Block Printing On Sarees

The workshop for Block Printing On Sarees is located at Nizampet X Roads, in the 7 Hills Shedhadri Block of Kukatpally. It is a long room with very long tables covered in thick fabric. We spend the whole day standing over these tables, dipping wooden blocks into trays of dye and pressing them onto sarees. You have to be careful with the pressure or the pattern comes out wrong. The air smells like pigment and wet cloth all the time. Sometimes the fans make the fabric move too much, so we have to pin everything down tightly. We have hundreds of blocks on the shelves, some with very old patterns and some that are newer. Our clothes usually have stains on them from the splashes, but that is just part of the job. Kukatpally is a busy area, so the noise from the X Roads reaches us even inside the shed. When the sarees are done, we hang them up on lines to dry, and the whole room turns into a maze of hanging silk and cotton. It is repetitive work, moving step by step down the length of a five-meter cloth. We talk while we work to pass the time, mostly about small things or what we are having for lunch. It is a manual process and our backs usually ache by the time we lock up at night. It is just the way we do things here every single day.