A National award winning Kalamkari painter, Sanjay Chitara grew up with the Vaghris, who are mostly the landless labourers of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Today, he lives in a proper residential society in Ahmedabad, and speaks proudly of his achievements as a Kalamkari painter.
As you walk into his house, you can see the certificates and the awards that are exhibited on the walls. They also feature the photograph of the late President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam conferring Chitara the Master Craftsman Award.
Those are the memories that he cherishes. “Kalamkari is our ancestral art, but it was on the decline as its traditional users, who bought it for rituals, began looking for less expensive visual representations of deities,” Chitara goes back to the roots of this ancient art form.
What started as a passion has now become a profession for Chitara. Ask him about that and he admits. “Currently, my paintings are exhibited at the Jaya He Museum Store at the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai. Due to our initiative, this art is finally getting its due recognition,” he says.
Chitara and his brother Vasant were very young, when they were introduced to Matani Pachedi, a traditional art of painting ritual cloths for communities like the Bharwad and Rabari herdsmen, Kolis, Rawals and Vaghris. “Traditionally, the Matani Pachedi, which depicts the mother goddess, is used as a canopy over scaffolding to create a temporary shrine or is bestowed on altars. It may even be worn by a priest during a ritual.”
As he talks about the basics of the art, one wonders why is the art form referred to as Kalamkari?
The art gets its name from kalam, as it is used to draw and the craft is called kari. “While it was traditionally produced by the free-hand Kalamkari methods, later block-printed versions became popular as they could be mass-produced and were cheaper,” he points out.
Thus, artisans began to turn to block printing as their medium instead of painting. Only a handful of families like the Chitaras decided to stick to free-hand painting. After Chitara, his mother, brother Chitara Vasantbhai and sister-in-law Anitaben too won national awards for the Kalamkari art.
His father Manubhai Chunilal Chitara had won the prestigious Shilp Guru Award in 2009, which is the highest honour for an Indian craftsman.
And it’s not just Chitara. His wife, Kailash, too is an accomplished Kalamkari artisan. “We work together to produce the pieces, as the process goes through various stages. The cloth is soaked in water and treated with myrobalan. After drying them, the drawing is outlined in colours extracted from iron rust, jiggery and other materials, using a bamboo stick which is chiselled at the tip to become a pen or kalam,” she elaborates.
Given this painstaking process, a Kalamkari painting can cost up to Rs 30,000 and can take months to be ready. While a block-printed Matani Pachedi costs anywhere between Rs 500 and Rs 3,000, Kalamkari is quite expensive. “It is easy to understand why our Kalamkari art was losing patronage of the ritualistic users. But fashion industry, interior designing have created a market for such handiwork,” Chitara admits.