2 min summary Best time to visit Map & highlights Asiatic lions Gir National Park Textile holidays

Gujarat textile holidays

In Gujarat, textile tours and workshops are a fantastic way for travellers to participate in true cultural exchange with some of the state’s most marginalised groups. Tours and workshops raise money that can supplement incomes of creators and help them raise their profiles. They can also help communities preserve heritage traditions. Find out what our textile tours of Gujarat entail.

Home\Asia\India\Gujarat

Gujarat textile holidays

Make a scarf and a half! In Gujarat, don’t just go on a textile tour, learn how to make beautiful objects for yourself with hands-on workshops – and be touched in return by this special part of India.

You lift away the woodblock and leave a perfect print on the fabric. Well, almost perfect. There are some wobbles where the pattern sneaks outside lines – wobbles that would render your scarf unsellable. But the wobbles mark this scarf out as your own – it is yours to keep.

The human hand leaves its traces in cloth all over Gujarat, a western state of India renowned for its textile traditions. Here, a bolt of dyed cloth can represent thousands of hours of manual work. The Ajrakh block printing process can involve over 20 steps to turn a sheet of white cloth into a double-sided red-and-blue piece of art. Hand-woven patola silk sarees take months and even years to make. To make the signature dot patterns on a Bandhani scarf, a woman must hand-tie up to 5,000 tiny knots.

“If you’re interested in human beings, you will be interested in textiles here,” says Sophie Hartman, founder of our partner Holidays in Rural India. Their textile tours in Gujarat are hands-on experiences, full of rewarding workshops where you can make your own pieces alongside master craftspeople – no experience necessary. In Gujarat, whilst there’s plenty of ‘material’ for fabric fans: Bandhani, Ajrakh, Patola – and a world of ikat, resist dyeing, mordants and madder – you don’t need to know anything about the mysterious world of natural dyes to be completely enraptured by their practical magic.

“I had no idea how moved I would feel by it all,” says Sophie. “To be standing in front of a piece of embroidery and finding myself almost weeping in front of it. I can’t thread a needle and I’ve found it all fascinating.”

See all our Gujarat Holidays

Give us a call

Contact Us

Call us for a chat about our holidays. We are happy to discuss your holiday and help in any way we can. No bots, queues or awful hold music.

01273 823 700 01273 823 700

Call us until 6pm

Calling from outside the UK

rosy@responsibletravel.com

Why go to Gujarat for textile tours?

There’s something in the water in Bhuj: in this city, capital of the Kutch region of Gujarat, dyes take to cloth with particular vividity: reds are redder, maroons deeper, indigo is bluer than blue. “Indigo thrives in very high salt – not in ocean water, but in mineral rich water,” Niyati Kukadia is from Soar Excursions and leads some of our textile tours. “That is why indigo dyeing survives in Kutch. The colours are more vivid and the art forms have flourished.” Indigo – the word comes from ‘Indian’ – is a natural dye that has been used here for thousands of years. If India was a colour, it would probably be blue.

A chemical engineer turned social enterprise entrepreneur, Ahmedabad-born Niyati works with the marginalised nomadic Mir community in Gujarat to create and sell contemporary beadwork designs. She is passionate about the region’s craft traditions.

“Indigo is something I could never explain through chemistry,” she says. “There’s something so magical about it – a fermentation process goes on in the dyeing of indigo. It’s this elusive magical being.”

The story of textiles is the story of people – but more importantly, it is the story of society. In Gujarat, the social fabric is literal: a single cloth can pass through numerous communities, who each play a part in its production process.

“Kutch is a very harsh landscape,” says Sophie, “Mariam Dossal, an academic, posits the theory that because it’s such a challenging environment, people are forced to cooperate with each other more than other areas of India.” The state is also known for the number of communities – some of whom are nomadic – who have migrated into the area over the centuries.

For travellers, it means you can follow the thread of a garment’s story from dyeing to spinning to weaving to embroidering – passing through a number of different strata of society as you do. Finish with collecting; the state’s dry climate helps preserve the fabric. In a shop established textile enthusiast A. A. Wazir you can see one of the largest collections from the region, comprising thousands of pieces collected by an enthusiast over the years, and now curated by his son, Salim.

Keeping traditions alive is important. In 2001 a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck the region, devastating the city of Bhuj and killing 20,000 people. A place that had been the hub for a multitude of crafts was brought to its knees. Whilst the city has rebuilt, the event highlights the precariousness of local traditions, especially when they are practised by marginalised groups. “The Indigenous communities we work with are really vulnerable,” Sophie explains. Semi nomadic and nomadic peoples find their ways of life incompatible with the modern world. Many find themselves in crippling debt and face nutritional challenges. Our holidays donate ration kits to nomadic Mir people, and there are opportunities to see and buy their beadwork – purchases optional, of course.

