पहनावा और वस्त्र
Two dress systems sit side by side here and are not variants of each other. The court and town system is the Rajasthani one — turban, angarkha, ghagra, odhni, with the tie of the turban and the print of the veil doing the signalling. The Bhil system on the hill slope is a different garment set entirely, lighter, with far more silver worn on the body and far less cloth, and it is the one that changed least in the twentieth century.
क्या पहना जाता है
Mewari safaMen
The Mewar turban is tied lower and flatter than the pointed Jaipuri pagri and is most often seen in a small check or a tie-dyed pattern rather than plain. Saffron is worn at weddings, white at a death, and exchanging turbans between two men is a formal, binding act rather than a courtesy.
किस मौके पर: Weddings, fairs, court occasions
Kanchli and kurti with ghagraWomen
A two-piece upper garment — a fitted kanchli under a loose kurti — worn with a gathered ghagra and an odhni drawn over the head and tucked at the waist. The two-piece top is the older Rajasthani form and survives more widely here than in the desert districts.
किस मौके पर: Everyday and festive
Angarkha and atamsukhMen
The side-tied cross-over coat, and its quilted winter version, the atamsukh — literally "self-comfort" — which the Mewar court wore in the hill winters and which appears in almost every eighteenth-century Udaipur painting of a durbar.
किस मौके पर: Ceremonial and winter
Bhil dress of the hill slopeBhil men and women
Men wear a short dhoti, a shoulder cloth and a small tightly wound turban; women a short ghagra and odhni with heavy silver at the neck, upper arm and ankle. For Gavri the same men put on skirts, masks and bells and hold the costume for forty days.
किस मौके पर: Everyday, and heavily elaborated for Gavri
Pichwai and temple clothThe deity
At Nathdwara the image is dressed and the wall behind it hung to a calendar — heavier quilted cloth and dark grounds in winter, thin white in summer, and specific pichwai subjects tied to specific festivals. It is a wardrobe, run as one, and it is the single largest employer of painters in the region.
किस मौके पर: Changed by season and festival
बुनाई और कपड़े
Akola dabu printChittorgarh
Mud-resist block printing by the Chhipa community at Akola on the Berach, using a paste of clay, gum and wheat chaff to mask the cloth before indigo dyeing. The Mewar version leans darker and coarser than Bagru's and is traditionally sold as odhnis and ghagra lengths at local fairs rather than through export buyers.
Pichwai clothजीआई टैगRajsamand (Nathdwara)
Painted and sometimes gold-worked cotton hangings, sized in fixed proportions to hang behind the Shrinathji image. The subject is set by the festival rather than by the painter, which is why the same scenes recur across two centuries of work.
Bhilwara suitingBhilwara
Not a craft tradition — a twentieth-century industrial one. Bhilwara became the country's largest producer of polyester-blend suiting fabric, and the mills there now clothe far more people than every hand craft in the region combined.
गहने
Borla or rakhdi worn on the foreheadAad — the flat collar necklaceTimaniyaHansli — the rigid silver neck ring worn heavily on the Bhil slopeBajuband and kandoraPajeb and kadla, worn in weight rather than in fineness by Bhil womenSilver, not gold, as the ordinary metal of the hill slope