Travelling Around Britain and the World

Saturday 9 March 2019

Gondal to Bhuj, Gujarat Part 11

Gujarat: The What, Where, When and Who

India
Gujarat

This post covers day 11 of a 14-day journey around Gujarat, following our circuit of Rajasthan last year. Smaller than Rajasthan, Gujarat is about the size of the Island of Great Britain and has much the same population.

5,000 years ago, Gujarat was a centre of the Indus Valley civilization and subsequently played its part in most of the major north Indian empires. When Islamic invaders reached northern India in the 9th century Gujarat held out until 1300 when it became part of the Delhi Sultanate.

A long drive took us from Gondal, by-passing the district capital of Rajkot, then north and west to Bhuj, capital of Kutch

An independent Muslim sultan seized power in 1391and Gujarat maintained its independence until becoming part of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century and later the British Empire, though local rulers of a patchwork of Princely States retained considerable autonomy. At independence in 1947 Gujarat was part of the State of Bombay, becoming a state in its own right in 1960.

With a long coast line facing the Arabian sea, Gujaratis have been seafarers and international traders for millennia.

Gujarat is the home state of both Mahatma Gandhi and the current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

-o0o0o-

Gondal to Rajkot


 Gondal* sounds like a stronghold of the Riders of Rohan, and Bhuj is obviously somewhere to the Hubside of Klatch. My mental preparation for a journey from Middle Earth to the Discworld was, I soon discovered, irrelevant.

Rajkot, the district capital, is an hour to the north and with 1.2m people is another major Indian city that is little known to the outside world. The road from Gondal passes through a heavily a populated land where industry and agriculture sit side by side.

Milk churns disappeared from our rural landscape without me noticing, though the internet tells me churn collections ceased in July 1979. I rather miss them, and I am always delighted to see them in India.

Milk churns on the move, Gondsl
Motorcycle helmets, unlike milk churns, remain the rule at home, but are not universally used in India. I suppose wearing bulky helmets would make it difficult to fit three young men on a motorcycle.

Three on a motorbike, north of Gondal
A contra-flow on the dual carriageway caused by an overturned vehicle had slowed us down, so with a long journey ahead, the existence of a Rajkot by-pass was a boon. North of the city we passed several outbreaks of what looked like tented encampments, one step down from shanty towns.

Tented encampment north of Rajkot
Entering Kutch

 The Gulf of Kutch, separating the Kathiawar Peninsula from the vast but sparsely populated district of Kutch, is the substantial estuary of a short and apparently nameless river. The salt pans crossed by Highway 27 some 20km from the advertised coast are where the river would be if it had any water.

Salt pans beneath Highway 27, Gulf of Kutch
Beyond the salt pans we left Rajkot district and entered the former Kingdom of Kutch – definitely Pratchett territory, particularly when spelled Kuchchh as in the map below. Twice the size of Wales, Kutch is by far the largest district of Gujarat and with 46 people per km², the least densely populated (Wales has 150, Rajkot district 400).

In my previous experience coastlines were simple. A cliff or beach has land on one side, sea on the other - that is how you know it is the coast. Had I spent more time in Norfolk I might have realised that the relationship can be more complex. Here it messes with your mind, the coastline is variable, the land and sea swap places with the seasons and any map is at best a snap shot.

Inland is the Little Rann of Kutch where we successfully hunted for Wild Asses only a week ago. From the narrow neck of an occasional river, the Rann (Salt Marsh) widens out, sprawling over south-east Kutch and parts of Morbi and Surendranagar Districts, covering some 5,000km² (coincidently, about the same as Norfolk).

Kutch (Kuchchh) and its Ranns. Borrowed from wikipedia, the map is the work of w:User:Miljoshi
The map is pre-2013 when seven new districts were created (Kutch was not affected)
In the rainy season most of the Little Rann floods with brackish water, hence the salt industry there. This causes few problems; everyone knows it will happen and nobody would be so stupid as to build a town on a flood plain (unlike some western countries I could mention). We will visit the (Great) Rann of Kutch in a day or two – that is even bigger.

The previous map of the Ranns of Kutch shows the coastline as it usually appears on modern maps. On this 1909 map it looks very different.  The differences are due more to the passing of seasons than the passing of decades.
We lunched at a branch of Coffee Day, a chain of air-conditioned, upmarket cafés that can be found everywhere in India you would expect to find them, and several places you wouldn’t. Cappuccinos and toasted chilli-cheese sandwiches would keep us going for the afternoon.

Kutch was not only a Princely State during the Raj, but on independence became a State of India in its own right, albeit a ‘Part C’ state – one ruled by a commissioner appointed by the President. India is defined as democratic in its constitution so ‘Part C’ states were only temporary and in 1956 a major reorganisation placed Kutch and Saurashtra State (largely the Kathiawar peninsula we had just left) into the already overlarge State of Bombay. In 1960 Bombay was split on linguistic grounds, the Marathi speaking south became Maharashtra, the Gujarati speakers to the north gaining their own state

Southern Kutch is flat, some scrub some fields prepared for planting, but not much to look at, so we were happy to stop at a dyeing and block printing works.

Southern Kutch lanscape

Block Printing in Kutch

I should no longer be surprised by Indian factories, though ‘factories’ is the wrong word in the local context. Many companies do ‘factory tours’ at home; there are tickets and guides, viewing galleries and roped off sections, safety briefings and sometime special clothing. Here we walked into the yard, introduced ourselves to a member of the family – of course it was a family business – and were warmly welcomed.

