Textiles designer Brigitte Singh lovingly lays out a piece of cloth embossed with a red poppy plant she said was probably designed for Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, four centuries ago.
For Singh — who moved from France to India 42 years ago and married into a maharaja’s family — this exquisite piece remains the ever-inspiring heart of her studio’s mission.
The 67-year-old is striving to keep alive the art of block printing, which flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries under the conquering, but sophisticated, Mughal dynasty that then ruled India.
Photo: AFP
“I was the first to give a renaissance to this kind of Mughal design,” Singh said in her traditional printing workshop in Rajasthan.
Having studied decorative arts in Paris, Singh arrived aged 25 in 1980 in western India’s Jaipur, the “last bastion” of the technique of using carved blocks of wood to print patterns on material.
“I dreamed of practicing [miniature art] in Isfahan, but the Ayatollahs had just arrived in Iran [in the Islamic revolution of 1979]. Or Herat, but the Soviets had just arrived in Afghanistan,” she said.
Photo: AFP
“So by default, I ended up in Jaipur,” she said.
A few months after arriving, Singh was introduced to a member of the local nobility who was related to the maharaja of Rajasthan. They married in 1982.
At first, Singh still hoped to try her hand at miniature painting, but after scouring the city for traditional paper to work on, she came across workshops using block printing.
Photo: AFP
“I fell into the magic potion and could never go back,” she said. She started by making just a few scarves, and when she passed through London two years later, gave them as presents to friends who were connoisseurs of Indian textiles. Bowled over, they persuaded her to show them to Colefax and Fowler, the storied British interior decorations firm.
“The next thing I knew, I was on my way back to India with an order for printed textiles,” she said.
For the next two decades, she worked with a “family of printers” in the city before building her own studio in nearby Amber — a stone’s throw from Jaipur’s famous fort.
It was her father-in-law, a major collector of Rajasthan miniatures, who gave her the Mughal-era poppy cloth connected to Shah Jahan.
Her reproduction of that print was a huge success the world over, proving especially popular with Indian, British and Japanese clients.
In 2014, she made a Mughal poppy print quilted coat, called an atamsukh — meaning “comfort of the soul” — that was later acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Another piece of her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York.
Singh starts her creative process by handing precise paintings to her sculptor, Rajesh Kumar, who then painstakingly chisels the designs onto blocks of wood.
“We need a remarkable sculptor, with a very serious eye,” she said. “The carving of the wood blocks is the key. This tool has the sophistication of simplicity.”
Kumar makes several identical blocks for each color used in each printed fabric.
“The poppy motif, for example, has five colors. I had to make five blocks,” he said. “It took me 20 days.”
At Singh’s workshop, six employees work on pieces of cloth laid out on tables 5m long.
They dip the blocks in dye, place them carefully on the cloth, push down and tap.
The work is slow and intricate, producing no more than 40m of material every day.
Her workshop makes everything from quilts to curtains and rag dolls to shoes.
Singh just finished another atamsukh for a prince in Kuwait.
“The important thing is to keep the know-how alive,” she said. “More precious than the product, the real treasure is the savoir faire.”
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
The average pay to employees by ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) was the highest among the companies listed on the local main board last year, while contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) ranked seventh, the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) said on Monday. Data compiled by the exchange showed ASE Technology, the world’s largest chip packaging and testing services provider, paid its employees an average of NT$6.28 million (US$199,746) last year, up 40 percent from a year earlier. TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker and the most profitable company in Taiwan, paid its employees NT$4.09 million on average, up
RSS