Summary

In Bhuj’s mirrored palaces, Nirona’s homes, and Ahmedabad’s stepwells, Gujarat’s artisans turn earth, thread, and metal into poetry. Explore Ajrakh block printing, Rogan painting, bell making, Patola weaving, and more on Forward Travel’s Gujarat’s Art & Rann of Kutch tour.

Table of Contents

• A Sensory Awakening
• Mirror Work
• Ajrakhi Block Printing
• Shawl Weaving
• Rogan Painting
• Bell Making
• Lacquer Work
• Mud Mirror Work
• Pottery
• Patola Saris
• Epilogue

A Sensory Awakening

In Bhuj, the morning air smells faintly of iron and indigo. A bell chimes somewhere in the lane, and you realise it’s not a temple gong but a goat’s collar, tuned like a note in a private orchestra. The Kutch sun hasn’t yet bleached the ochre walls, and the women in embroidered shawls are already at their doorways, mirrors on their garments catching the light like desert fireflies. Here, the art doesn’t just hang on walls. It dangles from wrists, adorns necks, and wraps around bodies.

This is Gujarat’s western edge, where the Great Rann begins. The state’s art forms were born of necessity, devotion, and an eye for beauty so instinctive it feels genetic. For travellers tracing the Gujarat’s Art & Rann of Kutch journey with Forward Travel, this is a route that begins in Bhuj’s mirrored palaces, loops through the mud-walled villages of Nirona and Ajrakhpur, detours into Harappan ruins, and finally arrives in Ahmedabad, where the pulse of old craft meets modern India’s velocity.

Mirror Work

Every journey through Gujarat’s arts begins, almost inevitably, with reflection, quite literally. In Bhuj’s Aina Mahal, the “Palace of Mirrors,” built by Rao Lakhpatji around 1750, light itself is the main attraction. Its designer, Ram Singh Malam, had apprenticed in Europe, returning with Venetian glass, Delft tiles, and an enthusiasm for chandeliers that must have bewildered local stone masons. The result is a two-storey experiment in glamour: Kutchi architecture wearing a European costume.

Step inside the Hall of Mirrors and you see marble walls inlaid with mirrors separated by gilded frames, a room whose edges are never certain because light keeps multiplying itself. The floor glimmers with blue delftware, and every shelf and arch seems to ask: what happens when desert restraint meets imported indulgence? The answer is Aina Mahal—half palace, half fever dream.

But mirror work, or shisha embroidery, didn’t begin in royal courts. Long before Ram Singh Malam started tiling palaces, women in the Kutch and Kathiawar regions were stitching fragments of mirror into fabric. Tiny squares, triangles, and circles held in place by chain stitch or satin thread. In Kutch, the chain ruled: curved, looping, exuberant. In Kathiawar, the satin dominated, disciplined into neat geometry. Their designs told stories of epic love, kings and heroes, harvests and battles, but the mirrors did something deeper: they caught light in the dark interiors of bhungas, the mud homes of the desert, and sent it dancing.

When you visit Bhuj today, the same impulse lives on in the markets around the Prag Mahal. Embroidered wall hangings glitter beside mobile-phone pouches, and the visual vocabulary of the palace gilded mouldings, triangular mirror compartments find itself reincarnated in cloth. What began as a royal experiment has become a folk language, translated from marble to thread.

Ajrakhi Block Printing

Twenty minutes outside Bhuj, the scent changes. Indigo. Wet wood. Boiled madder root. Welcome to Ajrakhpur, a village founded out of survival.

In 2001, after the devastating Gujarat earthquake, Dr. Ismail Mohammed Khatri led the migration of his Khatri community from Dhamadka to this new settlement. Their craft—Ajrakh hand block printing—had been inseparable from water. The mineral balance of Dhamadka’s wells had given their indigo and alizarin dyes their distinctive precision. When the wells ran dry, the artisans had no choice but to move.

