green-dyed badan (body) covered with Islamic script; the kepala (head) of a ceremonial royal sarong from Terengganu, patterned with supplementary metallic gold threads (kain songket), its design featuring the ubiquitous triangular pucuk rebung (bamboo shoot); a woven plaid silk sarong (kain tenunan) from Pahang.
Forerunners of Malay Batik
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Malay artisans did not completely spurn applying designs to the surface of machine-woven cloth, especially as it did not depend on a highly evolved technical level of weaving or dyeing. In a little known publication, Serian Batik, produced by the Malaysian Handicraft Development Corporation in the late 1970s, it is stated that the earliest form of Malay batik was a rudimentary form of resist dyeing that came to be known as batik pelangi. It is attributed to a woman named Minah Pelangi who lived in Terengganu during the 1794–1808 reign of Sultan Zainal Abidin II and was the best-known proponent of the art.
A prototype of Malay batik, batik pelangi (‘rainbow cloth’) was a rudimentary form of tie-and-dye in which patterns were made by stitching and gathering small areas of the cloth before dyeing and, sometimes, painting. The process was repeated for each colour.
The spatial arrangement and bright colours of Indian textiles are apparent in batik pelangi, as are some of the patterns, such as rows of triangles and droplet-shaped paisley figures, locally known as bunga boteh.
Batik Pelangi
Popularly known in India since the eighteenth century as bandhani from the Hindustani word ‘to tie’ and in Indonesia as pelangi or ‘rainbow’ after the colourful end result, batik pelangi was created using a tie-and-dye process in which areas to be left undyed on the cloth were bunched and bound tightly so that the dye could not penetrate. The process was repeated a number of times using a different set of bindings and a different dye each time to achieve a multicoloured rainbow effect. Pelangi textiles closely resembled their Indian prototypes in spatial arrangement, design elements—mostly random abstracts—and range of colours. Because the technique was particularly suited to lightweight machine-woven fabrics, especially silk, as well as to the more garish chemical dyes used in the process, batik pelangi was popularly used for smaller, softer items of apparel, such as head cloths and sashes for men, most often palace dignitaries, or as bodice wrappers for their royal womenfolk.
In a further development of the batik pelangi technique, and a more likely precursor of today’s Malaysian batik, Winstedt, in his pamphlet on ‘Arts and Crafts’, tells of how the random, abstract designs generated by the pure pelangi tie-and-dye technique on already woven cloth evolved into more typical Malay floral scrolls with the use of small wooden stamps carved with only a single flower or a portion of a border.
The stamps were pressed onto a pad comprising a wet rag impregnated with water-soluble red ferruginous earth and applied to the cloth laid on a padded tabletop, the earth washing away during dyeing. The pale red outlines of the designs made by the wooden stamps were stitched and the threads pulled tight to prevent the dye reaching the outlines (a process known in Indonesia as tritik). The nodules protruding from the stitched areas of the cloth were then bound with thread or banana leaf or tree fibres before the cloth was immersed in a dye bath. After the cloth had dried and the stitching and tying were undone, it was stretched on a frame and the white design areas of the cloth that had resisted the dye were brushed with different coloured pigments.
The batik pelangi technique, being particularly suited to the new imported lightweight, machine-woven cloths and to bright chemical dyes, was mostly used for smaller, softer items of clothing, such as stoles, sashes and bodice wraps.
In this 1930s kain pukul (stamped cloth) sarong from Kelantan, black dye is stamped on pale Chinese silk with wooden blocks in imitation of Chinese-influenced lokcan (‘blue silk’) designs from Pekalongan and Lasem in northern Java, characterized by patterns of stylized phoenixes and other mythical creatures, and lines (‘thorns’) protruding from the motifs.
An early single-colour kain pukul sarong featuring pairs of mirror images of the bunga sikat pisang (banana comb motif) on the badan (body).
Kain Pukul and Kain Terap
Evolving from the pelangi technique of applying the outline of a design on machine-woven cloth with a simple wooden stamp, the next logical step towards the development of batik was to print motifs with carved wooden blocks, a process known in Kelantan as kain pukul (stamped cloth) and in Terengganu as kain terap (printed or engraved cloth). Not only was the Malay Peninsula covered with forests, making wood abundant for printing blocks, but there has also been a long tradition among Malay men of making objects from wood, both functional and unadorned and sophisticated and decorative. Another necessary ingredient was the presence of imported cotton cloth with a tight, smooth surface on which an impression could be stamped without being absorbed as was common with loosely compacted handwoven cloth.
In the years leading up to 1920, it is recorded that two visionary and entrepreneurial men on the east coast of the peninsula, Haji Che Su bin Haji Ishak of Kota Bharu, Kelantan, and Haji Ali of Terengganu, were simultaneously experimenting with making a batik-like cloth using wooden blocks (sarang bunga, literally ‘flower nest’) to stamp out repeated designs on white cotton using a bluish-black pigment derived from wood and bark—not wax and therefore not true batik. Although the practice lasted a mere decade, the wooden blocks used by these men would almost certainly have been inspired by the expertise of Malay woodcarvers as well as the patterns observed on the Javanese batik sarongs available for sale on the peninsula. These, according to Winstedt, included ‘batek lesam [Lasem], batek gersek [Gresik] and batik kalongon [Pekalongan]’ after their places of origin along the north coast of Java, as well as the generic ‘batek jawa’. The motifs carved on the wooden blocks in museums and private collections do indeed reveal striking similarities to the floral, faunal, geometric and border motifs prevalent on Javanese sarongs—individual blossoms, large floral bouquets, foliated arabesques, creeping vines and the triangular bamboo shoot (pucuk rebung). Although very few examples remain of this crude printing technique, those that do show repeated floral patterns along the borders of bedsheets, tablecloths, shawls and sarongs. The white background cotton was sometimes dyed or parts of the pattern painted by hand. Azah Aziz says the cloth was often called kain batik Kedah as it was apparently popular in the state of Kedah in the northwest of the peninsula although it was not made there.
Skilled Malay woodcarvers were called upon to create printing blocks, such as this large Pekalongan-style bouquet in a basket.
A collection of early wooden blocks carved with floral, geometric and border motifs, used for decorating the surfaces of imported cotton cloth.
The block-printed pineapple design on this sarong made by SAMASA, Kota Bharu, Kelantan, was inspired by a shirt worn by Sean Connery in one of the 1960s James Bond movies.
Batik Kotak
