In the age of mechanical reproduction and mass consumption, many artisans practicing indigenous crafts are pushed to make changes to their traditional processes in order to adapt and survive. The time-honoured craft of Kalamkari is one such art form that has had to choose the contemporary practices of screen-printing with chemical colours over the labour intensive traditional system of production (block-printing with vegetable dyes by hand). Pitchuka Srinivas established the Kalamkari Art Museum in Pedana to preserve the history and traditional knowledge of the craft. Srinivas’s father, Pitchuka Veera Subbaiah, was a pioneer who introduced the Machilipatnam style of Kalamkari to the town of Pedana in the 1970s. Now, the museum is maintained by Srinivas and his son Pitchuka Varun Kumar. In his personal practice, Srinivas attempts to design new methods by experimenting with form and colour while still striving to be true to the centuries-old traditional process. His magnum opus is a piece called 'Tree of Life', which is a print he created with 212 blocks (generally 15-20 blocks are used for printing). It is one of the exhibits in the three galleries of the museum. Of the three, one of the galleries is dedicated to wooden blocks, one to the process of extraction of natural colours and one to the history of the form. A collection of wooden blocks with Persian, Dutch, Buddhist and Indian motifs is displayed along with other displays that illustrate the many histories that kalamkari carries with it.
