The binding comes before the colour
Before a single drop of dye touches Gujarati bandhani fabric, someone has spent hours pinching the cloth into tiny peaks and winding thread around each one. Thousands of them, sometimes, on a single dupatta. The thread is the point. It holds the cloth shut against the dye bath, resisting it, refusing it, so that when the binding is finally cut away, the undyed circles read as light against colour. The technique is called resist dyeing, and the word resist is doing more work than it looks like.
