fine crackle where the dye found its way in.
Two villages, one paste
Dabu is practised across a scatter of Rajasthan clusters, but two names carry the tradition: Akola, in Chittorgarh district, and Bagru, on the edge of Jaipur.
Akola sits about 52 kilometres west of Chittorgarh town, a farming settlement of roughly 12,000 people according to census figures, of whom the craft documentation site Gaatha reckons only around 200 still practise dabu printing today — a striking contraction for a place local lore credits as the technique's birthplace. One version of that origin story, recorded by the craft archive DirectCreate, places the accidental discovery of mud-resist printing with a rangrez, a dyer, in a village near Akola as far back as the eighth century. Whether or not the date holds up, the printing here has a recognisable temperament: bold, earthy, slightly rough at the edges, built around a set of named motifs — kahma, the red butterfly called lal titri, dholika, kantedar — that read, even from across a room, as older and less fussy than their Jaipur cousins.
Bagru is younger by comparison and better documented. The Chhipa families who print there trace their settlement to the 1730s, three years after Jaipur itself was founded under Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, on land watered by the Sanjaria river. The printing that developed there is finer — smaller repeats, tighter registration, a lighter hand — and it now carries a Geographical Indication tag, granted in 2024, that legally protects the name "Bagru print" for cloth made by the cluster's traditional printers.
Some of Bagru's Chhipa names are on the public record in a way most artisan communities never get to be. Ram Kishore Chhipa, born in the town in 1957, received a Padma Shri in 2009 for his work in dabu hand block printing. Vijendra Chhipa — known locally as Viju — is a fifth-generation dyer and master printer who took over his family's workshop, now trading as Bagru Textiles, after his father's death in 2007. Anouksha Pati of Studio Bagru, describing the process to the craft-rights initiative CIPRI, put the resist paste plainly: "The printer applies dabu, a resist paste of mud, gum, and spoiled wheat flour, and then the cloth goes out into the sun." She went further on what that process actually produces: "What gets called imperfection in Bagru printing is actually a record of conditions. The cloth does not just carry a pattern. It carries a documentation of circumstances."
Weeks for three colours
A single-colour dabu print — mud resist, one dip in an indigo vat — can be finished in days. Add colours and the timeline stretches fast, because dabu doesn't blend colours the way painting does. It sequences them.
A two-colour piece needs paste applied, a first dye bath, some of that paste removed, fresh paste applied over the sections that need to stay put, and a second dye bath, each stage with its own drying and cracking time. A three-colour piece — indigo blue, an iron-black syahi, an alizarin red — can mean three full resist-and-dye cycles from one length of cloth, easily stretching the work over several weeks.
The dyes themselves are their own small industries. Indigo is fermented for months in deep, V-shaped wells called naand, traditionally seeded with the pods of the Cassia tora plant to keep the vat alive and reducing. Red comes from madder root and alum, boiled together in a copper vessel, the tambadi, until the colour develops. Black, syahi, is made by fermenting rusted iron — old horseshoes, scrap — with jaggery and water for weeks until it turns a deep, staining brown-black. None of this is fast, and none of it forgives shortcuts: rush the indigo vat and it dyes pale; rush the syahi ferment and it stains unevenly.
The blocks that carry all this are still built on the same logic described in this series' first piece: a rekh block for outline, one or more datta blocks for fill, each carved from seasoned teak, sheesham or rohida wood, each taking a carver a day or two to finish.
What is going wrong
The honest version of this craft's present includes water, and water is not going well for it.
Gaatha's documentation of Bagru states plainly that the Sanjaria river — the river the Chhipa settlement was founded beside three centuries ago — has been dry for fifty years. Printing and dyeing that once drew directly from a live river now depends on groundwater, and the water table under Bagru has been dropping as monsoon rainfall grows less reliable. Several accounts of the cluster describe families reusing dye and wash water to irrigate crops, not as an environmental flourish but because the water has become too scarce to use once and discard.
Akola's pressures show up differently. Alongside the traditional mud-lime-gum paste, printers there have also adopted a resist mixture of tar, oil and a resin called rogan, dusted with ash instead of sawdust and paired with naphthol dyes instead of madder or indigo, trading some of the old recipe's authenticity for durability and a faster, cheaper turnaround, per Gaatha's process documentation. It isn't counterfeiting — it's the same families, blocks and motifs, adapting the chemistry under the same pressure that pushes every craft toward whatever holds up and sells for less.
