Ikkat, Patola and Bandhani: The Weaves Bengal Borrowed

Walk a Kolkata pandal today and you will see as much Ikkat and Bandhani as Tant. Both came from a long way away, and both are now completely at home.

All three of these traditions solve the same problem differently: how do you get a pattern into a cloth without printing it on afterwards.

Ikkat — the yarn is dyed before it is woven

The threads are tied and dyed before going on the loom, so the pattern emerges as the cloth is woven. That is why an Ikkat motif has soft, feathered edges — the tiny misalignment as the weaver matches thread to thread is the signature, not a fault.

Single ikat dyes the warp or the weft. Double ikat dyes both and matches them, which is extraordinarily difficult and is why a real Patola costs what it does.

Patola — double ikat from Patan

The most technically demanding textile made in India. Both warp and weft are resist-dyed and then aligned on the loom so the pattern registers exactly. A genuine Patan Patola takes months and is priced accordingly; almost everything sold as "Patola" is a single-ikat Rajkot piece, which is a lovely saree and a different thing.

The test: a true double ikat is identical on both sides, with no right or wrong face.

See Ikkat and Patola.

Bandhani — tied after weaving

The opposite process. The cloth is woven plain, then tied in thousands of tiny points and dyed, so the tied points resist and stay the base colour. The dots are the whole point, and a real Bandhani still shows faint puckering where the ties were — a perfectly flat "Bandhani" is printed.

Red and white Bandhani is as close as you get to lal paar sada without a Bengali handloom, which is exactly why it works at Puja. See Bandhani.

Why they suit Puja

All three are lighter than woven-zari silk, all three hold strong saturated colour, and none of them needs artificial light to look like anything — they read in daylight, which most of the six days is. They belong on the walking days rather than the sitting ones.

Compare against traditional Indian sarees and silk sarees. The six-day plan says which day each belongs to.