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| Gujarat |
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| India |
This post covers day 13 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.
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| From Kutch north to Hodka and Around |
Sumrasar, Village of Craftspeople
One way to make a living is to concentrate on handicrafts; more and
more people are being trained in traditional skills by government programmes. Another, linked to it, is tourism but that is in
its infancy.
We paused our journey at Sumrasar some 25km from Bhuj.
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Sumrasar, Gujarat |
Some houses are large, though not palatial – note the hand pump just
inside the front gate…
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Village house, Sumrasar |
…but there are signs of increased affluence and the reason can often be
seen hanging up to dry.
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Increasing affluence, Sumrasar (and the handicrafts that have caused
it) |
Finding an open gate and three women working inside Vijay turned on his
charm and we were invited in to take a closer look at their embroidery.
One was embroidering a sari using the most delicate of stitching.
Working eight hours a day, she told us, it would take her 18 months. Two
others were working on smaller pieces that would only take four months.
I suspect we would be shocked if we knew how little they are paid for
such highly skilled work.
We then dropped in on Meghiben. We did not know as she showed us her
appliqué work (her eyes are no longer good enough for fine embroidery)
that she is something of a local star and the subject of YouTube videos.
Some of her work is complex, but her simpler snakes and ladders cloths
would make appropriate presents, so we bought a couple. We grossly
overpaid, but her chuckle, beaming smile and evident happiness were
worth every rupee.
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Meghiben and her Snakes and Ladders, Sumrasar |
In a farm on the edge of the village....
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Farm on the edge of Sumrasar |
.... a young woman alone in the house was hesitant to receive visitors
but was happy to show us the embroidery she was working on as part of
her daughter’s dowry.
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Embroidery for a daughter's dowry, Sumrasar |
We continued our wander round the village. Poor quality farmland as
this is, most of the men were still working the fields; handicrafts were largely, but not exclusively, the domain of women.
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Spinning, Sumrasar |
Rogan Art in Nirona
To visit Sumrasar we had driven 2km east from the main highway. 15 km
west of the highway through dry farmland...
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Dry farmlands between Sumrasar and Nirona |
…. – though goats will survive on anything –
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Goats will thrive anywhere. Between Sumrasar and Nirona |
…is the village of Nirona. Rogan art, an art/craft undergoing a revival
after almost dying out at the late 20th century, survives in this one
village. The locals are proud of their work and very keen that visitors
should be aware that when Prime Minister Narendra Modi (a native of
Gujarat) visited Barack Obama in 2014 he presented him with Rogan
art.
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| Important information at the entrance to Nirona |
Abdul Gafur Khatri is the patriarch of the family who kept rogan art
alive - the extensive
Khatri family website can be seen here. In Sumrasa we largely met craftswomen, but rogan art has
traditionally been ‘man’s work’. All the men of the Khatri family are
now involved but in 2010, as the firm expanded they started training
women, too – not before time, some might say.
The rogan technique was brought from Persia in the dim, distant past;
‘rogan’ being derived from the Farsi word for oil (like the more
familiar rogan josh, lamb cooked in ghee). The paint for rogan art is
produced by adding vegetable dye and a binder to castor oil that has
been boiled for three days. The result is a liquid paint of high
viscosity. The painter pins a cloth to his trousers, works a lump of
paint onto the end of a stylus…
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Getting the paint onto the stylus, rogan art, Nirona |
…and guides it as it falls in a thread onto the cloth.
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Rogan art, Nirona Sometimes the paint can be curved elegently from a height, sometimes details need attention |
Designs are symmetrical; once a colour has been laid on one half
of the cloth, it is folded and pressed reproducing the design on the
other.
Traditionally the painted fabric was purchased by lower caste women to
decorate clothing and bed coverings for their weddings. Painting was
undertaken in the months prior to the wedding season, the painters
reverting to other work, mainly agriculture, for the rest of the year.
The arrival of industrially printed artificial cloths all but destroyed
the rogan market. With the aid of government programmes to boost
tourism, the Kahtri family have re-invented the art, making wall
hangings, bags, cushion covers, table cloths and pillow covers to give it a wider appeal, particularly to tourists. Foreign tourists remain rare in Gujarat, but domestic
tourism appears stronger.
‘Tree of Life’ motifs have always dominated, but recently there
has been much diversification and even some non-symmetrical designs. Narendra
Modi gave Barack Obama a Tree of Life and we liked the traditional design
too and bought one for ourselves. Despite being a much poorer man than
Barack Obama, I had to pay for my own, and although it is very pleasing,
it is probably not the same quality. Ours is on show in the hall, I
wonder where he keeps his (and are US presidents permitted to keep
their gifts? Probably not.)
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Tree of Life, Rogan art from Nirona |
Other Crafts in Nirona
Rogan art is not Nirona’s only craft. A few doors down we watched a
large man make a small bell using only cutters, pliers for bending, a
variety of hammers and shapes to hammer over. Edges were joined by
cutting and sliding them together. Produced in minutes, the bell looked
the part even if it was not very musical, but as it was destined for
sheep or goats – he can do bigger ones for cows - that mattered
little.
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| Making a bell, Nirona |
Despite the success of the Khatri family, Nirona does not look affluent…
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| Nirona |
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| I doubt we will have lunch from Bhatia foods, Nirona |
I doubt the young man making spoons, spatulas and rolling pins out in the
street using a hand powered lathe was making his fortune. We bought a
spoon to encourage him.
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| Making a rolling pin, Nirona |
To Hodka and the Mahefeel E Rann Resort
Returning to the highway we resumed our northward journey.
