Some crafts are loud about their skill. Block printing isn't one of them. From a distance, it just looks like a pattern on cotton. Look closer, and you're looking at thirty years of precision, repeated thousands of times, by one pair of hands.
That's Ramesh Kumar's hands. He works out of Bagru, a small town in Rajasthan whose name has been synonymous with block printing for generations — and every Ekohum motif you've ever worn started with him.
Bagru: the village that means block printing
Some places are known for a dish, a festival, an accent. Bagru is known for a craft. For generations, families here have carved wood, mixed natural dye, and pressed pattern onto cloth — not as a side trade, but as the town's identity. Ramesh is part of that lineage. Thirty years in, he's not learning the craft anymore. He is the craft.
This is what "homegrown" actually means, beyond the word on a label: a skill rooted in one place, passed hand to hand, still alive because someone like Ramesh kept doing it when it would have been easier to mechanize.
The handwork behind one motif
Here's what most people don't see when they buy a block-printed kurta: the carving comes first. Ramesh carves each block from teak by hand — a process that demands the kind of precision where a single wrong cut changes the entire motif. Then comes the printing itself: dip, press, lift, repeat. Over and over, down the length of the fabric, by hand, with natural dye.
No machine is involved at any stage. And because the hand isn't a machine, no two metres come out identical. That's not a flaw to be corrected — it's the entire point.
A printed cloth remembers the hand that made it. Look closely and you will see it.
— Ramesh Kumar
Precision you can actually see
Run your hand over a block-printed Ekohum piece and you'll notice it: the very slight variation in pressure, the way one repeat sits a fraction differently than the next. That's precision of a different kind than a printer achieves — not perfect uniformity, but consistent skill applied by a steady hand, over and over, for thirty years.
It's also why a piece like this never looks like it came off a shelf with a thousand identical copies. It came off Ramesh's table, with his hands on it.
Wear Ramesh's craft
Here are a few pieces currently carrying his block print — each one hand-printed in Bagru, with the natural irregularity that's proof of the hand behind it.
Hand Block Printed Indigo Kaftan Dress with Pocket — ₹1,350 →
The craft is the point
Every time you choose a hand-block-printed piece over a printed copy of one, you're choosing to keep a 30-year skill economically worth practicing. That's the real story behind "homegrown" — not nostalgia, but a working artisan whose precision still beats a machine at the one thing a machine can never fake: character.