For centuries, the nomads of Kutch, India’s westernmost and largest district along the international border with Pakistan, have coloured the land with their art and craft, producing embroidery, mirror work, thread, yarn, wool, weave and artisanship that has few parallels.

The 2001 earthquake—7.7 on the Richter scale, its epicentre just north of Bhuj, the district headquarters—which killed more than 20,000 people and affected more than 8,000 villages, changed the course of history in Kutch. The massive rebuilding and industrialisation that followed, the first experiment with the “Gujarat Model” of development, caused unprecedented disruptions in the life of these communities. Power plants, ports, solar farms, and cement and ceramic tile factories sprang up at a furious pace; the clear, shimmering skies were airbrushed with smoke-spitting chimneys. 

This industrialisation required its own army of workers, the kind that are cheap and easily available. The Maldharis, Rabaris, Meghwals, Ahirs, Fakirani Jats, and others of their ilk—nomadic and semi-nomadic communities who had, for ages, criss-crossed the land with few material possessions but a treasure trove of art and culture—were that workforce. The communities—many of their traditional routes already fenced in by factories, and thousands of hectares of common grazing lands, or gauchar, given away by the Gujarat government to private corporations for a song—were already cornered. Many gave in and many continue to do so. The result is that some of the finest weavers, dyers and embroiderers of Kutch now work as bathroom cleaners and security guards in big factories, many of which stand on land that was once the giant commons, the very fabric of life in Kutch. 

Even as Kutch continues to be a centre of craft clusters—its textile and embroidery sold across the world—and fashion designers in India continue to launch collections inspired by the region, the art and craft are becoming inaccessible to the people who make it. The ludi, the black Rabari veil that draped the women from head to toe in an unbroken line, a heritage of multi-generational finesse, is being replaced by cheap polyester versions from the sweatshops of Surat while handmade versions retail from luxury boutiques around the world for prices a Rabari woman can’t imagine. 

The development of Kutch is considered a great success, industrialisation across vast, seemingly empty stretches of land. “Where there was nothing, there are now factories,” is a common refrain. 

This, then, is the story of those empty stretches of land, the ebb and flow of people who walked it, a place where some of India’s greatest crafts were born, of people who weren’t wealthy but had the skill to create and wear the finest fabrics adorned by the most delicate embroideries.

IN THE VANKAR (Vankars are a Scheduled Caste community of master weavers) village of Kukma, Bhuj taluka, Tejsi Dhana, a kharad weaver, stood under the harsh sun, seeing how the light hit. 

“Dim enough,” he said, and carefully carried dried pieces of wood from the babool tree that grows in abundance in Kutch, emptying them in a simmering pot of yarn on an open fire. To get the exact shade of brown, everything mattered, from the time of the day to the number of hours boiled. He added pomegranate skins to the mix until the yarn turned orange and laid it out to dry. His challenge was to create a perfect shade of green, something that doesn’t occur naturally. The following day, he boiled the yarn with a hint of indigo, watching the colours change as he followed carefully-studied recipes handed down to his father by his grandfather. “The recipes, the weave, will remain the same,” he said.

But little else did.

The Dhanas came to prominence in a little-known village called Kuran on the border of India and Pakistan, earning a name as the finest bag-weavers; bags that were piled on the humps of camels. With little farming in the area, villagers from Kutch crossed into Badina, Pakistan, to get grain. They returned with bags known as chants, filled to the brim atop camels. The Dhanas’ bags were not only big and sturdy but also beautiful, in shades that people had never before seen. “So many hands went into making just one bag,” said Tejsi. 

Weavers formed relationships with shepherds who raised their animals well. Shepherds from the Jat, Rajput, Rabari, Ahir and Meghwal communities provided the wool that was handspun into thread. Camel hair was used in the warp and goat hair in the weft as communities united over the loom. In those simpler times, when the wool was clean, lustrous and beautiful, money mattered less. Sometimes they were paid in milk or ghee, wool, sheep or goat. Back then, relationships ran deep from Thar in Rajasthan to the Rann in Kutch.

“In sleeping, in waking, in art, we were one,” said Tejsi.

