A Town Called Indigo: Ajrakh's Second Migration and the Water That May Decide Its Future
The third in a series on the people, places and practices behind hand block printed cloth in India.
In a workshop in Ajrakhpur, near Bhuj in Gujarat, Sufian Khatri holds up a palm-sized piece of cloth. The dye is a soft, pale yellow, and the pattern printed into it — animal and floral motifs in a contrasting shade — is exquisite except for one thing: an uneven black dot, almost dead centre, ruining the piece. “This black dot is because of too much iron in the water that the cloth was washed in as part of the dyeing process,” Sufian, a tenth-generation Ajrakh craftsman, told Mongabay India in 2019. “It spoiled this piece.”
That one spoiled piece is a small, exact symbol of a much larger problem. Ajrakh — the resist-dyed, double-sided block print of Kutch — has already been forced to move once because of water. A quarter-century after that move, the water is turning against it again, in the very village the community built to escape it the first time.
A craft named for indigo
The word Ajrakh is generally traced to azrak, Arabic and Persian for indigo blue — the dye that, alongside madder red, defines the craft's palette. Its practitioners are Khatris, and the family now most closely associated with the technique traces its arrival in Kutch to 1634, when, according to the artisan collective's own history, brothers travelled from Sindh at the invitation of Rao Bharmalji, then ruler of Kutch, and were granted a village to settle: Dhamadka, chosen because the Saran river ran through it. Today's leading practitioner, Dr Ismail Mohammed Khatri, and his sons represent what the family's own record describes as eleven generations of Khatri printers and dyers, a lineage the University of Warwick's oral history project has documented in his own words.
Even that 1634 settlement was itself a response to older water history. Local accounts held onto by the community describe the Sindhu — the Indus — once running through Kutch, before the 1819 Rann of Kutch earthquake threw up a natural dam known as the Allah Bund and diverted the river out of the region for good. Sufian Khatri, recounting the family's oral history to Mongabay India, put it simply: back then, “red rice used to grow here,” and the natural dyes used in Ajrakh printing were, by his account, more vivid for the quality of the water. Ajrakh's relationship with water has been precarious for longer than anyone printing it today has been alive.
A pattern with no wrong side
What makes Ajrakh technically distinct from most other Indian block prints is that it has no back. In a technique called bipuri, the printer works dye, mordant and resist onto both faces of the cloth, pass by pass, so that the same geometric pattern appears with equal clarity on either side. The wooden blocks used to do this are carved in matched, mirrored pairs; a misalignment of even a few millimetres between the two makes the second-side printing impossible, because the pattern has to register through the cloth, not just onto it.
Getting there takes what craft documentation typically counts as sixteen distinct stages — washing and degumming the raw cloth, treating it in a bath of castor oil and camel or goat dung to prepare the fibre, printing with a resist of lime and gum, dyeing in indigo, printing again with iron-and-tamarind-seed mordants for black and rust, a second indigo dip, and a long finishing sequence of washing, drying and steaming, repeated on both faces of the fabric. Nearly every one of those sixteen stages ends in a wash. That is the detail that makes Ajrakh, of all Indian textile crafts, one of the most exposed to what comes out of the ground.
The first migration
Dhamadka's water problem did not begin with an earthquake, but the 2001 Bhuj earthquake is what forced the issue. Sufian Khatri, whose father Ismail Khatri led the search for a new home, described the change to Mongabay India: “Every night, after their namaz, when the craftsmen would sit together for a chat, notes would be exchanged on how many pieces were destroyed because of the iron-induced black spots. Some would have lost 50 pieces, some a hundred.” The community tested the groundwater and found the answer. “One of the initial stages is when the cloth is dyed with myrobalan and then washed. If there is even one percent iron in water, the (pale yellow) cloth gets black spots,” Sufian said. “We tested and found seven percent iron content in the groundwater in Dhamadka.”
Ismail Khatri and a group of fellow craftsmen surveyed sites around Bhuj, Bhachau and Anjar before settling on a plot roughly 40 kilometres from Dhamadka. They named the new village after the craft itself: Ajrakhpur. Ismail Khatri's contribution to keeping the community and the craft together through that move is part of why, in 2003, De Montfort University in Leicester awarded him an honorary Doctor of Arts — recognition, cited widely across craft archives, for his standing as the tradition's foremost living custodian.
History, repeating
What makes the present moment worth writing about is not that Ajrakhpur is dying. It is that the same problem the community moved 40 kilometres to escape has started showing up again, in a different form, in the place they moved to.
“The water table is going down like never before,” Sikandar Usman Khatri, an Ajrakh craftsman in Ajrakhpur, told Mongabay India. “When our family had just moved in here, water would start bubbling at a depth of 200 feet. It was good quality water. But when I had to dig a private borewell for additional water supply for my growing business, the depth was 450 feet.” Sufian Khatri's family drilled even deeper in search of cleaner water and came up short in a different way: “We had to drill 600 feet for water, but it turned out to have even higher iron content than in the village.”
Salinity is rising alongside the falling water table. A 2017 Status of Coastal Salinity report by the Gujarat Ecology Commission, cited by Mongabay India, found that groundwater salinity along the state's coastline — which had stayed fresh through the 1960s — climbed from 3,500 parts per million to 9,000 ppm at a distance of two kilometres from the coast between the 1970s and the report's publication, and from 860 ppm to 2,060 ppm at five kilometres inland. Younger craftsmen point to erratic weather as a compounding cause. “Instead of raining over a period of time, it now rains heavily on some days, and then there is a dry spell,” said Khalid Khatri, a young Ajrakhpur printer.
