The Intricate Patterning of Batik

IN a small rice-farming village south of Jogjakarta, Indonesia, a 19-year-old woman crouched in the doorway of her bamboo house, using the last rays of sunlight to see as she applied molten wax to a piece of cotton fabric. The woman, Miss Setyawati, was creating a work of batik, Indonesia's national handcraft. Yet the young artist is an anomaly, for few villagers today know the tools of the ancient craft. Batik, the pride of Indonesia's art for centuries, is dying out. The reason for the decline is simple economics: the labor-intensive craft of hand-printing textiles and coating with wax all parts that are not to be dyed cannot compete with cheap, mass-produced textile prints.

To be genuine, batik must be made with wax, and must be made by hand. The wax on batik may be applied with a canting (pronounced CHAN-ting), a sort of fountain pen for liquefied wax, or with a metal stamp known as a chop. Either way it is a laborious process. Imitation batik refers to machine-made printed textiles that use traditional batik motifs but are produced by a printing process in which a pattern is impressed directly onto the cloth.

Miss Setyawati (many Indonesians have only one name) learned the craft at a Government-sponsored workshop designed to keep the batik tradition alive and uses a canting to outline a stylized floral motif.

She will repeat the intricate motif over and over again until it completely covers the 40-inch by 98.4-inch piece of cloth (the standard size for a sarong or wraparound skirt); she will then repeat the design on the opposite side of the fabric.

Later, when she dyes the white fabric blue, the wax will preserve a white impression underneath. The process can take two to three months, yet the completed work will fetch a mere $15 to $35 in the market.

Factories, meanwhile, will produce thousands of batik lookalike print fabrics in a much broader range of colors, and sell them for a quarter of the price.

While tourists still flock to Jogjakarta to buy batik, experts say at least 60 percent of what they see and buy is not batik at all. And the wall hangings popular among tourists are a far cry from the traditional floral and bird motifs.