THE IMAGE OF Mohandas Gandhi sitting behind the charkha in the last days of colonialism shed light upon weavers who laboured over cloth in distant villages. When Gandhi learned to spin the wheel from a weaver family in Amreli, he politicised cloth, particularly khadi. The less articulated part of the story is that the Swadeshi Movement was as much about nationalist pride as a response to Indian markets being flooded with cheap Lancashire cotton, the single act of the Industrial Revolution that shattered artisanal livelihoods in India and drained her wealth.

With Independence, government schemes popped up to protect and uplift the weavers, and researchers took to the countryside in a bid to identify crafts that were long neglected. Pathbreaking research by revivalists such as Martand Singh, a textile historian, an international appreciation for the fine crafts of India, and a new generation of designers paved the way for fresh relationships with artisans. With NGOs setting up shop near craft centres, weavers realised that cloth carried monetary value. Soon the power loom popped up. Craft industries stifled under British rule were now confronted with a new development: a market.

But the real change in Kuran came after the wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971. They brought the first road to the village, running all the way to the border for military vehicles. As cars replaced camels, people forgot about the weavers in Kuran.

The world around them changed, but the Dhanas remained the same. They continued to spin thread on their grandfather’s charkha that was older than Gandhi. They continued to work on the nomadic loom which was more than 300 years old. The loom, made from local wood, was brought from West Banni. Father taught son how to cut the dry part from the trees and attached a contraption to pull it back and forth. While the weaves remained sturdy and thick, the family diversified and made carpets for the few that wanted them.

As fate would have it, a craft researcher spotted Tejsi and his nomadic loom. Fascinated by the contraption, he placed him in the centre of a museum in Ahmedabad in 1990, weaving a carpet. This was Tejsi’s first time outside Kuran. Later he was called to show his craft at Delhi’s National Museum, his loom at once a masterpiece and a relic.

THE HIGHWAY TO Kutch is a full throttle of activity. Trucks roar in a relentless drive on the smooth tarmac, the night illuminated by the promising lights of factories that line the path. In Bhuj, the remnants of the once-glorious walled city are still visible but most of the city has been fashioned anew in the wake of the 2001 earthquake.

The desert, the vastness of the Rann, seems unchanged. Buffaloes bathe in little pools of water while Pabiben, a Rabari, sits with her camel and some goats near a sign that reads ‘The Tropic of Cancer’. A Jat herdsman with a flock of goats beckons us and offers warm sweet milk. A little later, Pabiben confesses, “We’re paid to sit here.” A part of the “Kutch nahin dekha to kuch nahin dekha (If you haven’t seen Kutch, you haven’t seen anything)” tourism campaign.

But deeper in the desert, far from the glitz of glamping tents, the shepherds cling on to an old way of life. Where the road ends, the Kutch of folklore begins. The Rann is vast and open. The horizon seems impossibly far away. The monotony is broken by small blue lakes that dot the expanse. Young shepherds, boys in colourful kurtas—bright pink, neon green and turmeric—roam the plains while their goats graze. In the midst of the desert this lush greenery seems unreal, a mirage. 

Kutch marks the eastern terminus of the Old World Arid Zone that stretches from northern Africa to northern Asia into northern India. This is the heart of a migratory pastoralism that dates back at least 500 years, linking Kutchi nomads to a broader landscape that once included Sindh and Balochistan in Pakistan, Afghanistan and even farther into Central Asia.

WHEN THE SUN rises above the Gulf of Kutch, casting its glow over the village of Vandh, a quiet migration begins. Rabari shepherds leave in search of greener pastures even as the acrid smoke from the chimneys of Adani and Tata power plants engulfs the sky. On the back of their footsteps come the honking vans. Women rush out, an army in black, their embroidered scarves and skirts billowing in the breeze from the Arabian Sea. Their golden earrings weigh almost three kilograms each.

“It keeps them grounded,” said Nathiben Rabari.

Vandh, once just a village, is now proof of concept for Narendra Modi’s “Gujarat Model” of development. Village men who were once shepherds operate light machinery, and the women form the cleaning crew work in adjoining power plants.

