THE beauty of Rajasthan has been celebrated in music, dance and craft, making it India’s most recognized destination for a global audience. However, beyond the tourist brochures and the haunting images of an endless desert and exquisitely detailed palaces, it is the people who bring Rajasthan alive. It is often said that the history of Rajasthan is a song sung by the textiles of this wondrous state.

The unique heritage of hand skills is expressed through the many textiles like the cool, delicate kota doria saris. Kota’s handwoven cotton and silk threads are woven to form chequered patterns known as khats. These khats allow light and air to pass freely through the fabric giving it a translucent quality. Block printing is another regional speciality, with highly skilled wooden block carvers, dyers and printers who produce local styles of printing, ajrakh and bagru being the best known. The colour is extracted from flowers, bark, leaves and roots taken from the surrounding landscape to make the richly hued dyes, and the patterns are inspired by local flora and fauna, dense with cultural and religious symbolism.

Ajrakh is a time honoured emblem for the local communities of Kachchh. Nomadic pastoralist and agricultural communities like the Rabaris, Maldharis, and Ahirs wear ajrakh printed cloth as turbans, lungis, or stoles. The cloth is made in a sixteen-step process that includes washing, dyeing, printing, and drying, which requires a high level of skill and concentration in order to keep the colours fast and even. Pomegranate seeds, gum, hard powder, wood, flour of kachika, flower of dhavadi, alizarine and locally cultivated indigo are just some of the natural resources that printers use in this craft.

Dyes made from the knowledge over hundreds of years of interaction between humans and the local ecology, also form the basis for the intricate bandhini method of tie dyeing. Once released from the hundreds of intricately woven knots that protect gathers of fabric from the dye, the textiles become textured like sea coral, and patterns emerge from a placement of tiny abstract dots, or often, complex representations of flowers and birds that take enormous skill to realize.

 

Rajasthan also has a long tradition of producing khadi, the handspun and handwoven cloth which was at the heart of Mahatma Gandhi’s movement for independence from British colonial rule. Although the image of khadi often centres around the idea of the coarsely spun poor man’s cloth, khadi in fact can be the finest handspun and handwoven silk, wool or fine cotton muslins of 120 thread counts or more. These different weaves of khadi have exquisite textures and an intimate symbolic connection to the fabric of Indian society, making them uniquely suited to heritage luxury clothing for both domestic and international markets.

The hand of the artisan is at the heart of Rajasthan’s unique cultural heritage. The hand of the weaver, the hand of the skilled spinner or the hand of the embroiderer who renders intricate cutwork patterns on to cloth. These are the hands with skills that produce some of the finest textile based crafts known today. These crafts sit at the pinnacle of luxury: where luxury is defined as the conservation of heritage, of artisanal skills and material resources all in an effort to nourish rare beauty and produce the finest expressions of human creativity.

 

Over the years these skills flourished in small scattered pockets as middlemen, traders, sourced the best examples directly from master weavers, dyers and printers and sold it at great profit in urban markets. The artisans received no share of these profits and that resulted in a situation where the purity of their skill was severely compromised. Designs became commercialized and the middlemen controlled even the patterns and the amount and type of zari used in the saris. We studied this situation carefully and realized that if this system of exploitation by middlemen were to continue it would result in the permanent demise of these artisanal traditions. Centuries of innovation, skill and design, informed by local culture, would be eclipsed by the commercialization of every aspect and variety of textiles.

We wanted to create a revival project that explored the dynamic juxtaposition between Rajasthan’s craft and weaving traditions with contemporary design and fashion. We wanted to create a project to both support and celebrate the relationship between the living traditions of Rajasthan’s unique cultural heritage and contemporary cutting-edge innovation. The craft skills of Rajasthan represent a diversity of human ingenuity and endeavour, cultivated and honed over centuries of experimentation and the passing of knowledge from one generation to another. These skills were born out of the challenges of adapting to variable ecologies and landscapes; the social context of royal patronage; and the rich cultural diversity expressed through clothing and adornment of the body.

Every craft in Rajasthan is replete with stories rich in history and cultural symbolism. Each craft is also a living tradition, around which families and communities seek to flourish and prosper. Each craft represents countless, intimately connected stories of landscapes, of conversations with individuals, culture and society. Craft skills connect past, present and future: however, many artisans have languished, unable to adapt to rapid socio-cultural change and the demands of urban markets.

 

In 2015, we launched the Rajasthan Heritage Week (RHW). It was conceptualized as an event to be held annually to cultivate a dialogue between traditional artisans and some of the most renowned designers working in contemporary Indian fashion design. Rajasthan Heritage Week, held in the atmospheric city of Jaipur, is an unparalleled platform for the cross-fertilization of ideas and it showcases Rajasthan’s traditional crafts skills and their dynamic and exciting role in contemporary Indian design. RHW created the logo ‘Handmade in Rajasthan’, intended to be a mark of authenticity and excellence for Rajasthan’s crafts. The activities surrounding Rajasthan Heritage Week unlock the potential of Rajasthan’s complex heritage to take its legitimate place as part of a global movement for sustainable luxury, based on the region’s outstanding textile and craft skills.

