New Delhi: Zakiya Khatri grew up seeing her mother and grandmother dextrously tie fabrics to create elaborate Bandhani patterns with dots. But they never got the credit for their labour. That went to male artisans—primarily because they directly interacted with customers.

“Bandhani is my identity. From the very beginning, my aim was to get credit for my designs, instead of being an anonymous tie-dye assistant to male artisans,” she said at a gathering of experts from the textile and crafts ecosystem.

This was a few weeks back, at the India International Centre, at a forum hosted by Ritu Sethi, founder-trustee of Crafts Revival Trust. Under the table, was Zakiya’s two-year-old toddler Bushra, and next to her sat her husband Adil Khatri, also a Bandhani artisan-designer. Adil leaned in as Zakiya spoke.

Sethi had organised the symposium to mark the launch of American educationist Judy Frater’s book Artisans by Design. Frater is the founder of India’s pioneering design education programme for artisans at what was once Kutch’s Kala Raksha Vidyalaya and is also the founder director Emerita of Somaiya Kala Vidyalaya headquartered in Adipur.

The author-researcher was trained as an anthropologist and has lived in Kutch for 30 years, working with artisan communities for half a century, mentoring dozens of batches of artisans from the crafts-rich region. She fluently speaks Kutchi and Gujarati.

It would not be an overstatement that almost all artisans in Kutch refer to ‘Judyben’ with reverence.

Zakiya and Adil attended Frater’s design batch of 2013. Even though batches at Kala Raksha were segregated by gender, they met and fell in love.

Zakiya’s classmates were older Rabari women—embroidery artisans, who had been working from their homes or with NGOs. She was the only young girl from a Khatri family to take the bus every day from the town of Mundra, known for handprinted Batik, to Bhuj, where Kala Raksha was situated.

“Women are the real artists behind Kutch’s Bandhani, but men always got the credit,” said Zakiya, who had grown up seeing her mother, grandmother and other women of the community at work. Zakiya recalled helping her mother during school vacations and earning Rs 10 per job as pocket money.

Traditionally, as several textile historians have noted, women have been the “soul” of Bandhani. After menfolk mark patterns, women tie fabrics into knots, creating the design. Dyeing is done by men and it’s passed back to women who do the drying. Women also work on the pre-tying steps of soaking fabric in castor oil, camel dung and soda ash. This paste enhances dye absorption.

“Through this practice, men traditionally interfaced with their clients—mostly pastoralists and local communities who wear these textiles as markers of their ethnic identities,” writes Frater in one of her research papers. As markets grew, men, including traders who sourced business, interacted with clients from India and abroad as well as with designer ateliers and retailers. Recognition by gender persisted even for national or state awards and exposure.

This gender-determined commercial and creative interface bothered Zakiya.

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Bairaj: The rule of women

Zakiya’s label is the outcome of her ambition to be known for her artisanship. Its name—Bairaj—means the rule of women in Gujarati.

She has created a unique design language by experimenting with the ancient technique’s grammar of dots, eschewing traditional colours and widening her preference for base textiles.

“Most Bandhani work is double-layered and symmetric, but I work on asymmetric designs and the size of my dots is not traditional. Those who understand Bandhani recognise my designs today, it has my signature touch,” she said.

Even the colours that Zakiya uses are unconventional. “Even my pink is not the traditional hue, I mix it to achieve an unusual shade,” she said. She also makes pastel-hued Bandhanis for Western customers. Her creations include saris, stoles, shawls, aabhas (long Kutchi kurtas), kurta sets, and wall art pieces.

Adil has his own label, Nilak—which means green. He leans toward symmetric Bandhani designs in traditional, brighter colours and midnight blues.

“We didn’t want to merge our work under one umbrella name,” said Adil.

Both Adil and she, like all other design-trained artisans, have been taught the colour wheel, annual colour forecasts for India and abroad, and the art of using synthetic and natural dyes.