But not Nathiben. “I’m not that kind of woman,” she said. She spends her morning spinning thread in shades of red and yellow. Sometimes when the other women are busy at work, she does their embroidery, earning a mere pittance in cash but a great deal in repute. They don’t call her the finest hands in Vandh for no reason. 

“But this isn’t real work,” she said. It’s an art, a fanciful pursuit in a world of hard cash. Drawn to the craft as a child, Nathiben used to watch her grandmother embroider a cloth so delicate it looked as though it was spun by fairies. Over the years, she learnt about each stitch, recounting the story about how broken glass sewn onto blouses and skirts warded off the evil eye.

“Every garment had meaning. Embroidery is a language and we learnt it slowly,” she said.

But the Vandh of today is fast; faster since the earthquake of 2001. Change came in the footsteps of promises. First, the people of Vandh were introduced to a toothbrush, then to running water. With the first tap in a house, history was made. “Back then, we rejoiced,” said Nathiben.  

With the frenzy of development around the village, including a power plant nearby and the port of Mundra a mere twenty kilometres away, Vandh morphed into a place that was neither a village nor a town. The new school accompanied houses made of cement and doors, locks and keys. 

“We were no longer one people,” said Nathiben. “Everything changed but the little that remained was our culture.” 

Women were still draped in a ludi, the black Rabari veil. Mystery, it is believed, is the key to nomadic survival. The unknown ought not to be trusted. “That code is broken,” she said. 

Factory managers insisted on uniforms for the cleaners at the plant. The women fought back and won. But tomorrow is another story. “In a matter of years, you won’t know one Rabari from another,” said Nathiben.

KUTCH’S ALLURE, ITS development as a hub for craft, rested on the abundant grasslands of Banni. Once regarded as the greenest pasture in Asia, it drew nomadic shepherds from the mainland as well as from the deeper reaches of Central Asia and Persia. They brought their own customs and were gradually absorbed into the local community. But the tribes remained distinct, easily distinguished by the colours of their embroidery, the stitches on their veils and skirts.

Clues on caste and religion lay in the manner in which threads were fastened; a tie on the right of a kediyun (a handspun cotton top worn with trousers) denoted a Muslim, and one on the left a Hindu. A garment was thus a marker of identity. A tribesman would be able to tell the marital status, clan, animals reared and religious affiliation simply by studying the fabric. Together the tribes painted Kutch in vivid colours that fit together as a whole. Presiding over the intermingling of cultures were the Jadeja kings of Kutch, their patronage allowing the crafts to thrive.

A harmonious agreement existed between the rulers and the people. They allowed the nomads grazing rights over the commons under one condition: that the land be shared equally and that it remain a pasture. In response, the nomads roamed the lands with their animals, settling so long as the land remained fertile. When the water ran dry, they travelled to other lands, returning in time for the monsoon. Upon their return, Kutch became a sea of colour. Women in tie-dyed veils and long pleated skirts cut through the desert with their animals, arms stacked with bangles of bone and silver. Custom dictated that they sew their dowry, and a young woman was taught to embroider by her grandmother, who also told her the story behind every stitch.

IN 1993, A team of three Germans set out on a crafts exploration project in Kutch. They travelled from village to village in search of the fine black woollen shawl they’d seen on the nomads in the vast grasslands and desert plains. The road let them to a mud hut in Sarali where Samat Karshan, a weaver, was busy at work on his loom. Samat, unaccustomed to and excited by such company, laid out shawl after shawl from his collection of ten. He displayed blankets made of locally sourced wool, natural dyes and vibrant geometric embroidery. The Germans studied everything with an interest he had seldom seen.

Over cups of tea in the evening, under the light of a kerosene lamp, one black shawl—the ludi—shimmered. In a room with no mirrors, holding a garment with no price tag, one of the Germans was seduced by a luxury that could only be felt. 

Determined to buy it, he offered Samat as much as 15,000 rupees. Baffled by the sum, Samat turned him away.  

“I realised this ludi ought to be treasured,” he said.

