Rogan is the strangest craft in Kutch, and the one most likely to be described wrongly online. It is not block print. It is not embroidery. It is paint made from boiled oil, laid onto cloth by a stylus that never touches it.
The paint
Castor oil is boiled for close to two days until it thickens into a resin. That resin is mixed with vegetable pigment and water to make a dense, elastic paste. Traditionally the palette is small — white, orange, yellow, blue and green.
The technique
The painter takes a small amount of the paste on a metal stylus called a tulika, draws out a fine thread of it, and lays that thread onto the cloth from slightly above. The stylus does not touch the fabric. The line is placed rather than drawn, which is why the work has a raised, slightly glossy surface.
Then comes the part that defines it: the painter works only one half of the design, folds the cloth over, and presses. The wet paint transfers, printing a mirror image. Every symmetrical Rogan piece you have seen was painted once and folded, not painted twice.
Where it survives
Rogan is practised in Nirona, in Nakhtrana taluka, Kutch, by the Khatri family. For a long stretch of the twentieth century it was down to very few practitioners and came close to disappearing entirely. Abdulgafur Khatri was awarded the Padma Shri for his work keeping it alive, and Kutch Rogan now carries a Geographical Indication. Women were first trained in the craft around 2010, which widened the number of hands that know it.
How old is it
UNESCO research from 2008 traces Buddhist Rogan paintings to the fifth or sixth century, with the technique appearing across Patliputra, Bamiyan and Gujarat. What survives in Kutch today came down through the Khatri community.
Our Rogan-inspired designs
We drew a Rogan-style tree of life in Bhuj — symmetrical, because that is what the fold does, and kept to a tight palette, because that is what the craft does. It is our drawing, printed by machine. It is not handmade Rogan, and a piece of real Rogan from Nirona is a different object at a different price, worth buying from the family that makes it.
Ours are on a coaster and a 600 ml steel bottle, alongside eleven other Kutch crafts in the Kutch range.
Written in Bhuj, Gujarat. Sources: UNESCO research cited in the public record on Rogan painting; Geographical Indication registry for Kutch Rogan.