When the artisans first started working in 2015 with the designers selected by RHW, the partnership resulted in a mutual learning with the designers understanding the process and the constraints that went with it. The artisans were encouraged to mine their ancestral design heritage which had been preserved through sketches and drawings. Introducing them to newer pattern and colour combinations and teaching them how to use international colour forecasting were the primary objectives. By year two, the partnership was flourishing. The artisans were not only developing fabrics on order for the collection of designers like Abraham and Thakore, Manish Saksena, Rajesh Pratap Singh, Urvashi Kaur, Rimzim Dadu, Rohit Bal, Abrar Ali and others, they were also developing their own products in fresh new translations. This helped them reach out to a wider, younger audience which further inspired a few of them to explore ready-to-wear options instead of just concentrating on fabrics by the yard.

 

The Bangladeshi designer, Bibi Russell, was the first to partner with the weavers, dyers and printers of Rajasthan and it was her efforts that sparked off this revival project. The marketplace developed and grew with every edition of Rajasthan Heritage Week and further helped the artisans to reach out to both B2C and B2B customers during the four days of the exhibition and sale of their products. This impacted their sales through the year as many customers approached them for stocks on an annual basis. Buyers from Indian as well as international fashion brands like Myntra, Ajio, Wellspun, Ikea, Good Earth, Raymond and Levi Strauss & Co. attended the shows and made direct contact with the artisans. All this helped to boost the sales figures of the artisans and many reported a 300%-400% increase in turnover.

Over the years, artisans show-casing their collections at the fashion shows grew from nine in the first year, to twenty-five in the fourth year. The validation of sharing the same stage as the top designers made the artisans extremely happy. Photos of the event showed the artisans, the weavers, surrounded by the models who had displayed their collection. They felt it had given them the much needed exposure to this new world and had launched them onto the national stage.

 

The interface with the designers resulted in new developments that energized and reinvigorated the traditional artisanal products. For example, designers David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore decided to work with the block printers of Sanganer but were keen to develop new and modern blocks that could subtly change the narrative without compromising this traditional craft. Abraham and Thakore faced some initial resistance from the block makers who were used to creating the rigidly formal formats of geometric floral designs. However, the designers convinced the block carvers to create stunningly modern designs like the hounds tooth motif, irregular checks and stripes and then to print them on handmade khadi which created a beautiful, textural pattern.

Rajesh Pratap Singh worked with the wool weavers of Barmer to create a fabric that he shipped back to Delhi for final finishing. This resulted in a woollen fabric of high quality comparable to fine Italian wool. Rohit Bal discovered that a certain weight of khadi was perfect for his bridal creations as the fabric supported his signature intricate and heavy embroideries extremely well. Rimzim Dadu, Rina Singh and Urvashi Kaur worked on creating yardage out of the delicate Kota doria fabric which they successfully used to create diaphanous women’s wear collections for export to Japanese markets.

Manish Saksena travelled to remote villages in Khaitoon to work with sari weavers whom he found to be in the grip of middlemen who forced them to create saris in gaudy colours with the unnecessary use of zari embroidery. He guided the weavers back to their ancestral legacy designs and introduced them to modern colour combinations that would appeal to the contemporary customer. Saksena combined techniques like leheriya dyeing and block printing to create beautiful new designs. These were the kind of results we had hoped for and in the four year period, we saw Rajasthan khadi appear in many designer collections across India.

 

The great textile historian Martand Singh was one of the original mentors of Rajasthan Heritage Week, and it was his vision that saw the project come to fruition. His extensive experience working with khadi for many decades helped the weavers to refine their techniques and experiment with lighter weights and textures. His untimely death in 2017 left a void, and the 2018 edition of RHW was dedicated to his memory. In 2018, the great designer Issey Miyake curated a tribute to him in Tokyo to celebrate his extraordinary work with khadi. Many of the fabrics displayed were developments from Rajasthan Heritage Week.

Rajasthan Heritage Week has created an unusual and indelible journey through Rajasthan via its handwoven textiles and crafts. It serves as a special platform to tell the stories of the artisans whose lives are inextricable from the crafts passed down through generations of their families. RHW has also resulted in detailed documentation and example of best practice for translating the work of award winning artisans into luxury and designer fashion. The platform inspires the sons and daughters of artisans to take forward their family traditions of craft and excel. This younger generation aspire to become designers in their own right, transcending the division between craft and design, and representing a new era of Rajasthan’s rich social and cultural history of craft.