IN INDIA, CRAFT is not a thing of the past but of the present as well as of the future. With nearly 23 million craftspersons still practising, craft is as contemporary as mass production. Kutch is the only regional cluster of weavers in India that can create intricate motifs in thicker yarns of wool, cotton and silk. There are 1,200 weavers in 210 villages, of whom about 900 practise the craft full-time. Around 2,400 women are engaged in preparatory and finishing processes. It is a complex web of production based on traditional community linkages under constant threat from machine-made knockoffs produced at a fraction of the cost.

Krishen Kak, a cultural anthropologist and retired IAS officer, maintains that a traditional article of clothing has two aspects: a material value and a symbolic value. The first has to do with the technology of objects; the second is about the culture of human beings. Hence, it is not only the objects that constitute tradition but also the human beings who create and live it. To understand tradition and its future, one must not remain reliant on old techniques and design forms but also on the human beings who are its legatees and bearers. It is therefore crucial to understand the craft skills from the maker’s cultural perspective.   

In 1880, the Anglo-Indian naturalist George Birdwood described Indian craft as “a tradition of a system of decoration founded on perfect principles, which they have learned through centuries of practice to apply with unerring truth”.

MOST ROADS IN Kutch lead to Bhujodi, a small village with a big reputation. Almost every house on the main street has a weaver who has been recognised and celebrated by the government, if not with the Sant Kabir Award, then the National Award for Weaving.  

This dusty outpost, with the constant clatter of handlooms in the background, churns out shawl after shawl to satisfy a booming demand for handicrafts. But each weaver hides a special collection in the back room, pieces he will never sell, as a testament to the art produced in a tightly knit relationship with the community. And nobody has a finer collection than Vanka Kana, a Rabari collector and businessman.

“I’ll show you a treasure,” he said, opening a room lined with tin boxes, the sort used to store rice and lentils. Inside are pieces of heritage and history, a carefully curated collection of finery.

Vanka Kana is a Rabari known by all. His childhood was like that of any other Rabari. His family owned cows, buffaloes and goats. “I never wanted to work on the land, never saw myself as a shepherd,” he said. But in those days, Rabaris didn’t have many options. If you were born a Rabari, it was your destiny, your profession.”

But as chance would have it, Indira Gandhi, who was deeply interested in the textiles of India, ushered in a renaissance in crafts. Artisans from across the country were identified. Vanka Kana’s aunt was invited to Delhi to display her handicraft. Afraid of the city and the prospect of travel, she appointed the young man as her chaperone and luggage boy. In 1970, at the tender age of twenty, he set foot in the Crafts Museum in Delhi and saw a world of opportunity. People from all corners of India came to display their work. Aside from embroideries he’d never seen before, he saw work from local tribes—the Meghwars, Mutwas, Ahirs, Rabaris.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes. This was what women wore everyday,” he said. That’s when he realised they had something special at home in Kutch.

The following year, Vanka Kana took his wife’s clothes,  mother’s earrings and grandmother’s veil to the Crafts Museum in Delhi with one aim: to sell them all. “Nothing was left and I earned great money. I no longer was just a Rabari but a businessman,” he said.

Vanka Kana began a study of embroideries and techniques, identifying the skills and strengths of different communities. Ahirs did the finest work while the Dhebaria Rabaris’ work was ornate and vibrant. Many communities stitched motifs of the animals they reared. Patterns changed with changing circumstances: when development came to Kutch, there were embroideries of cycles instead of camels. He began a collection. In those days, when there was no road, when the desert still had the footprints of camels, he drove a Luna moped, hunting for garments. In his travels across the district, he almost always found the best pieces in eastern Kutch.

He picked up anything and everything: dowry bags so deep that he could fit in, a hundred-year-old camel saddle known as the atharia, with embroidery fit for a prince’s court. “Nobody in the community realised what they had in their hands. Those who did, kept these clothes hidden away.” 

Over the years he amassed an enviable collection. “What will you do when the collection is finished?” I asked. 

“With this the art dies,” he said. 

AS WITH THE people, the landscape was transformed by human intervention.  

