Two grandfathers
The short stories of collaboration
I had a plan.
I would take my grandfather’s woodcarving patterns to India, find an artisan who could print them on textiles, and somehow persuade two traditions that had never met to have a conversation.
That was the plan.
I had never heard of Ajrakhpur. I knew almost nothing about Indian textile printing. In my head, India and textile printing meant Jaipur.
It was a rather naive plan.
But I had one advantage: I was very decisive about it. And sometimes, when you are sufficiently determined and insufficiently informed, life decides to help you.
In my case, it sent a Hungarian man. István Vidák, a Hungarian master of felt, came to my town for an exhibition and an indigo-dye workshop. I went to meet him with one question: Where should I go in India? I was expecting an address. Instead, he offered me a place on a study trip. We were leaving in a month. I said yes immediately.
Then I went home and put some of my grandfather’s woodcarving patterns into my backpack because you never know…
A month later, I was on my way to India.
István introduced me to Sufiyan Ismail Khatri, a tenth-generation Ajrakh printer.
I took the patterns out of my backpack. I told him about my grandfather. I told him about the idea. He agreed to make some test prints, so we could see what would happen when these old Transylvanian patterns met Ajrakh.
I thought I would stay for a few days. I stayed for two weeks.
There was a lot of printing. There was also chai, very good chai. And one day there was fish.
Sufiyan bought fish and cooked lunch for everyone in the workshop. We sat outside together, eating and talking, while behind us the blocks, cloth and dyes waited with the patience of things that have been doing the same work for a very long time.
I began noticing the people. The way they worked with Sufiyan and the way Sufiyan worked with them. Designers came from India and abroad. Trainees came to learn. His older son was already involved in the family business. People were not coming there to admire an ancient craft.
They were coming to use it, to learn it, to make something with it.
Then I heard about Sufiyan’s grandfather, Mohammed Siddik Khatri.
His family had come from Sindh to Kutch generations ago, invited by the ruler of Kutch, carrying the knowledge of Ajrakh with them. Mohammed Siddik lived through another kind of journey. When chemical dyes became fashionable, he started using them too. They were faster, easier and commercially attractive. The old natural dyes were becoming less practical, while the new colours promised more speed and more money. And then, according to the story I heard in the workshop, he began to see the side-effects the chemicals were having on the people who worked with them. So he stopped. He returned to natural dyes even though it meant less money.
This is the part I keep thinking about, because it is very easy, from the future, to call something a tradition. At the time, it was probably just a difficult business decision. Everyone else was moving towards the new colours. He went back. And by going back, he carried something forward. He also made sure his sons learnt the traditional process. Later, Sufiyan himself would apprentice under his grandfather.
So the knowledge didn’t disappear.
Then there was Sufiyan’s father, Ismail.
He had studied seven classes.
So had my grandfather. Neither learnt their craft in school.
My grandfather learnt woodcarving beside a woodcarver in his village. He spent most of his life in Transylvania, under communism, in a system that had a remarkably simple approach to employment: people were given jobs, whether or not those jobs had anything to do with what they wanted to do.
At some point, my grandfather decided he had had enough. He went home and from there onwards he carved wood. Not exactly a career strategy. But it worked for him.
Ismail’s story took another route. A British researcher came to Kutch to study Ajrakh. Ismail agreed to meet her partly because he wanted to practise his English. Seven classes of schooling. A British researcher. A chance to practise English.
Sometimes the most important international collaborations begin for very ordinary reasons.
The researcher returned to Britain. Years later, Ismail was invited to teach Ajrakh at a British university. And then came the doctorate. They wanted to give him an honorary doctorate. He thought there had been a mistake. Of course he did. He had never studied there. It took some time to explain that they weren’t giving him a doctorate because he had been their student.
They were giving him one because he had become their teacher.
By then, I was beginning to see the strange symmetry.
My grandfather and Mohammed Siddik had never met. They lived thousands of kilometres apart, in different countries, different cultures, different religions, different histories. And yet both had, at some point, gone against the current. My grandfather refused the work the system had chosen for him. Mohammed Siddik refused the colours the market was choosing for him. Both decisions came with a price and both preserved something.
And then there were their descendants. Sufiyan was carrying Ajrakh forward. I was carrying my grandfather’s patterns forward.
So perhaps it wasn’t entirely accidental that I had arrived in Ajrakhpur with those patterns in my backpack. Perhaps I just didn’t know yet what I was carrying.
Today, the collection exists in two colourways.
Kutch is indigo blue: the colour of the desert at night, when the heat disappears and the sky seems to become enormous.
Transylvania is red: the colour I associate with the hills, forests, wild flowers and the dense, living landscape where my grandfather carved his patterns.
Two places, two landscapes, two traditions, two grandfathers who could never have imagined one another, and yet there I was in a workshop in Gujarat, watching Sufiyan print the patterns my grandfather had carved in Transylvania, and suddenly the distance between the two seemed strangely unimportant, because the patterns were there, on the cloth, in another country, in another tradition, in the hands of another family, and I realised that perhaps inheritance is not really about keeping something safe and unchanged, but about carrying it, sometimes much farther than anyone intended, until one day it arrives somewhere completely unexpected.
Which, in this case, was India.
My grandfather would probably have found that quite amusing.
