Batik

Court batik at Surakarta and Yogyakarta uses few colours: soga brown, indigo and the white of the cloth, with a firmly held difference between the two — Yogyakarta a brighter white, Surakarta a more yellowed ground. Its patterns are set out in repeating fields by rule, and some of them may be worn only by particular people.

Coastal batik — Pekalongan, Cirebon, Lasem, Indramayu — went the other way. Its colours are many and bright, its patterns carry the Chinese phoenix, Dutch flower bouquets, and the mega mendung cloud form of Cirebon. Lasem produced a red associated with its water and with the peranakan proprietors who ran its workshops. The two poles are not a ranking of quality but two different histories: one grew under palace rule, the other under the traffic of ports.

Batik tulis is made with the canting, a small copper spout on a bamboo handle laying hot wax line by line; a fine cloth takes months and is done almost always by women. Batik cap uses a copper stamp, which arrived in the mid-nineteenth century and cut the time to days; the work is heavy and almost always done by men. Both are batik because both use wax as a resist.

Cloth machine-printed with batik patterns, using no wax at all, is not batik under the definition used in the 2009 UNESCO inscription or by batik makers themselves, and is called batik printing in ordinary usage — a term that joins the two things most in need of separation. Most cloth sold as batik in Indonesia today is of the last kind, and this distinction is the one most often lost in sales descriptions; see SRC-0605.

Batik cloth is worn as a jarik or long wrapped length, and the kind of cloth states the occasion: particular patterns for marriage, for the seventh month of pregnancy, for mourning. The giving of cloth is part of obligation between families, as ulos is among the Batak.

The 2009 UNESCO inscription was followed by government policy making Friday a batik day in offices and schools. The consequences were large and forked: demand rose sharply, and most of the rise was absorbed by machine-printed cloth, so that an inscription meant to protect a craft enlarged the market for what is not that craft. Hand batik makers report the two moving in opposite directions — the name of batik better known than before, and a living from the canting no better.