For university student Farha Anjum, the annual Eid festivities after Ramadan would not be the same without the traditional embroidered clothing called chikan.

"Chikan embroidered clothes are a specialty on Eid," she said. "Although it is not necessary to buy them, there is a particular traditional and cultural following."

That following usually draws huge holiday crowds to the Aminabad market in Old Lucknow for bangles, slippers, long shirt-like garments called kurtas, and especially chikan. The embroidery traces its roots to the Nawab era of Lucknow, when the labor-intensive stitching on cotton cloth was especially made for local dignitaries.

This year, however, the excitement was lacking. China has inundated Indian markets with imitations that look like the local chikan, but the embroidery is done by machines.

"People prefer to buy Chinese chikan product as it is cheap and the machine embroidery is smoother than hand-embroidered local cloth," said shopkeeper Basheer Ahmed. "Once exclusively worn by Nawabs, the chikan was brought to the common masses by us. And now it is us who are being ousted out of this profession by some cheap cross-border product."

The decrease in sales is taking its toll on the chikan kaarigars (embroiderers), who work as a day laborers.

"Earlier, a hand-embroidered kurta would fetch them 100 rupees ($2), depending on the density of the embroidery," said Rashid, a chikan maker, "whereas a Chinese chikan cloth is available for as less as 40 rupees (80 cents) a meter."

The result, chikan producers said, is that many of them are losing their jobs and have nowhere to go to.

The Chinese chikan work, because of its clean finish, is often preferred by foreign tourists. Some upscale shopkeepers even sell Chinese products as local embroidery to tourists.

But shopkeeper Sandeep Singh said savvy buyers know better.

"A genuine chikankari customer can always make out between the Chinese machine-made and the Indian hand-made chikan work," he said. "And the customer will always want something genuine, not a cheap imitation of it."

Khalid Hussain, whose family has been in the business 40 years, said the variety of designs and stitches that are available in the local chikan work cannot be equaled by the Chinese products.

However, he said he is skeptical of the Chinese dominance in Indian markets. He expressed hope that the Indian government will soon take actions to check cross-border products to promote local handiwork.

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