Ajrakh is the most recognised of the Kutch crafts and the most casually copied. The geometry turns up on everything from cushion covers to phone cases, usually printed by someone who has never seen the process. It is worth knowing what the real thing involves.
The name, and the age
The word is generally traced to the Persian ajar, brick, with a diminutive ending — which fits, because the layout is essentially brickwork: a grid of repeating units locked together.
It is old. The Priest-King figure excavated at Mohenjo-daro wears a robe with a trefoil pattern and traces of red pigment that looks unmistakably like ajrakh, which puts something very close to this cloth in the Indus valley several thousand years ago.
Resist, not print
The thing to understand is that the block does not apply the colour. It applies the resist — a paste that stops dye reaching the cloth underneath.
The cloth is printed with resist, dyed, washed, dried, printed again with a different resist, dyed again in another colour, washed, dried. Round and round. Traditional Ajrakh runs to well over a dozen such stages and is printed on both sides in perfect register, so the cloth has no wrong side.
The colours come from the dyes available: indigo for the blue, madder root for the red, iron for the black, with the undyed cloth left as white. That palette is not a style choice. It is what the plants gave.
Ajrakhpur exists because of an earthquake
The printing families worked for generations at Dhamadka. The 2001 Bhuj earthquake damaged the village badly and affected the water, which for a craft that washes cloth dozens of times is not a small problem.
So the printers founded a new village and called it Ajrakhpur. It sits about fifteen kilometres from us. A craft that had been in one place for centuries moved, deliberately, and kept going.
What we do with it
Our Ajrakh jaali coaster takes the lattice geometry — the jaali, the screen — and the indigo-and-madder palette, drawn by us and printed by machine in a single pass.
It is not Ajrakh. Ajrakh is the process, not the pattern, and no sublimation printer performs sixteen rounds of resist and dye. What we have taken is the geometry and the colour, and we say so on the page.
If you want real Ajrakh, buy it from the printers at Ajrakhpur. It costs more than a coaster and it should.
Eleven more crafts in the Kutch range.
Written in Bhuj, Gujarat.