Nandana: The 400-Year-Old Print One Village in Neemuch Never Stopped Making
The fourth in a series on the people, places and practices behind hand block printed cloth in India.
Hero image courtesy of Asia InCH — Encyclopedia of Intangible Cultural Heritage, an initiative of Craft Revival Trust.
“This is our ancestral work,” Banwari Jariya, a fifth-generation block printer in the village of Ummedpura, Madhya Pradesh, told the news agency IANS in April 2025. “Earlier, the whole village was engaged in Nandana printing, primarily creating lehengas for tribal women. But over the past 10–12 years, demand has decreased, and many villagers have abandoned the craft.” Today, by his own account, one family in the village still does it: his.
Nandana is a wax- and mud-resist block print native to two villages, Tarapur and Ummedpura, in the Jawad tehsil of Neemuch district, Madhya Pradesh. It never travelled the way Ajrakh or Bagru did. It stayed exactly where it was invented, worn by the women who wore it, for what different sources place at somewhere between four and five centuries — and of the crafts profiled in this series so far, it has come closest to disappearing altogether.
Named for a pot of dye
The name itself carries the craft's origin story. Speaking to the natural-textile studio EcoFab, Banwari Jariya explained that Nandana takes its name from naand, the Hindi word for the earthen pot or pit used as an indigo dye vat. Cloth dipped repeatedly into the naand, in time, gave its name to the cloth itself. Tarapur, where the tradition runs deepest, sits on the banks of the Gambhiri river, and the surrounding districts of Jhabua, Ratlam, Mandsaur and Neemuch made up its entire traditional market — worn exclusively by tribal Bhil and Bhilala women, and effectively unknown outside it.
That narrowness is part of why Nandana looks the way it does. It never had to appeal to an outside buyer, so it never adjusted its motifs, its colours or its garment shapes to anyone else's taste. What survived is closer to a closed cultural loop than a marketable craft — which is also, artisans and researchers agree, a large part of why it nearly died when that loop broke.
A costume, not a fashion
Traditionally, Nandana-printed cloth was worn, not sold as decoration: a ghagra, the long gathered skirt of Bhil women, paired with a printed shoulder mantle, made up the everyday working dress of a community whose women farmed, herded and carried loads in it. According to a Madhya Pradesh Tourism account of the craft, even the choice of motif carried social meaning. The champakali (magnolia bud) print was worn mainly by unmarried girls; skirts printed with amba, the mango motif, were worn during marriage and pregnancy. Brothers were said to gift their sisters Nandana-printed cloth on Raksha Bandhan and Diwali. Indigo itself carried its own folklore: the community held that a cow that drank water used in indigo dyeing grew stronger, and that eating with hands stained by the dye caused no digestive harm — small beliefs that added up to indigo-dyed cloth being considered auspicious to wear.
The craft counts, by different tellings, either four or five core motifs: mirchi (chilli), champakali (magnolia bud), amba (mango) and jalam buta (a creeper-web pattern), with a fifth, dholamaru, added later. A single motif can take three to four separate carved wooden blocks to complete. Against most other Indian block prints, that is a narrow vocabulary, repeated for generations rather than expanded — the point was never novelty.
Pot, paste and rind
The technique layers three separate colouring methods onto one length of cloth. First, the fabric is printed with alum as a mordant and dyed in alizarin to fix the red of the motifs. Next comes a resist: traditionally a resin paste locally called daamar, boiled for roughly 24 hours and printed on while still hot — a step artisans have largely abandoned in favour of a mud resist instead, because boiling resin gave off a harsh smell and could blister a printer's skin. Once the resist covers the red motifs, the cloth is dipped into an indigo vat, traditionally five to six times, until the uncovered ground reaches a deep blue. A final mud-resist and pomegranate-rind dye step pushes some areas from blue toward green or black, depending on how long the cloth sits in each bath.
Sources differ on exactly how many discrete stages this adds up to — accounts describe the process as anywhere from 14 to 18 steps — but agree on the scale of the commitment: a single production run of cloth, once started, takes roughly a month, or 30 to 40 days by Banwari Jariya's own count, from first print to finished fabric.
