Owning and Meaning A True Piece of Batik

Yesterday, a friend randomly asked me, what is a thing that makes Indonesia, Indonesia…

I couldn’t answer one, but three: Indomie, Bali, and batik.

And I started to explain more about batik to her as I was wearing one at that time.

Batik is the traditional fabric of Indonesia, listed as UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists in 2009. And since then, the concern of wearing and protecting batik started to raise. It became our identity. It is now the formal attire code, slowly shifting the wear of suite for men. And it is the most popular souvenir from Indonesia. Tourists can buy the whole fabric, or clothes, or accessories such as bags, scarf, or even table cloth and bed sheet.

Batik, as recognised by UNESCO is the process of wax-resist dyeing applied onto a piece of fibrous fabric (UNESCO, 2009). It is a long process, requires an extra level of patience and persistence. There is two traditional way of making batik: the hand-drawn technique, and the stamped technique. The hand-drawn process resulting in richer, one of a kind, and can be price-tagged at high; while the stamping method makes it able to produce more batik in less time.

The long process of making batik: nyanting, nyelup, nglorod, and njemur...

But who thought, the popularity and high demand of batik, resulting in the toughest rival of the industry: the imitation batik.

The globalisation had introduced automation for batik: printed technique (Kustiyah and Iskandar, 2017). In quality, there is no way that printed batik can be compared to the genuine one. Every pattern looks identical and too even, designed in a computer, copied for thousand times. Yes, the colours are more vibrant, something that natural dye cannot produce, and somehow it is more attractive to the younger market. But it is artificial, smells cheap, and IT IS cheap. It only has colour in one side, while genuine batik’s reverse side is as bright as the front part and can be worn on both sides. That is the easiest way to spot printed batik.

Those pieces are never traded in the black market, yet they can be easily found everywhere, even online, even in the city of batik itself, in the biggest souvenir market. The production of printed batik has become an industry and has its own demand: those who don’t want to splurge on genuine batik and those who don’t understand the difference or simply don’t care.

This printed technique is raping the traditional batik techniques that artisans have preserved for hundreds of years. It was found that the forgers are not only existed within Indonesia but also from other countries, and they exported it to Indonesia. This free trade policy is threatening the existence of batik artists, and the government have to regulate this free trade policy (Nurainun, Heriyana, Rasyimah, 2008).

Statistics show that the demand for hand drawn and stamped batik declined in 2017. The export value of batik and batik products in 2017 reached USD 58.46 million with main target Japan, USA, and European market (Wibawaningsih, 2018). That number is 61% lower than the previous year (Pablo, 2018).

In the other hand, the demand for printed batik is far away above, especially the imported goods. It was reported that the value of imported batik in 2013 was $80.8 billion and was $87.1 billion in 2014, and there was another increase for 24.1% in 2015 (The Ministry of Trade, 2016). This number is so high because the demand is also high, and the traditional batik with complicated and intricated process cannot compete with the low price that artificial batik offers (Tiba, 2015).

This problem, I believe is something that’s not only faced by Indonesia but most countries that rely much on tourism and handicrafts. The Australia government works hard to protect the ingenuity of Aboriginal indigenous arts (Zilman, 2018). One attempt that the batik artisans still fight right now is to create a batik mark or national standardisation (SNI) so that every piece of genuine batik will have an SNI label, the same like the Australian Made logo (Susilaning, 2017).

But actually, what is the cost of a true piece of batik?

Because of the taking time process, and the rarity of raw materials, in the past times, only the privileged people can afford to wear batik. Some patterns were only allowed to be produced for the royal family. But now, batik is so much affordable and no limitation of who or where or when to wear it.

Below is the comparison of the recent prices of different quality of batik but the same motif: Parang, that resembles the shape of our traditional weapon keris.

See, it is not that expensive to get a piece of real batik. We as tourists can contribute to the sustainability of genuine batik. We can help those artisans to keep creating and regenerating, by purchasing real batik, not the printed one let alone the imported one.

So if you got the chance to visit Indonesia, or Yogyakarta or Solo in particular, I’d say you should own a good quality hand-drawn batik or few pieces of stamped batik that you can wear.

I’d suggest that you visit the batik tourism village like one in Giriloyo or The Kauman Village…