Jamdani and Bandhani come from different textile traditions, shaped by different hands and entirely different processes. Studio Medium brings them together in JamBan, a textile technique where handwoven motifs and resist-dyed patterns are plotted to meet, merge and move across the same surface.
First developed in 2019 for a collection of sarees and garments, the pairing has since become an ongoing exploration for the studio, with each season extending the possibilities of how the two crafts can work together.
The two techniques begin from entirely different processes. Jamdani is a weaving technique where motifs are introduced into the base fabric through a discontinuous or supplementary weft. Each motif is placed individually by hand, thread by thread, directly onto the fabric while it remains on the loom. Bandhani works after the fabric has been woven. It is a resist-dyeing technique in which small sections of the textile are pinched and tied by hand. These tied portions resist the dye, creating the distinctive dots that emerge once the bindings are opened.
Studio Medium’s intervention lies in making these two processes interact across the same surface. Rather than keeping the woven motifs and dyed areas as separate sections, the studio reworked the way Jamdani motifs are plotted. The designs move beyond a fixed, repetitive grid, allowing woven forms to expand, dissolve and continue into the Bandhani areas. A motif can therefore begin as a woven element and gradually transition into a field created through dyeing, with the boundary between the two techniques becoming part of the design itself.
The visual language developed from an interest in landscapes viewed from above, particularly the way different terrains meet and merge. Greens move into rivers, rivers meet mountains and mountains gradually return to fields and vegetation. This idea of shifting boundaries becomes a framework for the textile, giving the woven motifs room to change scale and direction as they move towards the resisted areas.
The making of JamBan begins at Studio Medium’s New Delhi studio. The Jamdani design is first plotted by hand on graph paper. A transparent layer is placed over the graph, and the proposed Bandhani pattern is mapped onto it. This overlay is an important part of the design process because it allows the team to see how the woven and dyed elements will occupy the same textile and where one technique will eventually meet the other.
Once the design has been mapped, the graph is scaled up and sent to weaving clusters in Bengal. Here, Jamdani weavers translate the drawing into the fabric, introducing the motifs by hand as the textile is constructed on the loom. Each element has to be placed within the weave according to the plotted design, making the first stage of JamBan a precise exercise in handloom weaving.
The woven textile then travels back to Studio Medium in New Delhi for marking. At this stage, the surface is prepared for the second craft intervention. The areas designated for Bandhani are mapped onto the completed Jamdani, establishing where the fabric will subsequently be pinched and tied. The marking stage effectively translates the original overlay from the design process onto the physical textile, connecting the woven construction to the dyeing process that follows.
The marked textile then moves west to the Bandhani clusters of Bhuj in Gujarat. Here, artisans work directly onto the already woven Jamdani surface, pinching small portions of the fabric and tying them by hand. These tied sections create the resist pattern, protecting selected areas from the dye. The process requires the Bandhani artisans to work with a surface that already contains a complex woven pattern, adding a second layer of craft onto an existing textile rather than beginning with an untouched length of fabric.
The textile is then dyed. The resisted portions retain their original colour while the exposed areas take on the dye, bringing the Bandhani pattern into visibility across the Jamdani base. This is where the two techniques become visually connected. The woven motifs occupy the surface alongside the dyed pattern, while the plotting developed by Studio Medium allows the two to extend into one another.
After dyeing, the textile makes its final journey back to New Delhi. Studio Medium then transforms the finished fabric into a saree or garment, completing a process that has moved through multiple stages, people, craft communities and regions. From the initial graph-paper drawing to the finished textile, a single JamBan piece can take up to sixteen weeks to make.
What makes JamBan significant within Studio Medium’s practice is the way the technique treats weaving and dyeing as parts of one design system. Jamdani provides the structure through which the textile is built, while Bandhani alters that surface through resist and colour. The two processes retain their individual methods, yet the final textile is designed around their exchange. It places Bengal’s weaving tradition and Gujarat’s Bandhani practice within the same textile, using a contemporary design process to connect two established craft languages.
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