Dyeing and printing factory yard, southern Kutch
Saying that the family had been in this business for 400 years, he told us they used only vegetable dyes, organically and sustainably produced, and because they were natural, they were permanent and would not fade in sunlight. The marketing speech was modern, the rest of the enterprise had changed little over the centuries – which is normal for India.

Colours and dyes are one of my areas of ignorance; I know indigo is the I in ROYGBIV, but it was only in 2012 in Vietnam when we saw an indigo plantation that I discovered it was a plant. Native to India, it has been used for producing blue dye since antiquity and arrived in Europe down the Silk Road. The Greeks called it Ἰνδικὸν φάρμακον (Indian dye) which became Indicum in Latin and eventually Indigo** in English, where the word’s earliest recorded use was in 1289. The dyeing agent, indigotin, is the same chemical my ancestors had previously extracted from woad, but indigo has far more of it.

I have never visited a dyeing works at home - to be honest my ‘factory visits’ have largely involved breweries, distilleries and the occasional cheese maker. If I did, they would doubtless be using artificially produced indigotin rather than indigo plants and I would certainly not expect to see five men in plastic macs up to their knees in a tank of indigo, dyeing cloth by dunking and slapping.

Dyeing cloth with indigo, Kutch
One particularly vigorous slap showered me in droplets of dye and my previously orange tee-shirt acquired an interesting pattern of green splashes – indigotin is green but oxidises to blue during the dyeing process. ‘Don’t worry,’ the manager said, apparently forgetting his little speech about natural dyes being permanent, ‘it’ll wash out.’ [He was right it did – after three of four passes through the washing machine.]

The next stage is block printing, surely a process from a by-gone age. An inked block is repeatedly struck onto the cloth to create a repeated pattern which can be simple…

Block printing in Kutch
…or complex.

A craftsman at work, block printing in Kutch

A rank amateur, Jaipur 2018
Printing a border, Lucknow 2013
I had a go myself in Jaipur last year; one small rectangular print but in four colours, so I placed each successive block with ever greater care.  It was a slow process. We first saw block printing in Lucknow bazaar in 2013; a stall-holder adding a patterned border to a piece of cloth with more speed and accuracy than I would have thought humanly possible. Compared to the man above, he was an amateur. This guy never paused to line up his strike, indeed he hardly seemed to look, he just moved along the cloth hitting the required spot again and again and again, his hand so fast it is fuzzy in the photograph.

But this is an easy process to automate. Despite their super-human accuracy, the printers must occasionally make a major error – the pressure when making the last few stamps on a large multi-coloured piece must be considerable. Machines never err.

We thought we might buy a tablecloth, and in the shop across the road our host’s brother showed us hundreds of cloths, no two of them the same.

The finished products, block printers,Kutch
And this is the tablecloth we bought. It has been used and washed more than once; the colours have lost some of their vibrancy and the brown was once darker, but it remains a pleasing design.

The tablecloth we bought
But is it any 'better' than a machine printed cloth? The only way to tell the difference is to find the little errors – preternaturally precise as the printers are, they are only human. So, should we value something because of its errors? That sounds perverse and if it were true, a machine could be programmed to make random errors.

Not absolute perfection, but to spot the errors you must look more closely than any sane person would look at a tablecloth
Hand printing was once the only way to print and it survives because of inertia – and because these skilled printers are paid a pittance. I would not want to put them out of work, but historically mechanisation has created more and better jobs than it has destroyed.

Or looking at it another way: we were privileged to see a dying craft that our grandchildren will only be able to read about in books (and blogs).

Embroidery

Those readers who now think I am a philistine, thank you for reading this far and allow me to confirm your suspicion.

We dropped in on a village of widows (!?) to see their embroidery. A little further down the road was an embroidery museum – it is an important craft locally. So much in India is underfunded that when you visit somewhere money has been spent, it stands out. The embroidery museum was modern and purpose built, air-conditioned and with subdued lighting to preserve the colours. The displays were cunningly lit so there was no glare or reflection from the well-polished glass cases and the captions, in Gujarati and English were clear and comprehensive – it was a model of what such a museum should be, though the meanies would not let me take any photographs. But embroidery? Lynne was not particularly interested and I would have been happier outside watching the grass grow, Vijay seemed to enjoy it, though. We might also wonder who it is for, there are few tourists in these parts and we had the place to ourselves.

And the Philistines were as cultured and sophisticated as any other iron age tribe – they had a bad press because their enemies wrote the book.

Bhuj

Although once a state capital and with an alleged population of 200,000+ Bhuj has a small-town feel.

We checked into our hotel, a new building full of dark plastic strips and right angles and had little time to look round before the light went. Our first impression of Bhuj - hot, poor, dusty and dirty -  may be a little unfair. It will be the main feature of the next post, but here is a photo to be getting on with.

Bhuj
With no time to explore we dined in our hotel. The restaurant was hardly crowded but the Punjabi lamb, mixed veg, rice and butter roti was fine and I like the dessert of rasgulla - soft paneer and semolina dumplings cooked in a light syrup.

 *Gondal was also the name  of an imaginary country invented by Emily and Anne Brontë in their teenage years
**The word 'Indigo' has been imported into India in the form IndiGo, the name of the domestic airline that took us from Jaipur to Delhi last year.


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Location: Gondal, Gujarat 360311, India

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