November 13, 2008 – Bhuj

November 13, 2008 – Bhuj

Arrived early yesterday afternoon and headed off immediately to the heart of downtown Bhuj (in Gujarat) a small and primitive town in the far western reaches of India that no one seems to have visited in decades. I soon learned that Bhuj is famous for a kind of shibori technique called Bandhani (which is where our word bandana comes from). It’s a dye resist technique that involves tying off the areas of cloth that you don’t want to receive color, rather like what we refer to in the US as “tie-dye”. We had fun sitting a small shop talking with the proprietors, a father and son team, who sell works made my local women. They had all sorts of things in the shop but it took some coaxing to get them to bring out the more interesting things. Eventually we each selected three or four items to purchase and the two men became more familiar and jovial with us. We saw two magazine articles that the son has appeared in that were published in Oman. Quite the dandy!

Next we had a rather peculiar but I suspect typical experience. Our guide needed to obtain permits for the group to travel into the tribal villages. Keep in mind that Gujarat is on the boarder with Pakistan and recently there have been several unsavory episodes between Hindus and Muslims in the area. I suspect that the combination of the two require extra precautions. The group sat on the bus, and sat and sat and the next thing we knew two hours had passed and still no guide and no permits. We dispatched Cliff to go into the crumbling governmental office building in search of Ahjay. It turns out the government had required forms in triplicate and quadruplicate for each of the 20 participants plus the driver, etc. and given the primitive state of things each were being written up by hand. Around 6pm we were finally released.

We headed off to visit a man whom Ahjay assured us had a spectacular local textile collection. I imagined going into a nice home and being treated to tea. Instead we headed to the outskirts of town and turned down a dirt road so narrow that I couldn’t image that our bus could pass through. On two separate occasions the driver had to get out of bus to raise low hanging electrical wires so we could pass. Finally the bus couldn’t go any further and we walked down the road, passing locals who each came out of their homes to say hello and wave to us. It was as if the whole place came to stop to welcome us. We ended at a house where outside about 20 plastic chairs had been placed in a circle. The man began bringing out textiles, one after the other and the pile on the ground grew taller and taller. All the while the people of the kind village watched on. The children were especially friendly and each wanted their photographs taken with us, on our cameras, which we all marveled at since they would never see the end result. It was a very special experience and one that I’ll never forget. As we walked back down the long dirt road, once again everyone came out of their homes to wave and greet us.