The word you already know is bandanna. It comes from this — bandhani, from bandhan, to tie. The English picked the cloth up through the East India Company in the eighteenth century, exported it, and kept the name without the craft.
It is a knot, not a print
This is the whole thing, and most people get it wrong. A Bandhani dot is not applied to the cloth. It is subtracted from it.
The artisan pinches up a tiny point of fabric and binds it tight with a plain cotton thread, wound off a small cylinder of plastic or glass used as a bobbin. Then another. Then another. The design is mapped out first on butter paper and transferred to the cloth, and then the tying begins, one point at a time.
When the cloth goes into the dye, the dye cannot reach what is under the thread. Untie it and a dot of the original colour is sitting there. For more than one colour, the cloth is tied, dyed, retied and dyed again — as many rounds as there are colours.
An elaborate piece can carry as many as one lakh ties. A hundred thousand knots, each made by a hand.
Who makes it
The Khatri community are the main producers of Bandhani in Gujarat — both Hindu and Muslim families. The craft is traced back to around the twelfth century, and it arrived in Kachchh when Khatri families migrated here from Sindh. It has been worked in this district for a very long time.
The dyes were local: madder for reds, pomegranate for yellows, and whatever else the land gave. That changed after the 1956 Kachchh earthquake, when chemical dyes came in and altered the craft substantially. Natural-dye Bandhani still exists, but it is now the deliberate exception rather than the default.
The cloths that matter most
Bandhani is a wedding cloth before it is anything else.
The gharcholu is the traditional wedding odhani of Gujarati Hindu and Jain brides — a grid of squares filled with tied motifs. The chandrokhani is worn by Muslim brides. Same technique, different cloth, different community, both central to the day.
Which is worth knowing if you think of Bandhani as decoration. In Kutch it is closer to a document.
Ours
The Bandhani Dots coaster and the 600ml steel bottle take the dot grid and the red-and-white palette. Bandhani is also one of the four in our Kutch Coaster Set of 4.
It is our drawing of Bandhani, printed by a machine in one pass. Nobody tied a hundred thousand knots to make your coaster, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
If you want real Bandhani
Buy a dupatta or a gharcholu from the Khatri workshops — Bhuj, Mandvi and Nakhatrana in west Kachchh all have them, and Khamir at Kukma is an honest place to start if you do not know anyone here. Turn the cloth over and look for the puckering where the knots were. A printed imitation is perfectly flat.
Eleven more crafts in the Kutch range, and boxed gift sets if you are buying for someone else.
Written in Bhuj, Gujarat.