Batik

What is Batik?

Batik means two things at once: a way of dyeing cloth, and the cloth that comes out of it. Melted wax is placed on fabric, by hand or with a stamp, and the waxed patches resist the dye. When the wax is later scraped off or boiled away, those patches show the colour the cloth held before. Repeating the waxing and the dipping builds up several colours. The technique is tied above all to Java in Indonesia, where it is the most developed, and Javanese workshops and artisans still produce it today. Cloth for batik may be silk or cotton. Motifs differ from one place to another.

Where does Batik come from?

Wax resist dyeing is old and widespread. Egyptians used it on mummy linen in the 4th century BC, and versions appear in India, Tang China and Nara Japan, and among the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Soninke and Wolof of Senegal. On Java the technique reached its most refined form, though dating is hard because cloth rots in the tropics. Two Dutch historians thought it arrived from India or Sri Lanka around the 6th or 7th century; others place its growth in Java's Hindu-Buddhist centuries, or argue it began only in the 16th century, after Majapahit. In 2022 a blue and white valance was identified and carbon dated to the 13th or 14th century, pointing to skilled work in the early Majapahit years.

How is Batik made?

Production starts with the cloth: it is washed, soaked and beaten with a large mallet, then the pattern is sketched in pencil and gone over in hot wax. The wax is usually paraffin or beeswax, sometimes with plant resins added. A canting, a small copper cup with a spout on a wooden handle, writes the finest lines; a cap, a carved copper stamp, covers cloth faster for larger runs; brushes or sticks are used for painted batik. The cloth is dipped in dye, dried, and the wax removed by boiling or scraping. Each further colour means another round of waxing and dipping.

Colours, motifs and borders

Motifs answer to their time, their place and the culture that makes them, so they differ greatly even inside one country. Some carry symbolic weight and are used only on particular occasions; others were drawn to match fashion and what the market wanted. Documentation of existing patterns by scholars in the early 20th century fed new designs, and artisans of Dutch and Chinese descent working on Java's northern coast blended several traditions into the pesisir, or coastal, style. Early surviving pieces are blue and white. Synthetic dyes later made brighter colour possible.

How Batik is worn

Batik is not worn as a single draped sheet. In the Malay archipelago it was a skirt or sarong, wrapped and worn with a kebaya, the fitted blouse, by indigenous, Chinese and European women alike. Some batik was made for other purposes entirely, such as the tok wi, an altar cloth used in peranakan households. Because patterns carry meaning, the choice of cloth could suit a particular occasion. Workshops today turn out a wide range of goods, from clothing to furnishings.

When Batik is worn

Most batik was everyday dress: a sarong for work, for the house, for going out, worn with a kebaya. Certain patterns were kept for specific occasions, so what a person put on could say something about the moment and the wearer. Batik also served ritual purposes, as with the tok wi altar cloth in peranakan homes. Painters later used the technique for pictures rather than dress, and collectors and museums treated older pieces as art. Batik continues to be made and worn across the region and beyond.

Styles of Batik

Batik comes in three broad kinds by method: written batik, worked by hand with the canting; stamped batik, made with the copper cap; and painted batik, done with brush or stick. Coastal pesisir batik from Java's north coast blends influences, and ateliers such as Eliza van Zuylen's and Oey Soe Tjoen's made cloth for a wide market. Javanese batik travelled overseas too. In Africa it grew into the African wax print, with bolder motifs, heavier lines and more colour, and some West African makers use cassava starch, rice paste or mud instead of wax. Malay peninsula workshops took up block stamping in the 1920s, and in the 1970s Aboriginal artists at Ernabella, Australia, made the craft their own.

What Batik means

Batik carries identity as well as craft. It drew outside attention in 1817, when an account of Java was published; collecting and scholarship followed. A Dutch merchant's pieces reached the Rotterdam ethnographic museum in 1873, examples went on show at the Paris world's fair in 1900, and the Tropenmuseum in the Netherlands now holds the largest Indonesian batik collection. Workshops and artisans survived the collapse that followed the Second World War and the independence struggle, and they still supply a wide range of goods. Batik has also fed other artists, among them the English painter Thetis Blacker, who studied the cloth in Yogyakarta and travelled in Bali.

Questions people ask about Batik

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle

• Batik on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data