In Northwest Corner of India, the Work of Centuries

A 90-minute nonstop flight north from Mumbai drops city-weary adventurers into the grasslands of the Kutch, a haven of exquisite, age-old craftsmanship nourished by its distinctive ethnic mix and historic isolation.

In scattered hamlets, weavers, embroiderers, textile painters, tie-dyers, bead workers, potters, carvers, cobblers and bell-makers work as they have for centuries, often taking weeks, even months to finish a single flawless piece. Their crafts are finding their way into sophisticated urban markets worldwide, but the path has been long and arduous.

In the village of Nirona, a rabbit warren of dusty footpaths leads to the workshop of Sumar Daud Khatri, whose family has practiced for seven generations an elaborate freehand fabric painting known as rogan art.

“It’s a 400-year-old tradition,” he explained. “It’s a dying art, almost extinct.”

He said he spent 14 years learning the art. Now his masterpieces of pointillism decorate his walls. As visitors sipped tea, he sat cross-legged on the cement floor with a simple piece of black fabric across his lap, holding in his palm a gob of putty-like paint made by boiling castor oil for two days and then adding pigment.

He dipped a stylus and pulled forth a wispy thread. With a loose wrist and steady hand he guided the filament onto the fabric in a continuous line, creating an elaborate design. Completing this one piece will require about three months working seven hours a day, filling the design with tens of thousands of tiny dots. It will sell for about $50.

The Sumar Khatri family is the last in the Kutch to practice the rogan fabric painting that locals bought for ceremonial clothing and special bed coverings.

Now they buy cheap machine-made textiles, and Mr. Khatri sells mainly to tourists visiting the grasslands of the Kutch in the most northwestern corner of India, in Gujarat state just 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, from the Pakistani border.

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Tourism here is on the rise, thanks to nonstop flights into the newly modernized airport in Bhuj, pleasant overnight accommodations and good roads, though shared intermittently by herded buffalo and sheep.

Those amenities, along with clean water and electricity, came to the Kutch after a devastating earthquake in 2001 brought economic assistance to the area and helped revive dying craftsmanship.

Several local cooperatives and non-profit groups now market the region’s handicrafts, particularly exquisite embroidery, to sophisticated urban markets in India and abroad. The Qasab-Kutch Craftswomen Producer Co. sells embroidered bags, pouches, home furnishings, quilts, art panels and dolls made by 1,200 women artisans from 10 ethnic communities in the region. The Kala Raksha Trust (www.kala-raksha.org), whose mission is to preserve traditions by helping artists generate income from contemporary work, takes orders from all over the world. Shrujan/ Threads of Life (www.shrujan.org) sells embroidered products in Mumbai, Amenabad, Vadodara and Bhuj.

Nothing increases one’s appreciation for these things like watching and meeting the artisans who make them.

From the airport in Bhuj, a well-paved highway leads immediately into the grasslands where about 5,000 families of herders and artisans live in about 40 hamlets clustered around shallow ponds fed by summer monsoons.

About a half dozen villages can be leisurely visited by car in a couple of days traveling with a knowledgeable guide like Kuldip Gadhvi, of Kutch Adventures. Having worked for a local philanthropic group after the earthquake, he seems to know just about everybody and all the artisans.

The Shaam E Sarhad Resort in the village of Hodka serves as a convenient base for visitors. This spacious open-air oasis is decorated with traditional white-clay mirror work, locally embroidered fabrics and colorful private cabanas. It was built with funds from the United Nations Development Program and employs locals as designers, cooks, musicians and managers. Profits from the hotel are plowed into community projects in Hodka.

About 200 families reside in Hodka’s brightly painted, circular mud huts with sloping thatched roofs called bhungas. Women draw water from wells and men tend buffalo that provide what is touted as the richest milk in India.

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The splendid embroidery done by the women in Hodka is known for its style, color and patterns passed down from mother to daughter over many generations. Embroiderers welcome visitors into their homes and display their vast collections of quilts and tunics (kanji), emblazoned with colorful thread stitched into geometric shapes, embedded with small glinting mirrors. Little girls sit on stoops practicing with needle and thread, preparing their own collections.

Embroidery work in the Kutch is a mélange of a half-dozen distinctive styles with different combinations of stitches, patterns and colors, reflecting the heritage of the various ethnic and religious groups that migrated to the Kutch from present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, Turkey and Iran. Traditionally women embroidered fabrics for their families, or for special celebrations, gifts or dowries with variations signifying the maker’s status and heritage.

North of Hodka, the village of Dhordo is renowned for its “mutwa” embroidery perfected by a small group of Muslim herders thought to have migrated to the Kutch from the Middle East in the 16th century.

The embroidery is characterized by microscopic stitching of tiny mirrors in stunning geometrical, symmetrical patterns. Sofiya Mutva, whose ancestors perfected this embroidery, works from her small home, which is decorated with elaborate mud-clay work and intricately carved wood shelves. On her wall hangs a masterpiece that took almost a year to finish. She said she was grateful when tourists buy her work, but sometimes they only watch her demonstration and don’t buy a thing.

Nearby, the village of Ludiya is a kaleidoscope of color, featuring a central bazaar next to the Hindu temple where households bring their work to sell as part of a community marketing effort. In addition to distinctive embroidery, artisans in Ludiya do intricate wood carvings, paint colorful wall murals and exhibit expert white-mud mosaics. The mosaics consist of small rectangular or diamond-shaped mirrors embedded into geometric patterns outlined in rods of raised white clay. The wall murals are floral, geometric or animal designs in lavender, yellow, mauve and turquoise. This eruption of color in the middle of the monotonous earth tones of the grasslands seem to joyously declare Ludiya’s recovery from the earthquake in 2001 that killed almost thousands of people.

Several kilometers north of Ludiya lies the town of Khavda. This is a popular departure point for camel caravans traveling east to a lake with the world’s largest colony of migratory flamingoes and for cars heading up a mountain road to a viewpoint overlooking the vast salt fields separating India from Pakistan.

Among the town’s many fine artisans, the most honored is Abdulla Ibrahim, a masterful potter. At his wheel, he demonstrated throwing a perfect urn in just a few minutes. His workshop walls display yellowing newspaper stories and photos of his meetings with dignitaries. But his business now is very slow. He thinks his best recourse would be to buy some equipment to harden, or galvanize, his ceramics. Then he said he could sell his pots for export.

Few local people buy them any more. They like the metal ones that don’t break.