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Mysore Rosewood Inlay: Pictures Set in Dark Wood

In Mysuru, artisans cut pictures into dark rosewood and fill them with ivory, pearl and coloured wood — a royal craft, known locally as Kundana Kale, that still glows after two centuries.

Kundana Kale, the art of inlay

In a small workshop in Mysuru, an artisan holds a piece of dark rosewood up to the light and the surface seems to hold a picture inside it: an elephant in procession, a peacock, a scene from the Ramayana, all drawn in pale ivory, mother-of-pearl and coloured wood against the deep brown grain. Nothing is painted. Every line is a separate piece of material, cut to shape and set into a groove in the wood, so that the picture sits flush with the surface. This is Mysore Rosewood Inlay, known locally as Kundana Kale: a kind of marquetry in which dark wood is the canvas and the inlay is the drawing.

The craft is concentrated in Mysuru's artisan clusters, Bannimantap, Mandi Mohalla and Karakushala Nagara, where family workshops have practised it for generations. Its roots are generally traced to the 18th century, when the technique, believed to have come from Persia, reached the region through Srirangapatna and flourished under the patronage of Tipu Sultan and then the Wodeyar dynasty, who made Mysore the cultural capital of South India. Some accounts trace it further back, to the Vijayanagara period. By the 19th and early 20th centuries, Mysore's inlay workers were employed on the great projects of the Mysore court, and the rosewood doors of the Amba Vilas Hall in Mysore Palace are still cited as evidence of their skill. A study by the National Institute of Fashion Technology dates the practice in its present form to about 150 years ago.

Materials: rosewood and the things set into it

The base is Indian rosewood, Dalbergia latifolia, a dense, dark hardwood whose rich brown colour deepens with polishing. Rosewood is the defining material, and the craft takes its name from it, but artisans also work with other timbers: sheesham and teak for larger furniture, and mango, jackfruit and other coloured woods for the inlaid pieces themselves. The inlay materials are what make the pictures. Historically the most prized were ivory, mother-of-pearl, horn, shells and sandalwood. Ivory is now banned, and modern artisans use white and beige plastic or acrylic in its place, along with brass, bone, resin and coloured woods. The tools are those of a fine woodworker: marking knives, small chisels, saws, sandpaper, glue, and beeswax and charcoal for the final finish. The skill lies in the cutting: each inlay piece must match its groove exactly.

The making: drawing with a chisel

A piece of Mysore rosewood inlay is made slowly, in a sequence that has changed little in generations. It begins with a sketch: the artisan draws the design on paper, often at full scale, then transfers it onto the smoothed, seasoned rosewood base. The outline is traced with a marking knife, and the wood inside it is hollowed out with chisels, cutting grooves at least two to three millimetres deep; the recess must be clean, or gaps will show in the finished picture.

Next the inlay itself is prepared. Each element of the design is cut from its material, ivory substitute, mother-of-pearl, brass or coloured wood, to match the groove exactly, like the pieces of a puzzle. The pieces are glued into place and pressed, sometimes with a hammer and sometimes in a mechanical press, until they sit firmly. Small gaps are filled with glue and rosewood sawdust, and the surface is levelled and sanded until inlay and wood are flush. Then comes the finishing that gives the work its particular look. A mixture of beeswax and charcoal, known as kala moum, is applied and scraped to heighten the contrast between the dark wood and the pale inlay, and the piece is polished, sometimes several times, until the surface is smooth and the picture seems to lie just beneath it. The whole process runs to nine steps, and a single panel can take days; larger pieces take far longer and are usually made by several artisans together.

Motifs and design language

The subjects are drawn from the world around the workshops: local life, flora and fauna, and mythology, elephants in the Dasara procession, peacocks, deer and parrots, flowering trees, and scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, or figures such as Radha and Krishna. The pleasure is in the detail: an elephant's trunk rendered in a single strip of inlay, a peacock's feathers picked out in contrasting woods. The dark ground gives the work a formal quality, and the pale inlay reads against it like light. The range of products is wide: wall panels and paintings, jewellery boxes, trays, pen stands, small elephants and other figures, and full furniture, sofa sets, dining tables, swings, deewans, cots, teapoys, wardrobes and pooja doors, as well as partition screens and door panels made to order for homes.

GI-tag status

Mysore Rosewood Inlay is a GI-tagged craft. The Karnataka State Handicrafts Development Corporation proposed its registration under the Geographical Indications of Goods Act, 1999, and it was granted Geographical Indication status in 2005, as application number 24. The registration recognises the craft's historic association with Mysuru and its distinctive designs. The tag means that only work made in the Mysuru region by the traditional methods may be sold as Mysore Rosewood Inlay, and it gives the artisan community legal protection against imitations made elsewhere.

How to identify an authentic piece

On a genuine piece the inlay sits flush with the wood: run a finger across it and you should feel a smooth surface, not raised edges or a printed picture under varnish. The inlay should be separate pieces, with visible joins, rather than a single flat image. The base should be real rosewood, dark brown with a close, visible grain, and the work should show fine, hand-cut detail, especially in the curves and the smallest elements. Printed imitations look flatter, their lines too uniform, their "inlay" often a photograph sealed under polish. Look for the GI logo, and buy from the Cauvery emporia, an established Mysuru workshop such as Arun Fine Arts in Mandi Mohalla, in business since 1968, or a government handicraft outlet. A very cheap piece whose picture looks printed rather than set into the wood is unlikely to be genuine.

Where the craft stands today

Mysore rosewood inlay is still a living craft, but it is a small one, carried on by family workshops in Mysuru's old artisan quarters. The challenges it faces are familiar to many Indian handicrafts. Rosewood is scarce and regulated, which raises costs and pushes artisans towards other timbers. The ivory ban forced a change in the craft's most prized material, and the substitutes changed the look of the work. Machine-made furniture with printed or pasted decoration undercuts hand-inlaid pieces, and many buyers cannot tell the difference until they are shown. And the younger generation is not always willing to spend years learning to cut grooves two millimetres deep by hand. Against that, the craft has real strengths. The GI tag gives it legal identity, and Mysuru's tourists bring buyers to the workshops themselves. Government emporia and online sales have widened the market, and new products, from wall art to pooja doors, have kept it relevant to modern homes. An ethnographic study carried out in Mysuru between 2019 and 2021 documented both its resilience and its fragility. Its future depends on whether those workshops can pass their skill to another generation, and whether buyers keep valuing a picture cut into wood by hand over one printed on it.