Gujarat has a long and varied history of textile making. Across the state, weaving, dyeing, printing and embroidery have developed alongside the communities that practise them, with techniques and knowledge passed down through generations. In Kutch, where much of this work is concentrated, textiles are closely connected to the landscape and to the people who have lived and worked there. Kutch is a dry region, marked by large stretches of open land, seasonal changes and a strong relationship with its natural resources. Its textile traditions have developed within these conditions. Cotton, wool, natural dyes and locally available materials have historically been used to make cloth suited to the region, while different communities have developed their own methods of weaving and printing. For our first collection, we worked across three different textile centres in Gujarat: Patan, Bhujodi and Ajrakhpur. Each is associated with a different process and history. In Patan, we worked with Mashru; in Bhujodi, handspun and handwoven khadi cotton; and in Ajrakhpur, Ajrakh, a traditional process of block printing and natural dyeing. PATAN Patan has a long history of Mashru weaving, a fabric with a documented presence in the subcontinent going back to at least the sixteenth century — it is mentioned as a category of silk cloth in the Ain-i-Akbari, the administrative record of Emperor Akbar's court. Mashru is a fabric in which the warp is silk and the weft is cotton, creating a lustrous silk surface while keeping cotton against the skin. Historically, the fabric is understood to have developed in response to religious restrictions around silk within parts of the Muslim community, which held that pure silk should not be worn directly against a man's skin. Mashru offered a way to enjoy the appearance and drape of silk without having it touch the body directly, and its name is generally traced to the Arabic word for "permitted" or "lawful." Artisans use a floating warp satin weave, in which the silk warp threads pass over several cotton weft threads before going under one — commonly cited as around six — so that the silk dominates the visible surface while the cotton forms the reverse. This creates the fabric's characteristic sheen on one side and a soft cotton back on the other. Once woven, the cloth is traditionally soaked in water and beaten with wooden mallets while still damp, a finishing step that heightens the lustre of the silk face. Historically patterned using stripes and ikat-dyed yarn, Mashru also travelled beyond Gujarat through regional trade networks, reaching, among other markets, the Ottoman Empire and the Gulf. Today, very little of this tradition remains. Only a handful of families continue to handweave Mashru in Patan and nearby Mandvi, the two towns where the craft has persisted in something closer to its original form. The rising cost of silk and reduced demand for handloom Mashru have made the original silk-and-cotton fabric increasingly difficult to sustain, and viscose or rayon have widely replaced silk in production. The Mashru used for the collection was sourced from a multi-generation Khatri weaving family in Patan, one of the very few families still working with the handloom tradition. The trousers made from the fabric retain the distinctive contrast between the lustrous outer surface and the softer cotton interior. BHUJODI Bhujodi is a historic weaving village near Bhuj, known for its handloom community and generations of weavers. We sourced the khadi cotton used in the collection from a handloom centre, where the cloth continues to be made through a largely manual process. Khadi begins with cotton being spun into yarn and then woven by hand on a handloom. Unlike mill-made cloth, where the process is mechanised and designed to produce consistency, handloom weaving leaves small variations in the yarn and the surface of the fabric. The texture, weight and character of the cloth are shaped by the person working the loom. Khadi also carries a particular history in India. The term itself derives from khaddar, and the first piece of Gandhi-era hand-woven cloth is recorded as having been made at the Sabarmati Ashram in 1917–18, with the fabric's coarse texture giving rise to the name "khadi." During the Swadeshi movement, handspun and handwoven cloth became closely associated with the rejection of imported textiles and with self-reliance: under British rule, raw Indian cotton was exported to mills in Britain and re-imported as finished cloth at inflated prices, a system the Swadeshi movement was formed to resist. Gandhi took up spinning himself in 1919, later formalised the Khadi department within the Indian National Congress in 1922, and made hand-spinning cotton a membership requirement of the All India Spinners' Association he founded. Khadi came to represent not only a way of producing cloth, but an economic and political idea centred around local production and the people who made it. In