We get this question a lot, usually from someone holding two block-printed shirts and asking why one costs more than the other, or why the "Kalamkari" label on one site looks nothing like the "Kalamkari" on another. Fair question. These three crafts get lumped together as "Indian block print" so often that most people never learn what actually separates them.
Here's the short version, then the long version, because the short version alone won't help you when you're staring at a rack of prints trying to figure out what you're looking at.
Bagru: the earthy one
Bagru comes from a small town of the same name, about 30 kilometres outside Jaipur. The Chhipa community has been printing here for something like 400 years, using a two-step process that starts with mud, not dye.
Before any colour touches the fabric, artisans coat the cloth in a wash of clay and cow dung, which sounds strange until you learn it's what fixes the dye later. Then comes the printing: carved wooden blocks stamped by hand, repeat after repeat, using natural dyes pulled from indigo, pomegranate rind, and an iron-based black called syahi. No chemical dyes, no machines.
What you end up with is a distinctly muted palette. Deep indigo blue, rust red, black, and the natural off-white of the cotton underneath. Motifs run toward small florals, birds, and geometric repeats. It reads as rustic in the best sense, more "this came from the earth" than "this came from a printer."
Our Indigo Butta shirt is a straightforward example. Small floral butta motif, hand-stamped, dyed with natural indigo. Nothing fussy about it.
The Fadat printing technique, another Bagru variant, gets used on our short kurtis, layering a rustic red base with a delicate buti motif before finishing the fabric with hand-quilting for texture.
Kalamkari: the painted one (mostly)
Kalamkari comes from Andhra Pradesh, and the name gives it away if you know a little Persian: kalam means pen, kari means work. Pen-work.
There are actually two distinct traditions under this one name, and conflating them is where a lot of the confusion starts. Srikalahasti Kalamkari is genuinely hand-painted, using a bamboo or tamarind pen dipped in natural dye, and the motifs lean heavily on Hindu mythology, gods, epics, temple scenes. Machilipatnam Kalamkari, on the other hand, is block-printed, developed under Mughal and later European patronage, and tends toward more repeating, decorative patterns rather than narrative scenes.
Most of what you'll find in shops today, including our own kaftans and co-ord sets, is the block-printed style, sometimes with hand-painted detailing added on top. It's a slower, more labour-intensive process than Bagru, and it usually shows in the price.
An 18-kali Anarkali set works well to show the scale Kalamkari can cover, an all-over print across a full flared silhouette rather than a small motif repeated in a corner.
Ajrakh: the complicated one
If Bagru is earthy and Kalamkari is painterly, Ajrakh is the one that will make you respect block printing as a discipline. It comes from the Khatri community, split between Barmer in Rajasthan and Kutch in Gujarat, and it's widely considered one of the most technically demanding block-printing traditions anywhere.
Part of that is the colour palette: deep indigo and madder red, both notoriously difficult natural dyes to get right. Part of it is the process itself, which can run to sixteen or more separate stages of resist-printing, dyeing, washing, and drying. Get one stage wrong and you're starting over. And unlike Bagru or most Kalamkari, genuine Ajrakh is printed identically on both sides of the fabric, which is its own technical headache.
Ajrakh from Kutch actually carries a GI (Geographical Indication) tag, which is the government's way of saying: this specific place, this specific technique, don't fake it.
Our Ajrakh pieces, the indigo skirt-top set and the block-printed dupattas, use this deep indigo-and-madder palette with dense, symmetrical geometric patterning. It photographs beautifully but it's worth knowing what actually went into it.
Even a smaller piece like a dupatta shows the density Ajrakh is known for, close-set geometric repeats with almost no bare fabric left showing.
So how do you actually tell them apart at a glance?
A few quick tells, none of them foolproof, all of them useful:
Colour is the fastest clue. If it's mostly muted earth tones with small floral or bird motifs, that's probably Bagru. If it's deep indigo layered with rich madder red in dense geometric patterns, that's Ajrakh. If you're looking at painterly, flowing scenes, sometimes figurative or mythological, that's Kalamkari.
Check the back of the fabric if you can. Genuine Ajrakh prints through to the reverse side. Bagru and most Kalamkari don't.
And honestly, ask the seller. If they can't tell you which technique, which region, or roughly how the piece was made, that's information worth having before you pay a premium for "handcrafted."
None of these crafts are interchangeable, and none of them deserve to be flattened into a generic "block print" label. Each comes from a specific community, a specific place, and a process that took centuries to develop. When you're picking between them, you're not just picking a pattern, you're picking which corner of India's textile history you want in your closet.
Browse the full Bagru collection, Kalamkari pieces, and Ajrakh sets if you want to see the difference in person rather than on a screen.