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Indigo-Dyed and Madder-Dyed Sunn Hemp Paper

Winter 2012
Winter 2012
:
Volume
27
, Number
2
Article starts on page
42
.

Radha Pandey is currently in her second year at the Center for the Book MFA program at the University of Iowa. She is deeply interested in handicrafts in India and particularly devoted to keeping alive traditional, Islamic papermaking. Her other interests include animation, letterpress printing, binding, and paper cutting.  These papers are made by Zakir Hussain Kagzi using the traditional Islamic sheetforming method as described in the preceding article. The dyes are derived from indigo and madder.

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The indigo is sourced from Gujarat, 528 miles from Sanganer. The madder is obtained from a local grocery. Hussain prepares the dye solutions and stirs them into the pulp at the vat. To make the colors richer, he brushes the dyes onto the surface of the paper once it is dry. Afterwards, he externally sizes the sheets with a wheat starch paste and burnishes the sheets, one at a time, by hand using an agate stone on a curved wooden platform. Hussain's paper is in high demand by mosques in the United Arab Emirates as well as by temples and mosques all over India. His dyed sunn hemp paper is used to repair or replace old, fragile, or damaged paper in scriptures. It is also used for calligraphy with gold ink.