Kutch, this history intersects with an older relationship to cotton. The region is home to Kala Cotton, an indigenous variety that has been cultivated locally for generations. Naturally rain-fed and well suited to the dry climate of Kutch, it remains an important part of the region's relationship with cotton. The fabric we worked with was handspun, handwoven and naturally dyed. The yarn has its own variations, the tension of the handloom changes subtly through the weave, and the dye settles differently across the surface. These differences remain visible in the finished textile. There is something very direct about seeing a handloom at work. The fabric is produced gradually, with the movement of the loom and the repetition of the weaver's hands determining its pace. It is a very different way of thinking about cloth from an industrial one, where a finished length can be produced almost entirely removed from the person making it. Bhujodi continues to have a strong community of artisan families working with these traditions, while also adapting the technique to contemporary textiles and clothing. For AṂSA, it was important that the khadi remain recognizable as a handwoven material. The slight irregularities of the cloth and its texture are part of what gives the finished garments their character. The jacket and trousers made from the Bhujodi khadi carry these qualities into a contemporary silhouette without trying to remove the evidence of how the fabric was made. AJRAKHPUR Further within Kutch is Ajrakhpur, a village closely associated with the Ajrakh printing tradition. Here, we worked with an eighth-generation Ajrakh printing family whose practice has been carried through their family for generations. Ajrakh is a form of resist-dye block printing practised principally by the Khatri community, who trace their presence in the Kutch and neighbouring Sindh region back several centuries. The word is generally linked to the Arabic azrak, meaning blue, in reference to the indigo that dominates the finished cloth, though it is also popularly explained through the phrase aaj rakh ("keep it today"), describing the daily rhythm of printing, dyeing and drying that the process demands. The process is long and exacting, typically broken down into somewhere between sixteen and twenty-three distinct stages of washing, resist-printing, mordanting, dyeing and drying, repeated in sequence to build up the design. The cloth is first scoured in running water to remove starch and impurities, then treated with a mordant — commonly derived from myrobalan (harda) — that allows the natural dyes to bind to the fibre. Wooden blocks, hand-carved with different parts of the design, are used to print a resist paste, traditionally made from lime and gum, onto the areas meant to stay free of a given dye; the cloth is then dyed, and the sequence of printing and dyeing is repeated so that the pattern builds up in layers, color by color. The colors traditionally used in Ajrakh come largely from natural sources. Indigo produces the deep blues, while madder root and iron-based pastes are used to build the reds, rusts and blacks that complete the palette. These colors develop through repeated dyeing and washing — traditionally taking place, historically, on the banks of a local river, whose water and mineral content were considered well suited to the process — giving the finished fabric its particular depth and variation. The printing itself requires considerable precision. The wooden blocks are carved to form different parts of the design, and several blocks may be needed to complete a single pattern. Each block has to be positioned carefully against the previous impression so that the design continues across the cloth. Meeting the family and seeing the process first-hand made the amount of work behind the fabric particularly apparent. The makers take considerable pride in this work and in the knowledge that has been passed through their family over generations. For the collection, the Ajrakh was used for the corset top and skirt. The garments retain the qualities of the original textile — the depth of the natural dyes, the variation of the hand printing and the evidence of the block itself. Rather than treating these characteristics as something to be corrected or made uniform, they remain part of the finished pieces. Working in Gujarat was as much about understanding the processes as it was about sourcing particular fabrics. In Patan, the construction of Mashru carries its own history; in Bhujodi, the cloth is built through the rhythm of the loom; in Ajrakhpur, it is built through layers of dye, resist and print. The three processes are very different, but each reflects the place where it is made and the people who continue to practise it. For AṂSA, working with these communities meant allowing that history and process to remain visible. The finished garments are contemporary, but the cloth retains the marks of how and where it was made.
