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
In a further imitation of the Javanese batik available in the early 1900s, in 1926 two sons of Haji Che Su of Kelantan, Mohd Salleh and Mohd Yusoff, adopted a type of silk-screen method to produce inexpensive ‘batik Jawa’ sarongs featuring the large Pekalongan-style floral bouquets of Java’s north coast. Known as batik kotak (kotak means ‘box’ after the frame used to hold the muslin screen stretched across it), the process required several large screens the size of a sarong, one for each colour to be printed on the cotton fabric. Instead of applying a resist material such as wax or lacquer to the fabric itself, the waxed design was applied direct to the muslin screen in the required pattern and then placed over the cloth. Dye was poured into a frame and forced through with a roller-like implement onto the sheet of cotton fabric underneath. Where the screen was masked by the resist design, the dye was unable to penetrate and reach the fabric. The wooden frame was then lifted clear and the design repeated on a further section of the cloth. Although this type of printing was quick, the setting up of the screens and the drawing of the motifs was time-consuming, which may explain why the process was not widely adopted outside Haji Che Su’s family. The founding of a family business, SAMASA Batik, still in operation today by Haji Che Su’s descendants, signalled the start of batik making as a cottage industry in Kelantan.
The real breakthrough in the development of Malaysian batik came, however, in the 1930s with the widespread adoption in Kelantan and Terengganu of wax stamping utilizing metal blocks. This development was inextricably linked with local production of the batik sarong in imitation of imports from the north coast batik centres of Java, and is the subject of the next chapter.
A combination block-printed/hand-painted 1960s sarong from SAMASA, Kota Bharu, Kelantan, featuring the recurrent Pekalongan-style floral spray on the kepala (head) and badan (body) and an intricate background of small filler leaves.
A section of the badan of a skilfully block-stamped (batik cap) sarong from Terengganu, 1950s, decorated with floral motifs, among them orchid buds and blooms.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the invention of the cap (pronounced ‘charp’) in Indonesia, a copper block that applies wax for an entire design on to a piece of cloth with a single imprint, revolutionized the batik industry which had hitherto been dominated by the labour-intensive stylus-like canting (tjanting in Indonesian, both pronounced ‘charnting’) for waxing cloth. Using a cap, a batik worker could wax twenty sarongs a day instead of spending a month or more hand-waxing a single sarong. This increase in the speed of production was deemed imperative in the mid-1850s, not only to fulfil the needs of a growing demand for batik locally and in markets outside Indonesia, such as Malaysia, but also to offset the flood of cheap printed European textiles that had begun to replace Indonesia’s handwoven products. It was feared that both Java’s batik industry and the wider country’s handloom traditions would be decimated. Although many purists disparaged the cap at the time for producing an inferior product—marks were left on the cloth where the stamped units overlapped at the edges—there is no question that it saved Indonesia’s batik industry from extinction and also allowed the technique to spread to other places. Cap textiles quickly outstripped their European printed counterparts in terms of quality, and because they were affordable were able to reach a much broader, albeit lower priced and less discerning market. Cap work could also be combined with canting work to produce yet another variation of wax-resist