The wage numbers, where they exist, are hard to read comfortably. Reporting by YourStory on Bagru's printing quarter found piece rates as low as Rs 10 to Rs 50, with one printer, Sawatri Chhipa, earning around Rs 20 for roughly an hour's work and a seasonal income for the year landing somewhere between Rs 30,000 and Rs 1 lakh — against finished textiles that retail for Rs 600 to Rs 1,000 or more. Separately, reporting on Rajasthan's block printing clusters more broadly has described work "that used to provide employment to about 100 people" now done by as few as two, as digital and screen printing absorb the volume that used to go to hand printers. Umeshwari Parmar of Pitambar India named the resulting pressure directly: "To meet scale and deadlines, many workshops are forced to use cheap, toxic materials — harming both the environment and artisan hands."
A GI tag protects a name. It does not refill a riverbed, and it does not, by itself, move a piece rate.
The crackle is the proof
Once you know what produced it, the marbled crackle inside a dabu motif stops looking like noise and starts looking like a signature — and it's the fastest way to tell a hand-resisted print from an imitation.
- Look inside the pale shapes, not just at their outlines. Genuine dabu shows fine, irregular veining within the resisted areas, where dye crept through hairline cracks in the drying mud. A printed or digital imitation of "crackle" repeats identically every time the motif does; real crackle never repeats.
- Compare a summer piece to a winter one if you can. Printers and buyers both note that mud dries and cracks faster in hot weather, giving summer-made cloth a heavier marbling than the crisper, finer resist lines of winter production. Neither is a defect — it's a dated record of the weather the day the cloth was printed.
- Check the reverse. Resist-and-dye colour penetrates cloth from both sides; screen-printed or digital imitations of dabu usually sit on the surface and look pale or flat on the back.
- Ask what's in the paste. A seller who can tell you whether a piece used the traditional clay-lime-gum resist or a tar-and-rogan hybrid is a seller who knows their supply chain. One who can't, likely hasn't asked either.
- Ask which family or cluster printed it. Chhipa family workshops in Bagru and Akola are identifiable and, increasingly, named on the cloth's own tags by brands working directly with them. If a seller can't name a village, they may not know it themselves.
Care for it the way you'd care for the process that made it. Wash dabu cloth in cold water, alone for the first few washes, with a mild detergent or none at all. Dry it in shade rather than direct sun, which is harsher on the dye than the printer's own sun-drying step ever was. Expect the colour to soften slightly over the first year — that's the natural dye settling into its final state, not the print failing — and don't fight it.
Buying a cloth that remembers water
Every stage of dabu asks something of a place before it asks anything of a buyer. It asks the local clay to be the right kind of sticky. It asks the sun to be strong enough to dry a paste but not so strong that a print becomes unworkable inside an hour. It asks a river, or increasingly a borewell standing in for one, to rinse mud off cloth without running out halfway through the job.
That's a lot of conditions for one length of cotton to satisfy, and it's a large part of why this cloth costs what it costs and takes as long as it takes. Buying it — from a seller who can tell you the village, the family, and what's actually in the resist — is a small, specific way of paying for all of that, instead of for a printed imitation of it. Buying less of it, and wearing what you buy for years rather than a season, is the part of "slow fashion" that actually matters: not the aesthetic of imperfection, but the economics of things made to last by people who are running low on the water it takes to make them.
Browse our own Bagru block printed sarongs, dupattas and stoles, printed in the resist tradition this piece describes.
Next in this series: a town called indigo — Ajrakh's second migration from Dhamadka to Ajrakhpur, and the water crisis that may decide whether it survives a third.
Further reading and sources: Gaatha Craft Archive, Block Print ~ Akola and Bagru Print; Wikipedia, Dabu printing, Bagru print and Ram Kishore Chhipa; The Kind Craft, Bagru Textiles: The Indelible Art of Block Printing; YourStory, In the Town of Bagru, Block-Printing Sets the Tone for Livelihood; Cultural Intellectual Property Rights Initiative, Voices of CIPRI India: Practicing CARE; DirectCreate, Bagru Dabu Block Printing.