Of all the crafts around Bhuj, Kharad is the one closest to going out entirely.
In the 1990s there were around ten families weaving it. Today there are two.
What it is
Kharad is a thick floor rug woven from camel, goat and sheep wool. The loom is a nomadic one — built to be set up, taken down and carried across the desert on the back of an animal. The patterns are bold and geometric, the kind of design language that comes from a landscape with very little in it.
A Kharad lasts a long time. Well over a hundred years is normal. A weaver produces perhaps three to five pieces in a month.
Why it nearly died
The decline is not a story about taste. It is a story about a supply chain coming apart.
Kharad rugs once furnished palaces in Sindh and Gujarat. Partition in 1947 cut off the Sindh market, which was where the money was. That was the first blow.
The second was slower and more final. The craft depended on a chain: pastoral communities shearing camel and goat hair, hand-spinners turning it into yarn, weavers making the rug. Hand-spinning of camel and goat hair is now effectively extinct in Kutch. When the middle of a chain disappears, the end of it cannot function however skilled the weaver.
What it looks like
Bands of undyed camel brown against dark wool, with geometric borders and diamond motifs running the length of the rug. The colours are largely the colours of the animals — which is why Kharad has a narrower, earthier palette than almost anything else in Kutch.
Our Kharad coaster and steel bottle take that banded geometry and that palette. It is our drawing, printed. It is not a Kharad, which is a hand-woven object made over days by one of two remaining families.
If you want the real thing
Buy it from the weavers. Khamir in Kukma, outside Bhuj, works directly with the remaining artisans and is the honest place to start. A real Kharad is expensive, and given what goes into it and how few people can still make one, it is not expensive enough.
Eleven more crafts in the Kutch range.
Written in Bhuj, Gujarat.