Colours of Kutch

The stylus hovers over the fabric like a hummingbird over a flower. However, it does not touch the fabric. The artist drops a blob of paint, made from castor seeds oil and pigment, on the heel of his left palm, mixes it with the index finger of his right hand and then dips the stylus in it. Sahil, the son of Padma Shri recipient Abdulgafur Khatri, expertly creates floral patterns by swirling the metal pen over the fabric while his father looks on and explains the process that his family has honed over eight generations. Sahil then folds the cloth and a mirror-image appears. And, thus, an invaluable piece of rogan art takes shape.

We are in the neat home of the Khatris in Nirona village in Kutch, located 70km away from the annual Rann Utsav festival, held in the village of Dhordo. Their home is suffused with the colours of their art and lined with the many state and national awards that various members of the family have won for their art. A miscellany of adults and children flash smiles of welcome, totally trusting of strangers who have invaded their home in search of local colour. Cups of tea, infused with the rich milk of buffalos that graze on the nutrient-rich grass of the Banni grasslands, are thrust in our hands.

The Khatris are famed for resurrecting this traditional craft, which was in its death throes, says our guide Iqbal Kumbhar. Once known to only a handful of Muslim Khatris, rogan craft earlier adorned the bridal trousseaux of local belles in Kutch. In 2012, the then Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi gifted one of Abdulgafur’s paintings to the British envoy to India. This was the initial overture to national and global recognition that would follow Abdulgafur. And in 2014, Prime minister Narendra Modi presented two exquisite rogan paintings of the Tree of Life design to the then US President Barack Obama. The design which took Abdulgafur one and a half years to visualise and create underscores the connection between heaven and earth and the underworld. It symbolises togetherness, and the fact that human beings relate to each other and the world, and that no one is alone.

A slew of accolades and national and state awards followed—a Padma Shri in 2019, and in 2023, Abdulgafur established a world record in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, for creating the longest (100-metre long) rogan art piece in history to commemorate India’s G-20 presidency. (Eight artists worked for 21 hours to create 580 motifs on a 100-metre fabric.)

Today, thanks to government incentives and the dedication of the Khatris, rogan is sought after by Indian and overseas tourists and buyers. Rogan art now glows on wall hangings, tablecloths, saris and skirt borders at designer stores in India and is sold online, too.

Indeed Abdulgafur, the scion of the family, is largely credited with pulling back rogan from obscurity, raising it to an art form and contemporising it. He is also training other families including women in the once jealously guarded, male-dominated techniques of this textile craft. “Both my brother Sumad Daud Khatri and I supervise a village studio,” says Abdulgafur. The studio is helmed by five artisans including one woman and has trained 400 women over the years.

The Khatri family originally hailed from Iran and moved to India almost 400 years ago. Today, the entire extended family is immersed in the art, including a young 14-year-old. “It was a challenge to keep the art alive,” says the 58-year-old master rogan artist who says that this unique textile craft originated in Iran. Indeed, the word ‘rogan’ in Persian translates to ‘oil based’. “In 1980, there were just four families left in Nirona village who practised the art,” he says. Eventually, the stringent requirements of the process, low returns and machine-made textiles prompted those families to abandon their heritage. Abdulgafur and others like him left their impoverished but serene haven of Kutch to battle urban chaos in the cities, in pursuit of what they thought would be a better life.

“I, however, had promised my grandfather to keep the art alive,” adds Abdulgafur. “In 1984, I received a letter from him asking me to return to Nirona from Mumbai.” He did, struggling with extreme poverty for many years. The earthquake that ripped through Kutch in January of 2001 was another body blow as it happened in the tourist season, and it took the region two years to recover from the economic aftershocks.

However, in Kutch, the largest district in India which sprawls across 45,000-sq-km in Gujarat, dreams and possibilities jostle with each other. This is evident in the salt and sandy wastes of the Great and Little Rann of Kutch, reportedly the second largest salt desert in the world where mirages shimmer. Elsewhere arrow-straight roads are flanked by shrubs that glow tawny in the sun and the bawal plant grows in wild tangled green heaps everywhere.

These eternal cameos inspire rogan artists who neither trace nor follow standard patterns. The fabric painting is done free hand and motifs are transferred onto the fabric from “the heart to the head and then the hand”—an example of amazing synchronicity, supreme focus and control. “So much so, a Rogan artwork can be created in a day or as much as two years. True art has neither limits nor boundaries,” said Abdulgafur.

However, equally time consuming is the making of rogan paint. Castor oil is boiled for 12 hours then cast in water. A sticky residue is the result.  It is then mixed with pigments—red, blue, yellow, white and green are the usual colours used to create vibrant arabesques. Safflower and linseed oils are occasionally thrown into the mix.

In the open-to-nature central courtyard of his home, Abdulgafur shows us some pre-painted rogan fabrics including smaller replicas of his favourite Tree of Life design. The smaller panels cost Rs1,800 upward while the more intricate paintings can fetch several lakhs. “It all depends on the detailing, size of artwork and the finish,” he explains.

While he speaks, his extended family pose willingly for us, allowing our cameras to probe the strong clean lines of their faces. The Khatris exude visible pride in being part of a tradition whose fires they have diligently stoked and kept alive. In their humble village home, we have entered and exited different worlds, glimpsing the lives of people who live in sync with the seasons.

We drive back to the village of Dhordo (near the 7,500- sq-km Great Rann of Kutch bordering Pakistan) and the site of the Rann Utsav Tent City. Managed by Evoke Experiences as a public-private partnership, the tent city’s theme is very Kutchi and rooted in the soil.

There, we met more artisans at stalls spilling over with local textiles and art, for in Kutchi villages, bejewelled women and men, dressed in local garb work on various crafts, particularly in the long summer and monsoon months and in times of drought when the parched earth is unforgiving. The stall owners exhibit a deep sense of contentment and pride in their handicrafts.

Indeed Kutch, for us, symbolises pure enchantment: warm voluptuous colours that daub their handicrafts, hot sun in the day, knifing chill under the stars, a vast salt and sand desert that seems to swallow the sky, and charming encounters with hospitable locals.

(Gustasp and Jeroo Irani are a Mumbai-based, husband-and-wife team of travel writers and photographers. Authors of two guide books, they have been trawling the planet and India for the last three decades in search of the off-grid and unusual)

Abdulgafur Khatriart and cultureclothColours of KutchGujarattraditional paintings