Today, in his courtyard workshop, Khatri’s sons still dip wooden blocks into dye, their palms blue to the bone. The process is so intricate that each piece of cloth passes through twenty or more stages, washing, mordanting, printing, dyeing, re-dyeing. Natural dyes dominate again: indigo for blue, madder for red, pomegranate rind for yellow, and iron scrap for black. The rhythm of the work is steady, almost meditative, interrupted only by the sound of cloth slapping against wash stones.

Ajrakh, meaning “blue” in Arabic, has always been a conversation between geometry and chemistry. The motifs are symmetrical, almost Islamic in discipline, but the colours bleed in the heat, turning precision into poetry. Locals still distinguish patterns by the community that wears them, the Aahir’s deep red chatani cloth, the Maldharis’ indigo limayai wraps. Every pattern is social history disguised as textile.

For the traveller, meeting the Khatris is an encounter with continuity—eleven generations of artisans who treat design as inheritance. Walk through the LLDC (Living & Learning Design Centre) nearby, and the Ajrakh fabrics hang beside embroidery, weaving, and beadwork, visual proof that Kutch’s crafts are less about preservation than persistence.

Shawl Weaving

A few kilometres down the road, the clatter of looms takes over. Bhujodi village feels like a living score. Rhythmic, repetitive, comforting. Here stands Hiralaxmi Craft Park, a ten-acre experiment in survival. When it opened in 2005, the idea was simple: give artisans a dignified space to work, sell, and rest. Today, the park hums with weavers threading wool and cotton into shawls that can withstand both desert cold and global fashion trends.

The shawls of Bhujodi are Kutchi to their core. Geometric, practical, muted but with deliberate bursts of colour. The weavers have had to adapt acrylic yarns replaced traditional wool when markets shifted; later, cotton and silk found their way back in. Prices of yarn doubled, wages stagnated, yet the hum of the loom continued.

Many of the weavers trace their lineage to the Vankar community, who traditionally supplied shawls to nomadic Rabari herders. Now, a Bhujodi shawl might end up in Melbourne or Milan. Yet, the process remains human scale: the warp stretched taut between pegs, the shuttle passing through by hand, and the weaver’s body acting as both metronome and measure.

You could buy one here, of course. But linger a little, and you’ll see why these shawls feel different. They are woven not for decoration, but for conversation with time and with texture, with a landscape that has always demanded resilience.

Rogan Painting

If Bhuj is the overture, Nirona is the crescendo. This small, dusty village about 40 kilometres north of Bhuj is the rare place where multiple crafts coexist within walking distance and sometimes, within one family compound. Rogan painting, bell making, and lacquer work all hum in their separate corners like instruments in harmony.

Step into the workshop of Abdul Gafur Khatri, and the first thing you notice is silence. The rogan artist doesn’t use brushes or sketchbooks. He uses a metal stylus dipped into a viscous paint made of castor oil and vegetable pigment, boiled for two days until it becomes a sticky, glistening thread. Then, without drawing a line, he trails the paint freehand onto dark fabric fine as a strand of hair, controlled as calligraphy. When half the design is complete, he folds the cloth, pressing the wet paint against itself, and opens it again to reveal a perfect mirror image.

Rogan, derived from the Persian word for “oil,” has travelled far from Persia to Patan to Kutch and nearly died out along the way. By the 1980s, Abdul Gafur’s family was the last practising one in India. His revival, crowned by a Padma Shri in 2019, is now local legend. When Narendra Modi presented Barack Obama with a Tree of Life rogan painting, it was a declaration that something hand-drawn in Nirona could belong to the world.

Bell Making

A few lanes away, the soundscape shifts to a clang. The Lohars, blacksmiths of the region, are hammering scrap iron into copper-coated bells, each tuned by ear using a small hammer called an ekal. There’s no welding involved; the metal is folded, beaten, and baked in a clay furnace. Every bell has its own voice, customised by the curvature of its rim and the length of its wooden clapper. Once meant to identify cattle across vast grazing lands, these bells now jingle in urban doorways as wind chimes or souvenirs. The transition from pasture to parlour may seem drastic, but the soul of the craft remains acoustic, an ear trained to perfect imperfection.

