India GOWorkshops in Jaipur
A day with a Bagru block-printing family
Start with masala chai and a walk through a village where cloth is drying in fields, watch dabu mud-resist being laid, indigo being worked and blocks being cut, then print your own scarf at the family's own table and carry it away.
from ₹3000 · by arrangement, most days; Bagru is about 30 km southwest of Jaipur
Watching block carving and printing at the Anokhi Museum
Watch a carver cut a teak block and a printer walk a length of cloth in a restored Amber haveli, in a room where the demonstration runs all day rather than on the hour.
modest museum entry · Tuesday to Saturday 10:30–17:00, Sunday 11:00–16:30, closed Monday. Demonstrations run all day except 13:30–14:00 daily and 13:00–14:30 on Friday.
Blue pottery: shaping a paste that contains no clay
Press a quartz-and-glass paste into a mould, watch it hold its shape without a speck of clay in it, then paint cobalt on the raw body and leave your tile or bowl to be fired and sent on.
from ₹1000 · most days, by arrangement
Meenakari: firing enamel into silver
Sit with an enameller as he fills the engraved cells of a silver piece with ground mineral colour and fires it, one colour at a time, hardest first, because each firing has to survive the next.
from ₹10030 · by booked slot
A miniature painting lesson with a Padma Shri
Grind pigment, learn how a brush is cut down to a few squirrel hairs, and put a single motif onto traditional paper under the eye of an artist the Indian state has decorated for this work.
from ₹5782 · by booked slot; held at the artist's home
Carving and dressing a kathputli puppet
Carve and paint the head of a string puppet, stitch its skirt and hang it on its strings, with a puppeteer from the community whose ancestors performed these stories in Rajput courts.
from ₹5074 · by booked slot
Lac work: bangles turned over a coal fire
Soften a stick of coloured lac over heat, roll it into a ring, size it on a tapered rod and press kundan and mirror into the surface while it is still warm, in the lane the city's bangle-makers have worked for generations.
from ₹5782 · workshop by booked slot; the lane is best around 11:00–17:00
Tarkashi: hammering brass wire into wood
Score a channel into a wooden surface, lay fine brass wire into it and tap it home until the metal sits flush with the grain and the pattern appears as a line of light.
from ₹7434 · by booked slot
Cutting a printing block by hand
Take a slab of seasoned teak, transfer a drawing onto it and cut away everything that is not the pattern, producing the tool that a block-printer will then use a thousand times.
from ₹7434 · by booked slot
Leheriya: tying the diagonal wave
Roll a length of fine cloth into a rope on the diagonal, bind it at intervals with thread and dip it, so that when it is opened out the resist leaves the rippling stripe Rajasthan ties for the monsoon.
from ₹5782 · by booked slot
Painting fresco on wet lime
Lay colour into wet lime plaster and watch it bind into the surface rather than sit on it, the technique that put painted figures on haveli walls across Shekhawati and kept them there for two centuries.
from ₹9676 · by booked slot
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