The economic weight of this falls hardest on smaller workshops. Khalid's father, Amin Khatri, a seventh-generation craftsman, told Mongabay India he quit Ajrakh printing altogether after the losses that followed the 2001 earthquake and opened a grocery store instead; it was Khalid who eventually persuaded him back into the family trade. “But now this (water problem) has started again in Ajrakhpur,” Amin said. “It's not as bad as it was in Dhamadka, but who knows about the future? We use water from the community well. The more well-to-do craftsmen have dug wells in the hope of better water. Not all have succeeded — they have put in money, but the water quality remained the same. But we don't even have that choice.” Another craftsman, Hamid, pointed to a bitter irony: the water used in Ajrakh's natural-dye process is clean enough to irrigate crops afterward, he said, “but we don't have land to do agriculture.”
What is being tried
The community's first fix was homemade: a filter that passed water through layers of charcoal, sand and stone to strip out iron, effective but labour-intensive, since the charcoal needed frequent replacing. In 2007, the Kutch-based crafts organisation Khamir ran a geological survey of the area's groundwater and piloted a bio-water effluent treatment plant to recycle water used in the Ajrakh process. “We implemented a pilot project of setting up an effluent treatment plant (ETP) that used bio-water technology to recycle the water that was used in the Ajrakh process,” Khamir's Ghatit Lehru told Mongabay India. The community covered half the roughly Rs 100,000 cost, but the plant's capacity fell short: as Sufian Khatri put it, “its recycling capacity was much lesser than our requirement of recycling 1 lakh litres of water every day.”
The more substantial fix now on record is a Common Effluent Treatment Plant built through the government's Northern India Textile Research Association (NITRA), sponsored by the Ministry of Textiles, with a documented treatment capacity of 150 kilolitres — roughly 1.5 lakh litres — a day. “The CETP has an iron filter and a dual media filter through which excess iron and other suspended matter will be removed from the water. It can then be reused in the Ajrakh process,” NITRA's Rahul Srivastava explained to Mongabay India in 2019, when the plant was expected to become operational within two to three months. Sikandar Khatri framed what that capacity would mean in practice: “Normally we use 1 lakh litre water in a single day. The CETP will ensure that we use the same amount of water in three days.” We could not independently confirm the plant's current operating status; NITRA's own project documentation, most recently updated in 2024, still describes it in terms of scope and objectives rather than a completion date.
Alongside the infrastructure, craftsmen are adapting the process itself. Sufian Khatri described experiments in printing a background colour directly rather than dyeing the whole cloth, and washing finished pieces in stored water instead of under a running tap. Some households have also turned to rainwater harvesting: Sufian's own workshop keeps an 80,000-litre storage tank, filled through the monsoon. None of these measures alone solves the underlying problem. Together, craftsmen told Mongabay India, they buy the craft time.
How to tell if what you're buying is real
Kutch Ajrakh received its own Geographical Indication tag in April 2024, a legal recognition of the craft's origin and the community that makes it — but a GI tag travels with a certificate, not with every scarf on a shelf. A few things are harder to fake than paperwork:
- Turn it over. Because of the bipuri technique, genuine Ajrakh shows the same pattern with near-equal clarity on both faces of the cloth. A print that is crisp on one side and faint or flat on the other was printed once, not twice, and isn't true double-sided Ajrakh.
- Look for depth, not flatness, in the colour. Natural indigo and madder sit with a warmth and slight variation that synthetic dye batches don't reproduce; synthetic colour tends to look uniform and slightly harsher under direct light.
- Expect small irregularities. A hand-carved block pressed by hand, sixteen times over, will not register with laser precision. Minor variation from motif to motif is a sign of the hand, not a flaw.
- Ask where it was printed. A seller who can name Ajrakhpur or Dhamadka, and the family behind the piece, is a seller who knows their supply chain.
Care for it accordingly: wash in cold water separately for the first few washes, use a mild detergent, and dry in shade rather than direct sun. Expect the colour to mellow slightly over the first year of wear — that is the natural dye settling, not the print failing.
A cloth that keeps moving
Ajrakh has now been shaped by water twice: once by a river's disappearance in 1819, and once by an earthquake's aftermath in 2001. Neither event was of the Khatris' making, and neither is what's happening in Ajrakhpur's aquifer today. What has stayed constant across two centuries is a community adapting a water-hungry craft to whatever water it can find, one borewell, one filter and one treatment plant at a time. Whether a Common Effluent Treatment Plant finishes what a community well and an 80,000-litre rain tank cannot is not yet settled. What is certain is that every length of genuine Ajrakh reaching a buyer today carries the cost of that uncertainty already priced in.
Explore our hand block printed dupattas, scarves and stoles, including pieces printed in the Ajrakh tradition, and buy from a supply chain that can name the village behind the cloth.
Next in this series: four hundred years in one village — the Nandana print of Tarapur, Neemuch, and the community that never stopped making it even after the rest of the country forgot its name.
Further reading and sources: Mongabay India, Water woes: Kutch's age-old Ajrakh craft faces its nemesis, once again; University of Warwick Oral History Project, Dr Ismail Mohammed Khatri; Wikipedia, 1819 Rann of Kutch earthquake; Northern India Textile Research Association, Common Effluent Treatment Plant, Ajrakhpur; Khamir, khamir.org; coverage of the April 2024 Kutch Ajrakh GI tag.