Bandhani: tying a knot ten thousand times

If you have ever held a deep-blue bandhani saree up to the light, you have seen the constellation. Thousands of tiny cream dots, each a perfect circle, scattered across a deep ground. The eye reads them as a pattern. The hand of the maker knows them as individual knots.

One dot, one knot

Bandhani — from the Sanskrit bandh, to tie — is a resist-dye technique. Before the fabric is dyed, the maker finger-ties tiny knots in the cloth. Each knot keeps the dye out of one small circle of fabric. When the cloth is dipped and the dye sets and the knots are untied, the circles emerge as the original colour of the cloth.

A bandhani saree with thousands of dots requires thousands of knots. Each knot is finger-tied, by women in Bhuj, in the salt-flat town in Kutch. They wear thimble-rings called potay made from goat horn to push the fabric up into knot shapes.

The Khatri community

Bandhani in Bhuj is practiced almost entirely by the Khatri community, a hereditary craft community. The skill is passed mother to daughter. Some women in the cluster have been tying for forty years.

Why the colour blooms

When you receive a bandhani piece from us, it arrives with the knots still tied. We send instructions to untie them gently. On the first wash, traditional bandhani "blooms" — some excess dye leaches. This is the craft, not a fault. By the second wash the colour stabilises and you have a piece that will last decades.