Mewar · Arid Northwest
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.
What is worn
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.
Worn for: Weddings, fairs, court occasions
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.
Worn for: Everyday and festive
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.
Worn for: Ceremonial and winter
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.
Worn for: Everyday, and heavily elaborated for Gavri
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.
Worn for: Changed by season and festival
Weaves and textiles
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.
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.
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.
Jewellery
Traditional dress of Mewar — garments, handloom weaves, GI-tagged textiles and jewellery. (8)