At the centre of Kutch lies the 3,847-sq-km Banni, a unique ecosystem of wetlands once regarded as the finest grassland in the subcontinent. Banni emerged from the sea as a result of tectonic activity; it receives silt from the rivers that flow across the mainland, and ends at the white desert that is the Greater Rann of Kutch. 

In the early 1960s, the Gujarat forest department planted a Mexican bush known as prosopis juliflora on 31,550 hectares of the Banni to minimise the threat of desertification. 

A mescal first imported by the British, shepherds call it the “mad tree”, capable of thriving where little else can survive. Over the past 50 years, the shrub has spread to over 1,500 sq km of the landscape, encroaching on Banni’s palatable and perennial grass species and impacting local livelihoods and biodiversity. The plant brought a shift in livestock holdings, replacing the Kankrej cow with the Banni buffalo, an animal that consumes the mad tree and has a high milk yield. This led many nomads to become milkmen at a time when pastoral nomadism is the best drought adaptation strategy.

Politically, confusion began with a 1955 classification of the Banni as reserve forest. While 60 per cent of Kutch falls under common lands, this notification brought with it a change in the traditional grazing sites. Demarcation defied the traditional system of commons, and the 7,000 Maldhari families who lived across fifty-four villages around the grassland with more than 100,000 animals—cows, buffaloes, sheep and camels—were thrown into disarray. Suspicious of the forest department, locals began to encroach upon the land for agriculture, breaking the age-old vow with the Maharajas to share the commons.

Soon, a process of carving up the land was underway. Across lush patches of Banni, farming increased and while some got richer, mistrust and fights shattered the early nomadic codes between the ruler, people and community. Co-dependent and interwoven economies, such as the manure-for-grazing agreements with farmers and nomads and the wool-for-cloth arrangements with weavers broke down.

But the real jolt was yet to come.

FRIDAY, 26 JANUARY 2001

It was a bright and calm winter morning. Nathiben was outside her bhunga (traditional mud-and-straw hut) chatting with her cousin; Tejsi Dhana was behind the loom, working on an international order; Vanka Kana was returning from dropping his son at a Republic Day flag-hoisting ceremony. At 8:46 am, a high-intensity earthquake hit Kutch. It lasted for just over two minutes. It took down Nathiben’s bhunga, left nothing of Tejsi’s home and studio except for the loom, and destroyed Vanka Kana’s home. Children were buried under the rubble of their schools as they readied to hoist the flag; the hospital collapsed as did the collectorate. Village after village, town after town was a scene of destruction and that’s when the world noticed Kutch.   

Aid flooded in. The army was dispatched within the hour and two billion dollars of reconstruction money was allocated to this long-ignored region. Following in their footsteps were NGOs, as campaigns led by expatriate Gujaratis brought millions in aid. Amid the mourning, when corpses still lay on the streets, newspaper articles recognised the importance of the collapsed heritage structures, from the damaged ancient gate to the palace. They took note of the importance of Kutchi heritage and identity and the role it would play in reconstruction. Within a matter of days, the government ran free bus services into, and throughout, the district.

This brought in unfamiliar faces in search of booty in a post-disaster boom economy. Two weeks after the earthquake, the Bhuj-published Kutchimitra ran a piece titled ‘Multi-storey culture and cement and concrete jungles are not part of our history.’ In response, traditions became stronger; the rituals of land purification ordinarily associated with the foundation myth of the kingdom were appropriated by common people to purify and protect land designated for reconstruction projects.

Edward Simpson, a professor of social anthropology who covered the earthquake and its aftermath, notes: “The longer I watched and listened, the more it was obvious that it was not the disaster itself but the doctrines of interveners that were truly shocking.” He likened the aftermath to a “second earthquake” with greater consequences for life than the earthquake itself. As new plans were drawn up, as physical institutions of rule such as palaces, temples and city walls were demolished, as Kutch was fashioned anew, its ancient legacy came under threat. 

New policies divested people of their property, and a new bureaucracy challenged long-established power structures. While many people were alienated by the new policies and resented them, they were also lured by compensation schemes that promised wealth. This “hyperbolic capitalism”, as Simpson calls it, was the kernel of the “Gujarat Model”. 

