Dutch cotton for the Tropics

Today the extensive list of examples gives us an idea of the use of the printed cotton fabrics, also called ‘katoentjes’ (cottons). Although De Leidsche Katoenmaatschappij mainly produced for a Dutch-European market, a considerable part of their products was produced and exported for, amongst others, the Dutch-Indies market, which is now Indonesia. Dutch cotton printing companies started imitating the extremely expensive batik cloths manufactured in Java early in the nineteenth century. The batik technique used in Java is a textile decoration technique in which warm liquid wax is applied to cotton cloth in a canting (a wax pen). After the motif has been applied to the textile, it is completely submerged in a dye bath. This ensures that the cloth with the wax layer remains uncolored, while the uncovered parts absorb the full color of the dye bath. To remove the wax layer, the cloth is boiled in water. To provide the cloth with multiple colors, the entire process must once again start from the beginning.

Because this batik technique is so labor-intensive, it goes without saying that the Javanese batiks were very expensive. The Dutch cotton printers tried to imitate these motifs with wooden block stamps, usually printing the paint directly onto the rolls of cotton. Thanks to this technique, these imitation batiks, also called Batik Blanda (Blanda means ‘the Netherlands’ in Indonesian), could be produced considerably faster. This meant that these _Batik Blanda_s could be offered at very attractive prices in the Dutch East Indies. Although it could have been the perfect story from a financial point of view, the sources at the time show that this Batik Blanda was not the success that was expected. The entire history of the production of this Batik Blanda is dedicated to innovating and perfecting these imitation batiks so that they resemble the Javanese variants to some extent. Sample books have also been preserved from various Dutch cotton printers that offered these imitated batik prints (fig. 10 & 11).

As mentioned, the Javanese market was not very inclined to buy these _Batik Blanda_s, partly because they do not have the right smell that comes from the wax and dyes, typical for real batik. Furthermore, in the beginning the absence of flow lines and color gradations was why Javanese consumers were skeptical. The less wealthy local population was driven purely by economical reasons to purchase these imitation batiks. The anonymous author in the Bataviaansch Nieuwsblad (“Batavian Newspaper”) of 1901 wrote:

Europe has introduced the well-known cotton printing, first with the hodgepodge ornament […] then a serious study of the native cotton decoration has started at the cotton mills, even the accidental inaccuracies of the batik-sarong have been imitated as accurate copying. This has had more results; however, not because of the great value of this product, but because of a major additional circumstance: the impoverishment of the population.

The author concludes that:

The native was not fooled by lifeless copying; he immediately marked them by name [meaning the term batik Belanda or Dutch batik] and separated them as illegitimate children. Although the native uses the imitation, he continues to despise it.translated from: Anonymous, “Nederland en de Nederlandsch Indische Kunst II.,” Bataviaansch Nieuwsblad 37 (1901)