We had now travelled so far north we left tropical India behind.
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| Crossing the Tropic of Cancer |
Passing a line though does not make it any cooler,
even if the fields were apparently covered with frost. Ever present as a
subtext in Kutch, salt was inexorably becoming the main feature.
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| Salty fields, Great Rann of Kutch |
After 30km we turned off towards Hodka. There is more
to the village than we realised at the time, but it is tucked away from the half-dozen
or more ‘resorts’ providing tourist accommodation. Over the years I have lost track
of the meaning of ‘resort’; once upon a time it simply meant the seaside town where
you spent your holidays. Then came the ‘Hotel California’ usage - a hotel with so
many facilities you never need to leave (though you can check-out). This was
followed by the ‘all-in resort’ – a closed world where unlimited food and drink
are provided ‘free’ so you can visit different countries without the inconvenience of encountering untamed
foreigners. And, now we arrived at the Mehfil-e-Rann Resort, seven huts in a desert enclosure.
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| Mehfil-e-Rann Resort, Hodka |
To be fair, they were platial, as huts go, both outside and
in.
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| Inside our hut, Mahefeel E Rann Resort |
They gave us a well cooked, well spiced vegetarian lunch in the small not quite open-air restaurant – it had a roof, but only three walls. .
The White Desert of Kutch
At over 10,000Km² the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is the world’s largest salt flat. At 7,500Km² The Great Rann of Kutch claims to be the world’s largest salt desert, though I would have thought a salt flat was the epitome of a salt desert. Not all the Great Rann is salt flat, but there is enough is to make the world’s second largest continuous area of salt – I think. The vast Makgadikgadi Salt Pan in Botswana consists or several discrete areas of salt in a sandy desert, the largest single area being just under 5,000Km², so maybe…
The salt starts a few kilometres north of Hodka; a viewing
platform (there is nothing to see but salt) and a cluster of camel and horse carts
marking the end of the road.
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| Viewing platform and carts, Great Rann of Kutch |
This is a place where Indian tourists come, today we
were the only foreigners.
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| An Indian family set off on a camel trek, Great Rann of Kutch |
We walked out onto the salt and looked at it stretching to the horizon. Vijay asked if we wanted to hire a cart. Why say no?
One reason is I have a horse allergy, but I sat facing backwards as far from the horse as I could…
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| Lynne and Vijay were looking forward, I was looking back at where we had been |
...while Lynne took pictures of people coming the
other way.
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| Wherever you go somebody will be staring at their phone, Great Rann of Kutch |
The horse plodded on for a couple of unchanging kilometres, then came to a halt and we got out.
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| In the Great Rann of Kutch |
Lynne walked a little way into the lonely expanse. The
whiteness plays with your mind, it looks like it ought to be cold and Lynne’s
feet should be freezing in her sandals, but they weren’t. It looks like it
ought to be slippery, but walking requires no particular care. The well-trodden
(or hooved) sections look grimy and slushy, but whatever our heads were telling
us, this was not snow.
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| Lynne without frozen toes in the Great Rann of Kutch |
It is hard to imagine this landscape a) not being cold and b) not being permanent. If the July/August rains are plentiful then the desert becomes a vast salt lake - or maybe an inlet of the sea. This 50 second YouTube video shot from below the viewing platform in August 2017 makes the point admirably.
All the carts stopped around the same area – there should have been snowball fights, but salt does not make people behave that way.
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| The stopping point, with the viewing platform in the background, Great Rann of Kutch |
They stop here because they can go no further, a drain
cut through the salt bars their way. Salt does not melt, nor will it dissolve
in an already saturated solution so the drain is a permanent feature. Aerial
photographs shows them criss-crossing the plain, but where the water comes from is unclear. According
to the map the sizeable Rann of Kutch Lake is some 20Km away in the right
direction, but it is dry this time of year.
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| Drain in the Great Rann of Kutch |
On the way back we chatted, through Vijay, with our youthful driver. He does not own the horse and cart, he said, but .borrows it from a friend in the village'; I presume he rents the cart and keeps his takings. When his working day is over he gets to ride the horse home.
Dinner at Hodka
Lunch at the Mehfil-e-Rann Resort (no, I don’t understand the name either) had been good and so was dinner (and lunch and dinner the next day). A series of small vegetarian dishes, a lot like a thali, were dished up by the lads behind the counter.
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| The dining room, Mahefeel E Rann Resort, Hodka |
The resort was not busy, but there was usually at
least one other table occupied, on one occasion five or six.
I was not always sure what I was eating, India has a
wealth of unfamiliar vegetables and the condiments offered new experiences, but
this was good, typical Kutch cooking. We found a lot to enjoy.
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| Lynne and Vijay have dinner, Mahefeel E Rann Resort, Hodka |
Part 1: Ahmedabad (1) Liquor Licences, Mosques and Tombs
Part 2: Ahmedabad (2) A Stepwell, Gandhi and a Thali
Part 3: Meeting the Locals
Part 4: Siddhpur, Patan and Modhera
Part 5: Salt and Wild Asses in the Little Rann of Kutch
Part 6: Blackbuck National Park, Velavadar
Part 7: Bhavnagar
Part 8: Palitana and the Temples on Shatrunjaya Hill
Part 9: A Lion Hunt and a Visit to Junagadh
Part 10: Gondal
Part 11: Gondal to Bhuj
Part 12: Bhuj
Part 13: To the Great Rann of Kutch, Craft Villages and a Salt Desert
Part 14: Going to School and Other Entertainments in the Great Rann of Kutch