By the middle of 2001, the Gujarat government implemented legislation for the creation of Area Development Authorities (ADA) that gave it the legal right to alienate people from their property. Private contractors and labourers descended on the district while cranes demolished the remains of the old town, making way for new roads, new neighbourhoods and a new Bhuj. 

Tax breaks set for a minimum of five years, and later extended, invited heavy industry to locate to the area. While the tax holiday boosted industrial development, it also led to an explosion in the population and pressure on a fragile ecosystem. In the area where the Mundra Special Economic Zone (SEZ) would come up in 2004, the population increased from 15,000 in 1990 to 1,05,000 in 2011 to 1,89,992 in 2021.

With the creation of the Mundra SEZ to encourage the development of export-oriented enclaves, the Adani Group acquired lots of “wasteland”. Though this began as early as 1993, under the Congress-led government, between 2005 and 2007, the mega-conglomerate secured 5,000 hectares out of a total 7,300 hectares dedicated to the SEZ. Some plots of land were sold for as little as rupee 1 to rupees 32 per sq m, then state revenue minister Anandiben Patel told the state legislature in 2012.

Redevelopment followed the vision of rapid industrialisation of the government of Narendra Modi, who became chief minister in October 2001. Wide highways ate up smaller potholed roads, cutting across routes that were once corridors for nomadic pastoralists. In 2004, a ceramics firm constructed a manufacturing plant on the Bhachau Highway. By the end of 2005, there were more than twenty factories. And there has been no turning back. In other parts of Kutch, the rate of growth has been even higher, notably around the government port complex at Kandla and the private Adani-owned port at Mundra. This industrialisation came at a cost, namely the rewriting of occupations, villages, lives and culture.

Following closely in the steps of redevelopment was relocation. Entire villages were uprooted across the district and airdropped into new locations. Dhamadka, a small village on the banks of the Saran River, was home to the Khatris, a community of block printers tracing their roots back to 500 years in Kutch. When the earthquake struck, almost no home was spared.

In the reconstruction, the village was relocated far from the water source that lent the Kutchi dye its irresistible colour. The new village was named Ajrakpur and, aside from the complete dislocation, the water, too, changed. With an increase in iron content in the water, natural dyes didn’t respond as they used to. Iron in water results in a blackish tint and when washed with hard powder—used to prepare the cloth for colour absorption—the tone altered. This pushed many Khatris towards working with chemicals or compelled them to move out of the area in search of better water. 

The takeover continues. A proposed greenfield copper refinery project in Mundra envisions industrialisation of 1,576.81 hectares of reserved forest land. The project’s wildlife management plan, published in 2020, notes that the forest area on the project site consists of mostly proposis juliflora. In 2022, the Gujarat forest department announced that it would begin restoring 10,000 hectares of the Banni grassland as it battled the mad tree. 

ON THE SMOOTH Bhuj-Bhachau Highway, Sitaben Rabari led a caravan of four camels, her family in tow. Cars zooming by slowed down to gawk at the parade. 

Two months into their journey, Sitaben was fed up with the prying eyes of travellers and the cars alarming the herd. Still, she walked tall, a wondrous sight on the highway. Once the sheep ran amok on the highway, and cars piled up with tourists taking picture after picture.

“They call it a mystery but this is a life of obscurity,” she said. And poverty. 

The colourful hand-embroidered khurjanis that used to hold their wares were replaced by bags of plastic, rice sacks were carelessly tied with bits of rope, the sundari leather bag to drink water from was replaced by battered plastic containers. The fine blankets Rabari women sewed in the desert were replaced by a synthetic yellow-and-red blanket. The black ludi that enveloped her was bought from the market in Bhuj, made in Surat. 

But the people who clicked her picture on the highway didn’t know that she was a mirage. Their snapshots were not a postcard from the past so much as a message for the present—of a society that hung by a thread. 

As for Sitaben, in those dark, cold nights in the desert, she silently hoped that the video footage of her chasing her herd would pop up on YouTube somewhere in between videos of Geeta Rabari, the nightingale of Kutch. It never did. 

It didn’t matter. “A woman can dream,” she said. “Can’t she?”