Dating back to 1250 AD, kadatas or kaditas are a rich resource on medieval and early modern Karnataka. Kept by village accountants and Mysore's mercantile community, they contain records of transactions between landowners and cultivators, sometimes a Mutt and its devotees. Most are in Kannada, but some have been found in Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Sanskrit, though they too are written in the Kannada script

The process: Strips of cloth