In every part of India textiles are more than colors and skills. They are about politics, memories and what is passed down. These textiles are handed from one generation to the next. They become a living record of who wore them and why. One pattern appears in this record more quietly than others: the grid or the chequered design, which is part of cloth used daily. For work for weather for years of use. It appears in cotton, wool and silk. It is found in the gamcha wrapped around a farmer's shoulders, the lungi tied around a fisherman's waist and the saree worn for a wedding. The grid is not something added after the cloth is made. It comes from the process itself. From how the thread is dyed before it even reaches the loom from how the threads are counted and repeated from generations of people weaving it the same way every time.

India's textile history has been carefully recorded by generations of art historians, craft researchers and textile scholars. Yet one part of that history- the grid, has rarely been studied on its own. Our starting point was Injiri, a textile brand created in Jaipur in 2009 by designer Chinar Farooqui.

The brand's name holds this history. Injiri comes from a Kalabari word. The Kalabari are a group from the Niger Delta in Nigeria. Meaning 'real India'-  for generations Kalabari women used lengths of Indian Madras plaid cloth as headwraps and called the fabric injiri, a name that is still used today.

This was not just a brief exchange. Portuguese traders are known to have taken chequered cotton. The cloth was later called 'Madras plaid' in the West. To West Africa as early as the 1400s. The trade grew more once the British East India Company built Fort St George on the coast that became the city of Madras. Among the Kalabari the cloth became a symbol of a person's entire life, worn at births, weddings and funerals. Clothes called ‘ede deis’ were hung across the walls and ceiling of the home. Some accounts say this exchange has been going on for four hundred years. Kalabari women also changed the fabric themselves, pulling out individual threads from the weave in a technique called pelete bite or 'cut-thread cloth’ - depending on who was trading it; the same fabric had names. George cloth to the Igbo after Fort St George; Guinea cloth to European merchants; and Real Madras Handkerchief in Britain.

It is easy to think that India's reputation for checks starts and ends with Madras. It does not. Some records say chequered cotton lungis were worn on the coast of Madraspatnam by fishers and farmers, as early as the twelfth century long before 'Madras checks was used anywhere else in the world. Checked cloth was also being made under different names for different reasons in many other parts of the country. In Bengal and Assam the same red-and-white grid appears on the gamcha called gamosa in Assamese. Odisha calls its version gamocha; in Tamil Nadu it is thundu; in Karnataka, meli; in Kerala, the thorthu marked at each end by a woven signal called chutty. Further east the idea has even more names. Gamphan in Mizoram, Innaphi in Manipur, Risa in Tripura. In Chettinad in Tamil Nadu handwoven cotton sarees still have a chequered pattern called Kattam simply the Tamil word for grid. In the north-west frontier the woolen checks are called Pattu while towards Punjab another type of double cloth checks are known as Khes.  Each of these is made from the same basic idea. Yarn dyed before it is woven crossing in two directions to form a grid. But each has its own name, its own community and its own reason for being worn.

Over time the look of these textiles has changed. Through trade routes opening and closing through the movement of traders, wearers and weavers through industrialization and through the social and economic changes India has gone through. The colors changed. The materials changed. Even the reasons people wore checks changed.. One thing stayed the same through all of it: the need of a community to see itself in what it wore and to use cloth as a way to show who they are. Look enough and every grid holds a story tied to a place. The weavers caste, the wearers region, the dyers method, the community's past.

India has gone through centuries of change. Family systems changed, colonial rule was lived through, industries were restructured. We are now into the twenty-first century and the gap between then and now keeps growing. Much of what remained in these textiles a hundred years ago is already disappearing. This Project is Injiri’s Art & Research Initiatives effort to capture what is left before it is gone too.

Sources

1. Injiri, "Our Story " accessed 2026. Https://www.injiri.co.in/story/

2. "Why Is Madras Popular in the Caribbean? Its Back Story Tells a Disquieting Tale " Discover by Silversea. Https://www.silversea.com/blog/destinations/central-america/why-is-madras-popular-in-the-caribbean-its-back-story-tells-a-disquieting-tale

3. Sabita Radhakrishnan, "Madras Checks," Madras Musings, February 1 2016. Https://madrasmusings.com/vol-25-no-20/madras-checks/

4. "Madras Checks," Impart. Techniques & Processes Textile. Https://imp-art.org/articles/madras-checks/

5. "Global Trade and Cultural Authentication: The Kalabari of the Niger Delta " Textile Society of America. Https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/600

6. "From South India To Global Fashion: The Rise Of Madras Checks " Outlook Traveller, October 25 2024. Https://www.outlooktraveller.com/destinations/india/from-south-india-to-global-fashion-the-rise-of-madras-checks

7. "Gamchha: The Ultimate Symbol of Utility, Heritage and Cultural Evolution, in India " LoudVoice. Https://loudvoice.in/gamchha-cultural-significance/