The Thankless Art: What Chikankari Costs the People Who Make It

The Craft Everyone Praises and No One Credits

Pick up a Chikankari kurta anywhere in India and you will hear the same words: delicate, timeless, heritage, art. What you will almost never hear is a name.

Not the name of the woman who sat with the fabric across her knees for three weeks. Not the name of the person who drew the block print outline, or the one who washed and starched the finished piece until the shadow work came alive. The garment gets the compliment. The hands stay invisible.

That is what makes Chikankari, for all its beauty, a largely thankless art.

Weeks of Work, Reduced to a Price Tag

A single well-made Chikankari piece is not one person's work. It moves through a chain of specialists, each doing something no machine can replicate:

• The naqqash designs the motif and carves it into wooden blocks.
• The chhapai artisan block-prints the pattern onto the fabric in washable blue ink.
• The karigar embroiders it, stitch by stitch, often across dozens of different stitch types on one garment.
• The dhobi washes the piece so the printed outline disappears and only the thread remains.

Depending on the density of the work, this can take anywhere from a few days to several months. Then the finished piece reaches a shop window, or a marketplace listing, where the customer's first question is almost always the same: itna mehenga kyun hai?

The Embroidery Is Mostly Done by Women Nobody Sees

The overwhelming majority of Chikankari embroidery in and around Lucknow is done by women working from home, in villages and neighbourhoods spread across the district. It is home-based, piece-rate work, fitted around cooking, childcare and everything else the day demands.

That arrangement has one advantage — the work comes to them — and a long list of disadvantages. Home-based workers are the easiest link in any supply chain to underpay, because they are scattered, uncounted, and rarely in a position to negotiate. Payment is per piece, so hours spent do not always translate into money earned. And because the embroidery happens invisibly, in private homes rather than in a workshop with a signboard, the labour behind the craft never becomes visible to the person buying it.

Then the Machine Arrived

The harder blow is competition that isn't really competition. Walk through any large market and you will find "Chikankari" garments priced at a few hundred rupees. Look closely and the tell-tale signs are there: identical motifs repeating with mechanical precision, a dense thread mat on the reverse, no shadow work visible through the fabric, no small irregularities that come from a human hand.

This is machine embroidery in the visual language of Chikankari. It costs a fraction to produce, and it trains buyers to believe that Chikankari should cost a few hundred rupees. Every hand-embroidered piece then has to justify its price against a fake — and the artisan, not the middleman, absorbs the pressure.

Chikankari carries a Geographical Indication tag. It has been practised in Lucknow for around four centuries. Neither of those facts puts money in a karigar's hands.

The Quiet Exit

There is a question artisan families increasingly ask, and it is the most damaging one for the craft's future: should my daughter learn this?

When a skill takes years to master and returns less than unskilled daily-wage work, the honest answer is often no. Younger generations move to other work, and the most intricate stitches — the ones that take longest to learn and are least commercially viable — start to thin out. A craft does not usually die in one dramatic moment. It narrows, quietly, one skipped stitch at a time.

What Actually Helps

Sympathy is not the point of this post. Buying behaviour is. If you value this craft, a few things genuinely move the needle:

• Learn to tell hand from machine. A buyer who can spot the difference is the single biggest threat to the imitation market.
• Stop treating the price as negotiable by default. The bargain always comes out of the last person in the chain.
• Ask brands who made it. Not "is it handmade" — every seller says yes. Ask where the karigars work, how they're paid, and whether the brand can show you the work in progress.
• Buy fewer, better pieces. One real Chikankari kurta outlasts five printed ones, and it pays an actual person.

Where Janaki Apparels Stands

We at Janaki, are dedicated to work with the artisans at each stage of production. We believe in discussing the reasonable and just price with the artisans for each piece and pay the amount as fixed during the discussion. We also believe in providing whatever extra assistance in their daily lives to help them lead their lives in a just and dignified manner. Most artisans depend on their pay for running their daily expenses so we believe in paying their due well in time.

We would rather sell one honest piece than ten that quietly pass off a machine's work as a woman's. If that makes our prices higher than the market's cheapest, we are comfortable explaining exactly why.

Explore our hand-embroidered Chikankari collection, or read our guide on how to tell hand Chikankari from machine embroidery.