Workshops and shopping ops

There’s no obligation to buy textiles whilst you’re out here – though many people do. You can financially benefit communities through workshops, too, and these can be more rewarding for travellers. “You end up making something so beautiful,” says Niyati. “Despite buying 10, 20 scarfs on your tour you’ll wear the one you have made, because you’ll love it the most.”

Workshops are a fantastic way to get to know Gujarat’s textiles, and the people who make them. Taking place in a leisurely fashion, with a break for lunch often hosted by the artisans in their own homes, you can meet people through a shared passion.

“If you see an art form for 30 minutes or an hour, that’s well and good but after the first month you’ll forget the name of the craft,” says Niyati. “One year on, you’ll forget the whole craft. Do a workshop, though, and you won’t forget, you’re more likely to want to come back for more and you’re more likely to connect to the person who taught you.”

Workshops don’t just set out a process with a fabric – another process happens at the same time. “It’s a switch between perceived high status and perceived low status,” says Sophie. “A lot of these communities are marginalised and low caste – and foreigners are perceived as high status – so for foreigners to be seated down learning a skill from someone considered low status is a brilliant shift. And with learning comes respect. The more time you spend with someone and you understand how their lives work, the more people feel happier opening up to you.” No longer tourist and subject, you become co-creators, making something wonderful together.

Artisans are renumerated for their time running workshops and it can be a useful secondary income stream.

Women’s work

Whilst production processes are often gendered: block printing is male work, embroidery female, this is changing. “During the course of travel we meet women artisans who have broken gender barriers and gone into male dominated fields – I know a 21-year old girl who is changing the face of Ajrakh right now,” says Niyati.

Textiles tell community stories; often, women’s stories. Whilst women’s work is frequently diminished and undervalued, female artisans can in fact make substantial impact when they are given income – and reinvest in their communities and families. “Secondary income means more investment into family matters and more autonomy for women who live in an extremely patriarchal environment,” says Niyati, speaking of the Mir community. “We want to build it to a level where this secondary income source can supplement family incomes to the extent that it keeps children in school – right now, that’s another big problem”.

Women’s interests are often diminished too – dismissed as frivolous, as decorative. With female travellers making up for majority of participants on these trips – and giving them rave reviews as lifechanging, life-affirming experiences, if anything, textile tours show how vital the decorative can be.

I ask Sophie whether she has bought anything from the region. “I’ll show you,” she says, and points her camera around her sitting room – everything that is Indian, she explained – and there is a lot – is from Kutch: from carpets to cushion covers to prints on the wall.

The best might be yet to come: “I meet new younger people every day who surprise with the beautiful things they do with the craft form,” says Niyati. “That’s my favourite thing.”

Get to know textiles in Gujarat

Ajrakh: This is one of the most sophisticated forms of block printing in the world, and recognisable for its layered use of madder and indigo. Block printing these intricate patterns over a double-sided piece of cloth where the patterns must exactly match – all by hand – is an incredible skill.

Bandhani: Forget what you know about ‘tie-dye’ when you hear about tie and dye – or Bandhani. Women, paid per knot, tie thousands of knots across a bolt of cloth. When these are untied after dyeing, they create fabulous, stippled patterns.

‘Bhujodi’ weaving: Bhujodi is a village in Kutch that is known for its weaving on traditional pit looms. It takes more than 10 days to create a single shawl on a loom, but more intricate designs can take up to a year to complete.

Rabari embroidery: The Rabari are pastoral nomads, and the women in the community are known for their fine embroidery filled with meaningful motifs and beautiful mirror work.

Rogan Art: That’s not embroidery, it’s a painting: boil castor oil down and add natural dyes and you end up with a paste that can be used to create very fine, raised linework designs that sit on the fabric like thread. It’s a centuries-old technique that’s being kept alive by a single, talented family.

Patola silk: Named after Patan, where it’s made, the complicated weaving process that makes Patola silk takes many months, and the resulting sarees are so precious that they are usually family heirlooms. They were exported into Southeast Asia from the 13^th century, where, in Bali, they were reserved for only the highest-ranking officials.

What do Gujarat textile holidays entail?

Textile tours are for textile fanatics but they’re also for anyone with any interest in communities and stories – that’s most travellers, then – especially in a region with such rich textile traditions as the Kutch and the wider Gujarat region. A tour of between 12 and 16 days is enough time to give you an immersive experience in this state. Textile tours tend to start from Ahmedabad – the region’s capital. From here tours typically drive towards Kutch, a district of the state renowned for a variety of textiles. Bhuj, the biggest city in the district, is a hub for crafts. Going in smaller groups allows you to stay in smaller hotels and homestays, and take part in workshops, some of which take place in people’s homes. You can combine textile tours with safari and cultural tours, too. You won’t be pressured into purchasing items – “I never want to force people to go on a buying spree,” says Niyati. “Usually I have to hold people back from shopping and tell them to pace themselves!” The best advice? “I tell people to bring an extra bag,” says Niyati, “And to bring clothes they don’t mind getting dye splatters on – though we do have aprons, of course.”