Walk into a bhunga — the round mud house of Kutch — and the first thing you notice is that the walls are moving. Small round mirrors set into white relief catch whatever light there is and throw it back at you.
It looks like decoration. It started as engineering.
A room built without windows
A bhunga is round and largely windowless, for good reasons in this landscape: fewer openings means less heat, less dust, and far less for a desert wind to get hold of. The 2001 earthquake made the structural case too — a circular wall has no flat face to shear, and many bhungas were left standing where concrete had come down.
The cost of that design is darkness. A single oil lamp in a round windowless room lights very little. Set dozens of small mirrors into the walls and that one flame is reflected in every direction at once. Lippan is, among other things, a lighting system.
How it is made
The relief paste is mud mixed with camel or donkey dung — the fibre in the dung is what stops the mud cracking as it dries, the same principle as straw in cob. It is worked onto the wall by hand, drawn out into ridges, curls, peacocks, trees, geometric lattices. While it is still soft, the abhla — small mirrors, traditionally cut from blown glass — are pressed in.
Then it is finished in white clay, which is what gives Lippan its characteristic look: white relief, dark ground, glinting discs.
It is traditionally women's work, done on the inside of the home, and passed between generations without drawings.
Why it reads so well when it is flattened
Most crafts lose something when they are taken off their material. Lippan loses less than most, because the design language is already about high contrast and repeated circular motifs radiating from a centre. Drawn flat, it still reads as itself.
That is why it was the first Kutch craft we drew. Our Lippan coaster keeps the white-on-earth relief and the ring of mirrors, printed rather than pressed. It is our drawing in that idiom — not a piece of Lippan, which is a wall, not an object you can post.
Where to see the real thing
You cannot buy a wall. But Lippan is all over Kutch if you go: in the bhungas at Hodka and Bhirandiyara, in the resorts around the Rann, and increasingly on panels made for sale by women's collectives in the villages around Bhuj. If you are here for the Rann Utsav, it is worth an afternoon.
The Kutch range carries eleven more crafts alongside it, each named on its own page.
Written in Bhuj, Gujarat.