✦ Artisan craft · India
The art of
handmade paper
Sanganer, Rajasthan
The craft
Always practical, always passionate.
Paper reached India around the eleventh century, traveling in from Persia and Central Asia — the word kagaz still carries that origin. The families who made it took the craft as their name. They became the Kagzis, and they still are. For six centuries, handmade paper was the writing surface of India: court documents, Mughal miniatures, imperial decrees. Whole neighborhoods called kagzi mohallahs grew up around the trade. In the sixteenth century, Raja Man Singh of Amber brought Kagzi families to Sanganer, outside Jaipur, settling them on the Saraswati river for its clean water. Sanganer became one of the great paper towns of India, and remains one today.
In Sanganer, this tradition has been practiced for generations, woven into the town's broader heritage of hand papermaking and natural dyes.
No two sheets are ever the same — the water decides, and we follow.
Our commitment
100% recycled cotton.
The technique was always practical. Cotton rags, jute scraps, banana fiber, whatever the fields and households gave up, soaked and beaten into pulp, lifted out of the vat on a screen, pressed, dried in the sun. Nothing wasted. The paper that came out was soft, durable, and inseparable from the place that made it. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British mill-made paper nearly killed the craft. It came back through the Swadeshi movement. A Gandhian named Munnalal Khaddari formally re-established papermaking in Kalpi in the 1940s, and Gandhi himself bought it in bulk for his ashram, a small act of preservation that quietly mattered. After independence, the Khadi and Village Industries Commission picked up the work, and the paper making towns slowly came back.
CRAFT STEEPED IN HISTORY