A decline counted twice
Two different accounts of Nandana's decline exist, taken a few years apart, and both point the same direction. The heritage archive Asia InCH records that in the 1960s, Tarapur and Ummedpura together supported 57 printing units employing more than 1,000 people. By 2009, only four workshops remained. By 2020, two. The Jariya family's own account, given to IANS in 2025, describes the same arc in more intimate terms: once the entire village of Ummedpura practised Nandana printing; today, one family — theirs — still does.
The causes, as artisans describe them, are mundane rather than dramatic: mill-printed cloth undercutting hand-block prices, tribal customers switching to cheaper synthetic hosiery, and a process too slow and too labour-intensive to compete once its original captive market had other options. Unlike Ajrakh's water crisis or Bagru's dried-up river, nothing forced Nandana's hand from outside. It simply stopped being anyone's first choice, one household at a time, until almost no households were left.
One family, a G20 stall, and a pending GI tag
What has kept Nandana from disappearing entirely rests, at this point, on two brothers. Banwari Jariya and Pawan Jariya, both of Ummedpura, have spent the past decade rebuilding a market for a craft that had none left. In 2017, Pawan Jariya received a national award from the then Union textiles minister Piyush Goyal for a hand block printed bedsheet, and later demonstrated Nandana printing at a stall during India's G20 summit in Delhi, where, he told IANS, he “interacted with global guests.” The brothers have shifted their own production away from the ghagras their grandfathers made, toward sarees, salwar suits, dupattas and bedsheets aimed at buyers who were never part of the craft's original world — a market Banwari Jariya says now includes foreign customers who travel to Ummedpura directly to buy from them.
As of the most recent available reporting, in April 2025, the brothers had also applied for a Geographical Indication tag for Nandana printing, with the application described as being in its final stages. We were unable to independently confirm whether the tag has since been granted; as with the treatment plant in the previous piece in this series, some parts of this story are still being written by people other than us.
What to look for if you find it
Genuine Nandana is rare enough that most buyers will never be offered a fake — the far likelier problem is never encountering it at all. If you do:
- Check the palette. Authentic Nandana runs on alizarin red against an indigo-to-black or indigo-to-green ground, produced by natural dye and a pomegranate-rind finish, not a printed approximation of that palette in synthetic colour.
- Look for the motif set. Mirchi, champakali, amba and jalam buta, sometimes with dholamaru, are the traditional vocabulary. A piece claiming to be Nandana with an unrelated motif range is worth questioning.
- Ask for the village. With the craft now concentrated in a single family in Ummedpura, a seller who can name Tarapur or Ummedpura, and ideally the Jariya family directly, is telling you something a generic “hand block print” label cannot.
Care for it as you would any naturally dyed cotton: wash separately in cool water for the first several washes, use a mild detergent, and dry away from direct sun. The colour will soften a little over time — a sign of the natural dye settling into the fibre, not of the cloth wearing out.
A craft that stayed home
Ajrakh moved twice to survive. Bagru's river ran dry and its printers adapted their chemistry rather than their address. Nandana did neither: it stayed in the two villages where it began, wore itself thin against a market that shrank to nothing, and now survives because two brothers decided it was worth the decade of work it has taken to make people outside Ummedpura care. Whether a GI tag changes that calculus the way it has for Bagru remains to be seen. What is not in question is that a piece of Nandana cloth, today, represents one of the narrowest supply chains left in Indian textiles — a single family, in a single village, keeping a four-hundred-year habit alive past the point where habit alone could sustain it.
Explore our hand block printed dupattas, scarves and stoles for other living traditions from this same family of crafts, and read the earlier pieces in this series on Pethapur's wood carvers and the dabu printers of Akola and Bagru.
Further reading and sources: IANS via Lokmat Times, Artisans of Ummedpura in Neemuch preserve a 400-year-old traditional art; EcoFab, Nandana Print; Asia InCH Encyclopedia of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Hand Block Printing/Nandana of Madhya Pradesh; Handicrafts and Carpet Sector Skill Council, Nandana hand block printed textiles: The forgotten cultural legacy of Madhya Pradesh; Gaatha Craft Archive, Nandana Prints~Tarapur; Madhya Pradesh Tourism, Nandna Print: Exploring India's Hidden Block Printing Art.