If you’ve traveled to the Kutch or Gujarat region of India, you may have come across shawls and cloth stamped with intricate, beautiful designs.
Ajrakh (also known as Ajrak) refers to an artistic practice in which textiles are block-printed, or decorated by wooden stamps dipped in ink. In Ajrakhpur, a small village in the Kutch region of India, I met the Khatri family, who are 10th-generation Ajrakh artisans.
As the story goes, the Khatri family was living and practicing the craft in Sindh (an area in modern-day Pakistan), but moved to the Kutch region of India in the 16th century at the request of an Indian king who admired the block-printed design.
Sufiyan Khatri, one of the artisans, tells me that his family is Muslim and that all Ajrakh prints honor Islamic tradition: They do not depict human or animal figures. Instead, the dizzying symmetrical patterns include geometric angles, interpretations of the night sky and repeating floral motifs inspired by local plants.
Sufiyan credits God for his family’s artistic inspiration, creativity and business acumen.
To make the intricate designs, first, men cover wooden blocks with pastes made from common ingredients including tamarind seed, gum, clay and millet flour. Sometimes it’s mixed with dye.
The paste has three functions: to shield the adherence of dye to fabric, react with natural chemicals to absorb certain dye colors and dye the cloth with designs.
Printers pound the blocks hundreds of times onto the fabric.
After the cloth is printed, artisans sprinkle sawdust or buffalo dung on the fabric to prevent prints from smudging. The fabric dries under the sun, then goes into a dye bath, the dries in the sun again. Later, it is washed and beaten to remove the mud.
The name Khatri translates into “one who fills with color,” the artisans tell me. Most artisans in Ajrakhpur have nails stained deep blue with natural indigo. Sufiyan’s grandfather passed down knowledge of natural dyes to his father, and they experimented together.
Indigo was used to create a vibrant blue, madder for red, pomegranate and turmeric for yellow. Fermented rusted objects, like bicycle parts, were mixed with sugar to create black dye.
Hundreds of hand-carved wooden blocks line the walls of the Khatri studio. Each block has a number and is cataloged so designers and textile purchasers can easily access them. Blocks are retired when the edges turn rough or become uneven.
The Khatri brothers have blocks that are over 200 years old.
Observing the Ajrakh process is quite the sensory experience: The place is lined with vats of indigo, rusty objects, simmering pots of turmeric and pomegranate skins.
When Sufiyan’s great grandparents migrated to Kutch, they settled in a village called Demadkah so they could access its river. But in 1988 the river ran dry. After an earthquake in 2001, the Khatri family moved to a village nearby and named it Ajrakhpur. There are about 50 families here producing block-printed textiles. They yield about 140,000 meters of printed fabric annually.
The families here use about 200,000 liters of water every day to wash textiles. Not all of the families in Ajrakhpur use natural dyes. Runoff of wastewater with chemical dyes can be harmful to the environment.
When the block printers came here, they built a common washing tank called a ghat. All families in Ajrakhpur can come here to wash their textiles. The water they use is groundwater, which is slowly disappearing. Sufiyan says every 10 years the groundwater levels decrease by 10 feet. In India, the demand of groundwater continues to outstrip the supply.
“Every year the water level goes down, down and down,” Sufiyan says. “We are worried about what will happen to our water in the future.”
Just six months ago, the families in Ajrakhpur invested in a biofilter to treat wastewater in collaboration with an NGO called Khamir. This NGO has been working with block-printing communities over the past five years on water treatment and conservation for sustainable craft practices.
The biofilter cleans the dirty water by using earthworms, which actually feed on the dyes. The worms host millions of bio-degrader microbes in their guts. Sufiyan says the filtered water is helpful, but it’s still far from what they need to meet a growing market demand.
The Indian government recently approved a grant to support building a biofilter three times as large as the current one. It will be completed in the next few years.
Traditional Ajrakh colors are black, blue and red. In the old days, the family tells me, men used to wear Ajrakh shoulder cloths and turbans dyed with madder root and indigo. They doubled as spice sacks or prayer mats.
Ajrakh was an important part of the local barter economy. A family of weavers might trade hand-woven turbans and shawls to the Khatris for block printing. Artisans saved their masterpieces for dowry collections and labored over unique designs for weddings.
Today, the Khatris’ work is celebrated on international fashion runways, and Sufiyan and Juned Khatri, his brother, work with designers from all over the world.