Zakiya emphasised that in Kutch it would not have been possible for her to be married and have her own business if Adil and his family did not support her.

Adil said that everyone in his family, including his sisters, is well-educated. Encouraging Zakiya to learn and travel on her own for work is not something out of the ordinary. “That’s how we are,” he says modestly.

The couple started working from their family home in Bhuj, using a room on the top floor as the studio. They have now moved to a bigger setup. “It has dedicated places for dyeing, printing and even photography,” said Zakiya.

Zakiya’s dreams were shaped by Frater and her time at Kala Raksha and later at Somaiya Kala Vidyalaya. The guest faculty included some of India’s most experienced and learned teachers from National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), National Institute of Design (NID), Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara and experts from related fields.

Zakiya said that all visiting teachers encouraged her to develop a distinct label.

It’s also where she and her husband learnt to communicate in English and why it was crucial to building their brands. Today, Zakiya and Adil speak fluently in English.

Adil said that while they both work in the Bandhani space, their brands are complementary and not competitive.

Frater’s mentorship has also given Zakiya the opportunity to go global. In 2017, she participated in an artisanal gathering in Peru and in 2018, she presented at a crafts festival in Wisconsin, USA.

Frater’s approach to teaching is to sustain what artisans know instead of overwriting traditional or personal knowledge. Visiting teachers from urban institutions would review the students’ projects through formal juries. The process was crafted around collaboration and dialogue, each teaching the other in an open format.

“Zakiya had the strength of character right from the start, she could stand up for herself in a community of women who cover their heads,” said Ritu Sethi, who was part of Zakiya and Adil’s jury in 2014.

Referring to Zakiya, and two other female artisans from Kashmir and Tamil Nadu who have similarly broken gender barriers, Sethi said they represent a small but significant shift. “They don’t speak of what they are told at home or worry about what people or community will say. It is like a drop of rain falls on a plant and a flower springs up,” she said.

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The business of artisanship

In 2014, two years before they were married, Zakiya and Adil joined another useful course—Business Management for Artisans (BMA) at Somaiya Kala Vidyalaya. Helmed by Frater, she taught them how to set up a business, communicate, the ups and downs of e-commerce and managing finances.

“From the start, Zakiya yearned for recognition and credit. Very few women, if at all, have had opportunities in the professional and commercial space to grow on their own,” said Frater, over a Zoom call from Santa Fe, where she returned after her hectic book promotion tour across India and the US.

The only other female Bandhani artisan who made a small name for herself, recalled Frater, was a lady by the name Anaben, in the eighties. Anaben’s work was presented at the Festival of India exhibitions curated by the late textiles guru Martand Singh.

However, the representation of artisans at forums is now changing. At the symposium in Delhi, next to Frater—who wore an Ajrakh blouse with a mustard woven cotton sari, draped Gujarati style, her golden hair in a bun dressed with a fabric hair trinket—sat Bachiben, a senior female embroidery artisan from Kutch. A ‘bai’, quite literally from Zakiya’s Bairaj, came in her traditional Rabari costume. She shared her views in Gujarati on how design education had changed her outlook towards embroidery as an occupation and why it was crucial for female artisans. Sethi and Frater took turns to translate.

In a paper published online last year in the Journal of South Asian History and Culture, Frater analysed gender, value, creativity and the marketplace. In her arguments, she contextualised what tradition means to artisans who inherit skills and occupations, how identity is defined and shaped, and what the role of a woman means among Kutch’s pastoral, artisan and agriculture communities.

In that context, Zakiya’s story matters. “Gender per se did not shape an artisan’s traditional relationship to craft and creativity, but rather the relationship to the consumer, which had been determined by gender roles,” argued Frater.

Zakiya participates in an American crafts festival, communicates with her clients, and strategises e-commerce and pop-ups across India, while she travels with Adil and takes turns taking care of Bushra with him—it’s all part of her identity project.