Ajrakh & Rogan: Sacred Geometry of Kutch

From the four-and-a-half-thousand-year-old trefoil shawl on a priest-king in Mohenjo-daro to the village of Ajrakhpur that the Khatri families built from nothing after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, the story of two Kutch crafts that print the cosmos in indigo and red and paint it, drop by drop, in boiled castor oil.

Ajrakh is not one print. It is sixteen prints, in sequence, on the same length of cotton. Between each stamp the cloth is washed, dried, dyed, boiled, sun-bleached, steamed, and washed again. A single nine-yard Ajrakh shawl takes three to four weeks of patient, resist-dyed, multi-block work by a Khatri master in the village of Ajrakhpur in the Kutch district of Gujarat. The village itself is only twenty-three years old. The families who live in it were displaced from the nearby village of Dhamadka in the great Bhuj earthquake of 26 January 2001, and rebuilt the entire craft from zero. This lesson walks into an Ajrakhpur courtyard at dawn, where a young Khatri printer is beginning the fourth of sixteen stages on a shawl commissioned by a Chennai designer who works with slow-fashion buyers in London and Tokyo, and then walks three hours east to the village of Nirona, where the last family still practising the dying Rogan oil-painting art of Kutch works with a stylus, a bowl of boiled castor oil, and a hand that has kept a tradition alive that almost nobody else in the world remembers how to do.

Dawn in Ajrakhpur

It is five in the morning in Ajrakhpur, a village in the Kutch district of Gujarat, about fifteen kilometres east of Bhuj. The eastern sky is pale but the sun has not cleared the low hills. In a long, open-walled shed at the edge of the village, a young Khatri master block printer we will call Sufiyan Khatri, a composite drawn from the younger generation of Ajrakhpur printer families, is laying a six-metre length of cotton cloth across a long padded table. The cloth has been soaked for two days in castor oil, camel dung, and soda ash, washed in the village pond, and sun-dried. It is the colour of weak tea and smells faintly of cow.

This is only stage four of sixteen. The shawl will not be finished for another three weeks. Sufiyan's father Mohammad is at the carving bench at the back of the shed, finishing the mordant block they will use this morning. The block is four inches square, carved in teakwood, showing a trefoil flower inside an eight-point star. The same motif, with small variations, has been stamped on Khatri cloth for at least four generations of the family. If the Indus Valley archaeology is read the way the Khatri community reads it, the motif is closer to four and a half thousand years old.

The shawl is an order from Chinar Farooqui, whose Chennai label Injiri sells hand-printed Ajrakh to slow-fashion buyers in London and Tokyo. Before Injiri began placing direct orders in 2009, the Khatri printers of Ajrakhpur sold most of their cloth through middlemen at a third of what it was worth. Farooqui did not invent the price. She agreed to pay what the cloth actually cost.

This lesson is about two Khatri crafts that live in the same district of Gujarat: Ajrakh, the sixteen-stage resist-dyed block print; and Rogan, the castor-oil painting tradition of Nirona village, which came close to dying out and is now held alive by a single family of brothers.