The Crafts
Every DUSHYANT shirt begins with a fabric crafted by hand—printed, woven, or dyed using techniques that have been practiced in India for centuries. We develop original prints and weaves, and many of the fabrics we sample never make it to the final collection.
I.
Hand Block-Printing
A carved wooden block, dipped in dye, pressed onto fabric by hand. What that description leaves out is the scale of the labor involved.
A single block takes days to carve. The design is first drawn on paper, then transferred to a block of teak or sheesham wood and chiseled out by hand. Complex patterns require multiple blocks—one for each color, plus a separate block for the outline. A five-color print means five blocks, each one needing to register perfectly with the others.
The printing itself is rhythmic, physical work. The printer sits on the floor with the fabric stretched before him on a padded table. He dips the block into a tray of dye, presses it onto the cloth, lifts, moves, repeats—sometimes thousands of times for a single length of fabric. Alignment is done by eye. There are no guides, no machines.
No two pieces are identical. The pressure varies. The dye saturates differently. The registration shifts by millimeters. These are not flaws—they are the record of human hands at work.
Once you know what to look for, you can see the process in the cloth.
II.
Handloom Weaving
Fabric woven on a wooden loom operated entirely by hand—no electricity, no mechanization. The process begins long before weaving, with the preparation of the yarn.
Raw cotton is spun by hand or on a charkha, then wound onto bobbins. The warp threads—the vertical threads that form the structure of the fabric—must be measured, arranged, and loaded onto the loom. For a standard width, over three thousand individual yarns must be aligned and threaded through the loom's heddles, one by one. The warp is then sized with a natural starch (usually rice) mixed with oil, which strengthens the threads and helps them withstand the tension of weaving.
The actual weaving is a rhythm: lift, throw, beat. Lift the warp with the pedals, throw the shuttle through the opening, beat the new weft thread into place with a wooden bar. Depending on the complexity of the design, a weaver produces anywhere from half a meter to five meters of fabric per day.
Handloom fabric has a softness that comes from the way the yarn is handled—never stretched to the breaking point, never pulled at industrial speed. The fabric breathes.
The result is a cloth with a texture and irregularity that machine-woven fabric cannot replicate. It also has a subtle unevenness, a visual depth that comes from human inconsistency.
III.
Natural Dyeing
Before synthetic dyes existed, all color came from the natural world—plants, minerals, metals, even insects. In Rajasthan and Gujarat, these traditions continue.
Indigo, the deep blue that appears in much of our work, is extracted from the leaves of the indigofera plant. The dyeing process requires a fermentation vat—sometimes twelve feet deep—where indigo, lime, and jaggery are combined and left to reduce. The vat must be maintained daily, and some have been kept alive for decades. Fabric is dipped into the vat, then removed and exposed to air. The oxidation transforms it: what emerges green turns blue within minutes. Multiple dips deepen the color.
Reds come from madder root or alizarin. Blacks are made from fermented iron—old horseshoes soaked in water with jaggery for weeks. Yellows come from turmeric or pomegranate rind. Each dye behaves differently and requires its own process.
In resist dyeing techniques like Dabu and Ajrakh, a paste—often made from clay, lime, gum, and wheat chaff—is applied to the fabric before dyeing. The paste blocks the dye from penetrating certain areas, creating patterns in negative. Sawdust is sprinkled over the wet paste to prevent smudging. After dyeing, the paste is washed away, revealing the design.
Ajrakh, practiced in the Kutch region of Gujarat, is among the most complex of these techniques. A single piece can require fourteen to sixteen stages of printing and dyeing, taking up to three weeks to complete. The process is climate-dependent—certain stages can only happen in certain seasons. The result is fabric that is printed on both sides, with colors that deepen over time rather than fade.
These processes are slow, and they are meant to be. The colors that emerge are not uniform. They shift and layer. They look like they came from somewhere.