Nine Hundred Hours.One Garment.

Metal-thread embroidery worked from the underside of a stretched frame with a hook, so the karigar does not see the face of the piece until it comes off the adda. Real zari is silver wire gilded with gold and wound over a silk core. The substitute is metallised polyester, and the difference is visible within two years of wear.

Time to learn

Seven years. Two to be useful at a frame, seven to be trusted with a bridal panel.

Time per piece

800 to 900 hours, five karigars, for a full bridal skirt.

Held here by

Rafiq Ansari, Lucknow — thirty-four years

Flat metallic ribbon folded, cut into leaves, petals and geometric repeats, then appliquéd onto the ground. The whole effect rests on the repeats being identical and the tape being cut on exactly the right bias. A millimetre out and a border reads as handmade in the wrong sense.

Time to learn

The technique takes a fortnight. The calibration takes decades and cannot be taught, only accumulated.

Time per piece

90 to 140 hours for a full dupatta border.

Held here by

Meena Devi, Jaipur — twenty-eight years

Chain stitch pulled up through the ground with a fine hooked needle. It is the fastest of the frame crafts and the one that carries beads and sequins best, laying a continuous line at roughly four times the speed of needle and thread. On our pieces aari does the ground and zardozi does the ornament.

Time to learn

Three years to hold an even chain around a tight curve.

Time per piece

110 to 160 hours for an anarkali bodice and sleeves.

Held here by

Imran Shaikh, Kolkata — nineteen years

White thread on white cloth. The shadow stitch, bakhiya, is worked from the reverse so the float reads through fine muslin as a bloom rather than a line. Thirty-two named stitches survive and six are in daily use. The pattern goes on first as a washable block print and is meant to vanish in the first rinse.

Time to learn

Five years for bakhiya. Longer if you want the murri knots to sit upright.

Time per piece

200 to 260 hours for a densely worked kurta.

Held here by

Salma Khatoon, Lucknow — forty-one years

Tie-resist dyeing. The cloth is pinched into thousands of points with a fingernail kept long for the purpose, each point bound in thread, then dyed; the bound points stay clear. A piece is graded by dot count, and a fine odhani carries upward of forty thousand.

Time to learn

Two years to tie evenly. Most tiers begin at eight or nine years old.

Time per piece

Three weeks of one pair of hands to tie a fine odhani, before any dye is mixed.

Held here by

Jitendra Khatri, Bhuj — twenty-six years

Sixteen stages of resist and mordant printing in indigo, madder and iron, printed on both faces of the cloth so that the two register exactly. The printing is the visible part. The craft is the vats — reading a fermenting indigo by smell and surface, and knowing what to feed it.

Time to learn

Ten years, and the last five are the dyeing rather than the printing.

Time per piece

Fourteen to twenty-one days per length, and it stops when the weather turns.

Held here by

Ismail Khatri, Ajrakhpur — thirty-seven years

Uncut polki stones held by 24-carat gold foil pressed cold around the girdle. No claws, no solder, no heat anywhere near the stone; the foil is burnished until it grips. The back of a good kundan piece is finished in enamel, because it sits against skin for six hours.

Time to learn

Eight years. The apprentice spends the first two making foil and nothing else.

Time per piece

60 to 90 hours for a choker, plus the enameller’s time on the reverse.

Held here by

Hariram Verma, Jaipur — forty-five years

Vitreous enamel fired into engraved gold. Each colour is fired separately and in descending order of hardness — white first at the highest heat, red last — because one firing at the wrong temperature destroys the colour beneath it. Red is the one that decides whether you are a meenakar.

Time to learn

Six years, and the failure rate on red stays high throughout them.

Time per piece

40 hours for the reverse of a choker that nobody will look at.

Held here by

Nasreen Begum, Hyderabad — twenty-two years

Coiled thread worked with a hook into dense raised knots — matte where zardozi is bright, and the most durable surface work in the house. It survives being gripped, which is why it goes on cuffs, plackets and the front edge of a jacket.

Time to learn

Four years to keep the knot height constant across a whole panel.

Time per piece

300 hours for a fully worked jacket front.

Held here by

Devendra Soni, Jodhpur — twenty-four years

Brocade on a pit loom with a jacquard head: silk warp, supplementary zari weft. The design is drawn first as a naqsha on point paper by a specialist who never touches a loom, then punched into cards. In kadhua each motif is woven individually rather than carried across the back, which is five times slower and the reason a real Banarasi has no float lines behind the pattern.

Time to learn

A weaver starts as a child at the loom. Ten years before kadhua.

Time per piece

25 to 45 days for a saree. A kadhua bridal piece can run six months.

Held here by

Ashok Maurya, Varanasi — thirty-two years

Hand-carved teak blocks, one block per colour, registered against a corner pin by eye rather than by machine. A four-colour repeat means four passes down the full length of the cloth and four chances to lose the register. The slight drift you can see across a printed saree is the evidence it was not a screen.

Time to learn

Two years to print. Twelve to carve the blocks, which is a separate trade entirely.

Time per piece

Three to six days for a saree length, longer when the dye needs sun.

Held here by

Ramji Chhipa, Chanderi — eighteen years