The Women at the Washing Ghat: Block Printing's Invisible Labour

The seventh in a series on the people, places and practices behind hand block printed cloth in India.

In Sanganer, on the southern edge of Jaipur, a length of freshly printed cloth doesn't stop working when the block comes off the table. It goes to water: a wash to strip the tree gum that held the resist, days of drying, dye, then a final wash in running water to rinse and set the colour. Between the dye vat and the finished metre sits a stage called tapai — the cloth spread flat on open ground, sprinkled again and again with river water, and left in direct sun for eight to ten days. Someone has to walk that ground every few hours. Someone has to know, by smell and stiffness, when it's ready to come up.

That someone rarely ends up in the photograph. Block printing has a face in most marketing — a man's forearm, a carved teak block, wood meeting cloth. It does not, as a rule, have a face for the washing, the beating, the hauling of wet fabric into the sun. That labour is real and long, and recent research into India's informal textile economy makes an uncomfortable case that it's also where some of the worst-paid, least-protected work in this craft tends to land.

Who actually does the washing

Ask who washes and finishes block-printed cloth and the answer changes depending on which town you're standing in — worth sitting with, rather than smoothing over.

A 2009 rapid assessment of Sanganer's handicraft cluster, carried out by the Institute of Social Studies Trust during the global financial slowdown, found women concentrated in "lighter" jobs — sorting dye, hand embroidery, stitching — and, notably, in the washing and finishing units themselves, while being paid less for it: "The entrepreneurs claim to give equal rates to men and women," the researchers wrote, "but on an average, a woman worker earns less than her male counterpart, as she works for fewer hours due to her domestic responsibilities." Semi-skilled workers, mostly women, earned roughly ₹100–150 a day against ₹150–350 for skilled male artisans.

Thirty kilometres away in Bagru, a 2019 study in the IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, based on interviews with twenty women artisans, described washing differently: heavy, muscular work done by men, or by women specifically from the Dhobi (washerfolk) community rather than the Chhipa printers. Finishing and market-facing roles, the same study found, stayed largely male.

Both things can be true at once. What doesn't vary is the pattern underneath: whoever does the wet, physically hard work at the end of the line — printer or washerwoman, Chhipa or Dhobi — earns less than whoever gets to be the named artisan up front, and women disproportionately land in that first category, wherever the line falls in a given town.

What the numbers say, nationally

Zoom out from any single village and the picture sharpens. A 2020 WIEGO statistical brief by economist Govindan Raveendran, drawing on national labour survey data, put the average hourly earnings of India's home-based workers at ₹48 for men and ₹24 for women — precisely half. Women's earnings, the brief noted, were "not even half of the recommended minimum wage in India of ₹46.88" an hour, with two-thirds of women home-based workers earning ₹23 an hour or less, against 18% of men.

The gap shows up again, more recently, in the textile trade press. Writing in texfash in August 2026 on how digital printing is squeezing the market for genuine hand block work, journalist Subir Ghosh noted that "women in home-based work, paid on low piece rates, earn about half the male rate and roughly half the recommended minimum wage, at levels recorded near two rupees a piece." A nationwide handicraft-sector survey released in May 2026 by the Institute for Human Development and the Crafts Council of India, led by statistician G.C. Manna, found the average worker earning about ₹270 a day — below the legal minimum wage in every state surveyed.

None of these figures are specific to block-print washing alone. No study I could find puts a rupee number on exactly what a woman drying cloth on the Sanganer tapai ground earns per day. But the washing and finishing end of block printing sits inside this same informal, piece-rated, overwhelmingly female workforce — and there is no reason to think it escapes the arithmetic that governs the rest of it.

A dollar a piece, a jacket that sells for two hundred

The clearest picture of that arithmetic in practice comes from the wider home-based garment economy that block printing's finishing work sits inside. Reporting for Al Jazeera in June 2026, marking thirty years since the International Labour Organisation's Home Work Convention, journalist Anuja spent time with women stitching and finishing garments from single rooms in Kapashera, on Delhi's edge. Shehnaz Bano, 38, sews leather jacket panels for about ₹100 — roughly a dollar — a piece; the finished jackets, she was told, sell abroad for $200 or more. "Just because I work from home," she said, "I don't get equal pay or rights." Sangeeta Devi, a migrant from Bihar, finishes garments for around a dollar per hundred pieces; a third woman, Putul Devi, said she'd switched to cooking on firewood because cylinder gas had become unaffordable on what she earns.

The same economics show up in embroidery. Fieldwork published by Feminism in India in June 2026, based on research in Mumbai's Shivaji Nagar, found bridal lehenga embroiderers paid piece rates as low as ₹5, most work falling between ₹12 and ₹60 a piece. Farida, 20, described how one misplaced stone erases payment for the whole piece: "You have to be extremely careful. If a stone is placed incorrectly, the piece is rejected, and payment is denied." A labour enforcement officer told the researcher plainly that piece-rate work "falls outside the [Minimum Wages] Act's enforcement reach" — the law requires payment by the day or hour, and piecework sidesteps it.

None of this is block printing specifically. It's the informal economy block printing's washing and finishing work is embedded in — the one that decides how a woman is paid when her employer is three or four subcontracts away and effectively invisible.

