Meera Rathore turned her grandmother's block-printing table into a textile house now sold in four countries.
The table is still there. It stands in the first room of the house in the walled city, its surface stained in indigo and madder from sixty years of wooden blocks, and every new printer at Rathore Textiles spends their first morning at it.
"My grandmother printed for others," Meera says. "Merchants brought her cloth, she gave it back beautiful, and they put their name on it. I decided we would print for ourselves."
She was twenty-six when she sold the first bolts under her own label, from a borrowed stall at a winter fair. She sold out by the second evening and spent the night with her mother cutting more.
What followed was not a straight line. There was the year a large retailer copied her best pattern and sold it for a third of the price. There was the flood that took a season's stock. There was the long argument with her family about whether a woman should be travelling alone to trade shows in Milan.
Through all of it she kept two rules. Every piece is printed by hand in Jaipur. And every printer is paid by the month, not by the metre, so nobody hurries a block.
Today the house sells in India, the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan, and employs forty-two printers. The trend for hand block printing has come and gone twice in that time. Meera has not changed what she makes.
"A trend is someone else deciding what you are worth this year," she says. "A house is you deciding it every year."
“My grandmother printed for others. I decided we would print for ourselves.”
