Bagru block print, and how to tell it from a screen print

Bagru is a town outside Jaipur where the Chhipa community has been printing cloth with carved wooden blocks and mud resist for something like three hundred years. The process runs in a fixed order: the cloth is washed in the river, treated with harad, printed with dabu mud where the dye should not reach, then dyed, then washed again. Each colour is a separate block and a separate pass. What this means for you as a buyer is simple. Look at the edge of a printed motif. A hand block leaves a line that bleeds very slightly into the cloth and does not repeat identically across the panel — you will find a place where the printer set the block down a millimetre off. A screen print gives you a clean edge and a perfect repeat. Neither is a defect. But only one of them took three days.