Kutch · Arid Northwest

The small things

An earthquake that moved a riverOn 16 June 1819 an earthquake of magnitude somewhere between 7.7 and 8.2 raised a ridge across the northern Rann — the Allah Bund, the dam of God, so named to distinguish it from anything people had built. It runs for around eighty kilometres and stands some six metres high, and it blocked the Nara, then an active freshwater branch of the Indus. The organised delta on the other side became the marsh and salt flat that is there now, and the port town of Lakhpat, which had traded on that water, emptied.
The 2001 earthquake, and what it rebuiltAt 8.46 in the morning on 26 January 2001 an earthquake of magnitude around 7.7 struck with its epicentre near Chobari in Bhachau taluka. At least twenty thousand people died, most of them in Kutch; some ten thousand in Bhuj alone, where the great majority of buildings were destroyed or made uninhabitable. Anjar lost more than two thousand, including schoolchildren in a Republic Day procession. The reconstruction that followed rebuilt close to a million damaged houses across the state, redrew Bhuj's old city, moved the ajrakh printers to a new village, and brought in the funding and the organisations that reshaped the craft economy.
Round houses stand up betterThe bhunga — a circular mud-and-thatch house with a light conical roof — came through 2001 far better than the rectangular masonry around it, because a cylinder has no corners to concentrate stress in and a light roof has little mass to throw. Post-earthquake rebuilding took the form seriously, and the bhunga plan reappeared in reconstruction and then in every resort on the Rann.
A cloth with no wrong sideAjrakh is printed on both faces in register, through around sixteen stages of resist, mordant, indigo and madder, with washing and sun-drying between them. That is a great deal of extra work for a garment — until you notice that it is worn wrapped, thrown over a shoulder and wound as a turban, so both faces are always visible and neither can be a reverse.
A craft that moved for its waterThe ajrakh printers had worked at Dhamadka for generations, but the water there had been deteriorating and the 2001 earthquake brought the workshops down. They founded a new village, Ajrakhpur, and moved. Natural dyeing depends on the mineral content of the water it is washed in; a printing tradition can be tied to a well more tightly than to a village.
Drawn from the back, in reverseIn suf embroidery nothing is drawn or traced. The embroiderer works from the reverse of the cloth, counting warp and weft threads and building the design in triangles, so what she can see while working is the mirror image of what she is making. Every composition is held in the head, and no two pieces come out identical — which is a property of the technique rather than a claim about artistry.
Mirrors as a signatureCommunity styles are fastest to tell apart by the mirrors. The Ahir use small round mirrors, all one size; the Rabari deliberately vary shape — round, lozenge, triangular, rectangular; the Garasia Jat use hundreds only a few millimetres across on a single yoke; the Mutwa use the smallest of all. Getting the attribution wrong is a real error, not a matter of taste, because the maker is what the style names.
Buffalo that graze at nightThe Banni buffalo leaves the vandh in the evening after the second milking and returns at dawn, walking eight to ten kilometres in the monsoon and up to fifteen in summer, unaccompanied. It avoids the daytime heat, and it means the herders sleep while the animals work. Recognised as a distinct breed in 2010, it yields around twelve to eighteen litres a day on grass that would not support a crop.
The camel that swimsThe Kharai camel of coastal Kutch grazes on mangrove, which means swimming out to islands in the creeks to reach it. It is one of very few camel populations anywhere that feeds in salt water, and it is recognised as a distinct breed from the desert camel of the interior.
A city built around water it did not haveDholavira sits on an island in a salt desert with no perennial water. Its builders cut sixteen or more reservoirs into the rock, some seven metres deep and nearly eighty long, and channelled two seasonal streams into them. The whole city plan is an argument about water storage, which makes it the most legible Harappan site for anyone standing in this landscape today.
A snack sixty years old and a thousand kilometres wideThe dabeli was invented in Mandvi in the 1960s by Keshavji Gabha Chudasama, whose shop is still open. It is now sold from carts across Maharashtra and Gujarat, and the packaged dabeli masala is a national grocery item. Most of the people eating it could not say where it came from.
An alphabet that cannot spell the languageKachchhi has implosive consonants — made by drawing air inward — which Gujarati does not, and it is written in the Gujarati script, which therefore has no letters for them. The scripts that could spell it, Khojki and Khudabadi, have gone out of use. This is a practical reason a language with a million speakers has almost no written literature, and it is separate from the question of status.
Bells tuned in setsNirona's bells are folded from iron sheet without welding, coated in copper or brass and fired so the coating fuses, then tuned by ear by adjusting the shape and the clapper. They are made in graded sets so that a herd carries a chord rather than a noise, and a herder can pick out one animal, and judge its distance, in the dark.

Small local details of Kutch — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (13)