Lacquer Work

Further down the village, the Wadha community keeps its lathe spinning for lacquer work. Here, wood meets colour in a hypnotic dance. Artisans apply layers of lac, a resin from insects, onto turned wood, creating stripes of green, red, and yellow that shimmer as they move. The designs are improvised, zigzagging into geometry, scratched to reveal hidden layers. Once used to decorate toys and kitchenware, these lacquered pieces now travel to galleries, though their origins remain stubbornly domestic.

Mud Mirror Work

From Nirona, the road turns north towards the edge of the White Rann. The salt flats begin shyly, first as pale dust, then as a dazzling white ocean that swallows horizon and shadow alike. Villages like Dhordo and Khavda lie at its periphery, where art has always been both shelter and ornament.

In Dhordo’s bhungas, women from the Rabari and Mutwa communities practise Lippan Kaam, or mud mirror work. The craft began as home decoration: designs moulded from a mix of clay and camel dung, studded with tiny mirrors. The motifs (peacocks, camels, temples, mandalas) recreate the world outside in miniature. When sunlight strikes them, the walls seem to flicker alive. Today, artisans use plaster of Paris instead of dung, and their designs hang in city apartments, yet the aesthetic remains defiantly rural. Each mirror still catches the desert light like a small sun.

Pottery

A short drive away, Khavda offers another kind of alchemy. Its potters, heirs to an unbroken lineage reaching back to the Harappan civilisation, still shape clay from the local Rann soil. The vessels, rounded, red, and hand-painted with black and white dots, echo the patterns found in Indus Valley excavations. The similarity isn’t romantic speculation; Dholavira, a major Harappan site, lies less than two hours away. Here, you can still see the remnants of an ancient water system, step wells, and even inscribed signboards, proof that civilisation and design have long shared this landscape.

The potters of Khavda don’t see themselves as archaeologists. For them, clay is simply livelihood. But when you watch a pot emerge from the wheel, earth, water, air, fire, you can’t help but feel that elemental energy.

Patola Saris

By the time you reach Patan, north of Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s colours have shifted from the earthy to the opulent. In narrow lanes lined with wooden havelis, silk threads glint from looms where the Salvi community still weaves Patola saris.

Patola is a double ikat, meaning both warp and weft threads are dyed before weaving, each colour tied and resist-dyed to exact positions. A single sari can take months, even a year, to complete. The patterns (elephants, parrots, flowers, geometric grids) align so perfectly that the design is reversible, identical on both sides. Historically, Patola was a symbol of prestige: the Solanki kings wore it to temple, brides received it as dowry, and Southeast Asian royals imported it as ceremonial cloth.

Today, standing before the looms, you see why the process borders on mathematical obsession. The threads are measured to fractions of a millimetre; a displacement of one can undo weeks of work. Natural dyes like turmeric, indigo, and madder still rule the palette. Watching the Salvis weave is like watching meditation performed with needles.

Nearby, the Rani Ki Vav stepwell deepens the metaphor. Thousands of sculpted figures descending into the earth, an inverted temple that mirrors the intricacy of Patola weaving. Both are acts of devotion expressed as design.

Epilogue

When the tour ends and the flight boards for home, Gujarat’s light lingers, the kind reflected from mirrors, bouncing off indigo, glinting on metal. It’s hard to forget.

The artisans of Kutch refine their labour daily, between dust storms and power cuts, between cattle bells and tourist chatter.

Forward Travel has curated Gujarat’s Art & Rann of Kutch as an 8-day journey through the mirrored halls of Bhuj, the stepwells of Patan, the residences of desert artisans, and the museums of Ahmedabad.

Get in touch to explore Gujarat’s artistry on two wheels or two feet at your own pace.