The Textile Heritage of Gujarat

Met at the airport and driven to your hotel. Ahmedabad was founded in 1411 by Sultan Ahmed Shah on the east bank of the Sabarmati, and grew rich on cloth: in the twentieth century its mills earned it the name Manchester of the East, and it is still called India’s textile city.

The old walled city is a maze of pols — gated neighbourhoods of carved wooden houses, as fine as the stone havelis of Rajasthan — and in 2017 it became India’s first World Heritage City. The rest of the day is yours.

Out to Pethapur, near Gandhinagar, where craftsmen still carve the wooden blocks that Gujarat’s printers use. Each block is cut in deep relief from teak or sesame wood, often with tools the carver has made himself; a design in several colours needs a set of blocks, one for each colour, cut to fit together exactly. Watch trellises, flowers and lahariya waves come out of plain wood.

Back in the city, the Calico Museum of Textiles, in the Sarabhai family’s haveli at Shahibaug: one of the great collections of Indian cloth, seen on a guided tour booked ahead, with sacred bronzes, Jain manuscripts and miniatures in the galleries alongside.

In the afternoon, a two-hour workshop in Mata ni Pachedi, the painted and printed cloth of the mother goddess, made by a few families of Chitara artists in Ahmedabad: outlines drawn with a bamboo kalam, colours traditionally from natural dyes. Dinner at Vishalla, Gujarati village food served under the trees, with the Vechaar museum of old utensils beside it.

A long, full day. First Ambaji, in the Arasur hills at the south-western end of the Aravallis: a white marble temple with a golden spire, one of the great shrines of the goddess, where no image is worshipped but a sacred yantra. In the bazaar around it, Garasia and Rabari families come to buy and sell in their own dress and silver. Then Siddhpur, where the Dawoodi Bohra merchants built whole streets of tall houses in a European manner a century and more ago, with carved balconies and painted columns.

At Patan, the Rani ki Vav, the Queen’s Stepwell, built in the eleventh century in memory of King Bhimdev I and now a World Heritage Site: seven levels of galleries carved with hundreds of figures, most of them forms of Vishnu. Patan is also the home of the double-ikat patola, woven by the Salvi family: warp and weft are both tied and dyed before weaving, so that the pattern appears, exact, on both sides of the silk. Mashru, the satin-weave of silk and cotton, is being revived here too.

Then the Sun Temple at Modhera, built in 1026–27 under Bhimdev I, with the stepped tank of the Surya Kund before it; and Becharaji, the temple of Bahuchara Mata, patron goddess of India’s hijra community. On to Bajana, at the edge of the Little Rann of Kutch, by evening.

A long drive west into Kutch, broken by some of the finest craft villages in India. At Ajrakhpur, the Khatri families who print Ajrakh have worked since they moved here from Dhamadka after the 2001 earthquake. Ajrakh is resist-printed on both sides of the cloth with blocks and natural dyes — indigo and madder above all — in a long round of printing, dyeing and washing; walk from workshop to workshop, for each family has its own designs.

Nearby, at Dhaneti, the Ahir women’s embroidery, bright with mirrors. Then Bhujodi, just outside Bhuj, where the Vankar weavers work at pit looms set into the floors of their houses. Their shawls and blankets began as barter: Rabari herders brought wool from their sheep, and the Vankars wove it into cloth for them. Visit a Rabari home for their embroidery, then on north to Hodka, a village in the Banni grassland, for the night.

The morning at the Living & Learning Design Centre outside Bhuj, the craft museum and school set up by the Shrujan trust to keep the crafts of Kutch in living hands: galleries of embroidery, weaving, printing and metalwork, then a hands-on embroidery workshop with the women who teach it, and lunch. Back in Bhuj, the Kutch Museum, founded in 1877 and the oldest in Gujarat, for its textiles, weapons, coins and inscriptions; then the Swaminarayan temple, rebuilt in white marble after the earthquake.

Two more crafts in the morning. First an ikat workshop, where the warp or the weft — or, in double ikat, both — is tied and dyed in sections before it goes on the loom, so that the pattern forms as the cloth is woven. Then a master of bandhani, the tie-dye of Kutch: thousands of tiny points of cloth pinched up and bound with thread before dyeing, leaving a field of dots when they are untied.

In the afternoon, the royal quarter of Bhuj. The Aina Mahal, the Palace of Mirrors, was built in the eighteenth century for Rao Lakhpatji by Ramsinh Malam, a craftsman who had learned his skills in Europe: mirrored walls, Delft tiles and a pleasure hall with a fountain. Beside it, the Prag Mahal, an Italian Gothic palace of the 1860s and 70s, and its clock tower over the city.

The long drive east out of Kutch, past the edge of the Little Rann, back to Ahmedabad and your hotel. The evening is free for a last walk in the old city, or for the textile stalls you did not have time for.