Hand painted wall hanging

Kalamkari is a form of textile decoration in Andhra Pradesh using a special tool to draw figures in black outline and colouring them in rich natural colours. The treatment of the cloth and the elaborate dyeing process following the drawing is also special to this particular form of textile art.

Most traditional Kalamkaris were made to hang as backdrops or on ceilings in temples and other sacred spaces. They depicted stories from India’s epics and very often had a Telugu script running along the bottom of the panel of sectioned illustrations. Some Kalamkari artists wrote sections of the story randomly amidst the artwork. More recently, the script has been eliminated from large Kalamkari works, more particularly in the Tree of Life pieces that are decorative and temporal.

Niranjan, son of the great Kalamkari master Jonnalagadda Gurappa Chetty, has combined exploration and research with the excellence of his inherited skill. He began his experiment using Telugu sentences on small squares of cloth, and painting enlarged details of flowers and birds usually found in chintz designs that evolved as textiles for trade in the 18th century. Alongside, he wrote a few simple lines about the art of Kalamkari, the flower or the bird. These were accepted enthusiastically as unusual contemporary expressions moving away from the more elaborate and crowded textile pieces with a sacred orientation that emerged from most kalamkari artists in Niranjan’s home town of Srikalahasti.

Encouraged by the response to these small cloths, and always ready to follow ideas that offered experimentation and development of his genre, he attended the calligraphy workshop at New Delhi. Since then he has allowed his creative imagination and mature understanding of the medium to energize his commissioned work. The result is a Tree of Life that lyrical phrases in Telugu within finely wrought images of leaves, flowers, fruit and birds. One hidden message says “the marigold resembles the turmeric coat on the face of a wedded woman”, another, “lotus, firecracker flowers, are red in colour” and “parrot is a courier between lovers”.

Many messages and a burst of innovation create an entirely new version of the centuries old-design, the likes of which Kalamkari art has not seen for a long time.