Where the arithmetic has been rewritten — and where it hasn't

Some interventions have genuinely tried to change this. Studio Bagru, founded by Jeremy Fritzhand and Varun Sharma, removed the chain of middlemen a length of cloth traditionally passed through — as many as eight sets of hands, the founders say, taking a cut before a printer once paid as little as seven rupees a metre saw any of it. Anokhi, the Jaipur block-printing house founded in 1970, took a different route: rather than inserting women into the male-dominated trade of carving and printing, it built out embroidery, appliqué and beadwork as paid work for rural women, alongside an on-site daycare. Women Weave, a weaving initiative profiled by Forbes, restructured pay so workers are compensated "for every step of the process," rather than the older pattern of unpaid labour inside a family workshop; its director, Nivedita Rai, said that under the new structure "many women earn more than their husbands."

SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association, has worked this problem at larger scale for decades — its Rudi Bazaar initiative targeted ₹12,000–15,000 a year for rural women through direct trade, with a companion programme setting a ₹3,000-a-month floor. But SEWA's own writing is candid about the limits: incomes in the informal economy stay lower than the formal one for everyone, and "a gender gap in earnings within the informal economy" persists regardless.

And when the ground shifts, these gains are often the first thing lost. That 2009 Sanganer study was measuring what happened when the 2008 financial crisis hit an export-dependent cluster, and it found casual and female workers absorbed the job losses first, while established male artisans held their positions longer. A study of MarketPlace: Handwork of India, a fair-trade cooperative that grew from three women in 1980 to roughly two hundred artisans today, went so far as to interview a hundred of its own artisans and ask, honestly, whether the empowerment it promised was actually being felt — rather than assuming a fair-trade label had done that job on its own. That's rarer than it should be: an intervention checking its results, not just its intentions.

What "ethically made" usually leaves out

This is the gap most "ethically made" labelling glosses over. A Business and Human Rights Resource Centre analysis of the 2026 Fashion Transparency Index found just 1% of major fashion brands disclose what share of their supply-chain workers earn a living wage. Fashion Revolution India's reporting on the domestic garment sector goes further: compliance audits are frequently gamed with scheduled visits and coached answers, with the burden falling hardest on small manufacturers while big brands "transfer responsibility without transferring profits or actual accountability." Garment Labour Union president Rukmini VP has described factory-floor targets of 150 to 200 pieces an hour with a single thirty-minute break contingent on hitting them — different work from home-based washing, but the same question: does the person doing it see a fair share of what the piece sells for?

A hangtag that says "handmade" or "ethically sourced" answers almost none of this. It tells you a human being was involved. It doesn't tell you whether she was paid a living wage, paid per piece with no floor, or paid nothing because the work happened inside an unpaid family workshop.

What to actually ask, and how to look after what you buy

If you're buying hand block print and want to know what you're actually paying for, four questions get you further than any certification sticker:

• Who finishes it, not just who prints it? A seller who names the printer's town but goes vague on who washes and dries the cloth is telling you something by omission.
• Is anyone paid by the piece? Piece-rate pay isn't automatically exploitative, but it becomes so fast with no floor under it. Ask what a typical day's earnings look like for the people finishing the cloth, not just printing it.
• Does the price reflect the full finishing process? Cloth that's genuinely gone through multiple washes, days of sun-drying and a proper mordant cure costs more to make than one rushed through a single rinse — and should cost more to buy.
• Will the brand actually answer any of this? Most large fashion brands, per that transparency research, won't. A small label that says "here's roughly what the family that washes this is paid" tells you more than a certification logo ever will.

Once you own it, the same washing that made the cloth is a decent guide to keeping it: hand wash in cool water with a mild, pH-neutral soap, never a machine's spin cycle, and dry flat or on a low line out of direct midday sun. Natural dyes fade gently by hand and badly by hot machine cycles — treat the fabric the way the person who finished it did, and it will outlast several fast-fashion wardrobes.

Paying for the whole chain, not just the name on the label

It's easy, writing about a craft like this, to tell only the printer's story — the carved block, the steady hand, the motif passed down a family line. That story is true and worth telling. But it leaves out the washing ghat, the sun-drying ground, the woman doing piecework three subcontracts removed from the brand whose name ends up on the tag.

Buying less and buying better only does the good it's meant to if "better" includes her, not just the artisan whose name made it onto the label. That's harder to verify than thread count or dye source, and most of us will get it only partly right. But asking the question — who finished this, and were they paid enough to do it again next season — costs nothing and changes what gets rewarded.

Next: thirty kilometres and a world apart — why Sanganer's fine white-ground prints and Bagru's earthy dabu resist come from what are, at bottom, two opposite philosophies of cloth.

Further reading and sources: "Home-Based Workers in India: Statistics and Trends," WIEGO Statistical Brief No. 23 by Govindan Raveendran, June 2020; "Rapid Assessment Study of the Impact of the Financial and Economic Slowdown on the Handicrafts Industry in Sanganer, Rajasthan," Institute of Social Studies Trust, 2009; "Participation and the Socio-Economical Status of Women Artisans: Special Reference to Hand Block Printing of Bagru," IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, January 2019; "Digital Prints Now Imitate Block Work as India Reweighs Handmade Value," texfash, August 2026; "India's Handicraft Sector Employs 1.13 Crore, But Workers Earn Just ₹270 a Day," The Print, May 2026; "As ILO Convention Turns 30, India's Home-Based Workers Demand Equal Rights," Al Jazeera, June 2026; "The Lehenga and the Law: Women Who Embroider Bridal Lehengas Earn as Little as ₹5 Per Piece," Feminism in India, June 2026; "The Garment Industry in India: A Paradox of Progress and Exploitation (Part 1)," Fashion Revolution, 2024; "Just 1% of Fashion Brands Disclose the Percentage of Garment Workers Earning a Living Wage," Business and Human Rights Resource Centre; "Rajasthan Sanganeri Block Print," Gaatha Craft Archive; "Anokhi," Wikipedia.