Mubassirah Khatri: The First Woman of Ajrakh
Mubassirah Khatri is a pioneer, being the first woman in the Ajrakh craft and skilfully combining Ajrakh prints with hand-painted art to create contemporary designs within a centuries-old tradition.
“I enjoy creating surface designs that tell a story. I feel there is an instant emotional connection with a textile that has a story in its design. This is true for me as a textile artisan and for the wearer of the textile,” says Mubassirah Khatri, 25, the first Ajrakh woman artisan from Ajrakhpur, Kutch, Gujarat, India, and the founder of Elysian, a brand of artisanal Ajrakh hand-block-printed and hand-painted textiles and attire.
Mubassirah Khatri
Ajrakhpur is a craft village renowned for its centuries-old tradition of Ajrakh, a complex and time-consuming technique of resist hand-block printing with wooden blocks. Traditionally, 18–20 steps are required to create an Ajrakh textile (as the textile is printed, dyed, washed, and dried multiple times), and the process stretches across 20–22 days. Traditional Ajrakh prints use natural dyes in indigo, maroon, and black, with white (the ground colour) creating patterns and outlining motifs.
Mubassirah grew up observing her father, Khalid Usman Khatri, create Ajrakh textiles and was particularly intrigued by the innovative touches he introduced in his work. She learnt the technique from him and then pursued a course in Design Education at Somaiya Kala Vidya, Anjar, Kutch, Gujarat, where she received the Best Student and Best Collection awards.
She decided to specialise in Ajrakh and went on to become the first female Ajrakh artisan after ten generations of the craft. She later completed a Business Wellness Programme at Kaarigar Clinic (an initiative that mentors artisans to grow their traditional craft practices into self-sustainable businesses), where she received the Most Innovative Entrepreneur award in her batch.
Mubassirah’s love for creativity and storytelling emerges on the cloth as she creates textiles with striking visual appeal. The stories depicted stem from nature and life events around her that manifest imperfections and the passage of time—of the movement of the sun, moon, and stars; of distressed wooden doors in their workshop; of dried leaves fallen on the earth; and of the bare branches of trees.
To bring these stories to life, Mubassirah draws on Ajrakh as well as hand painting, thus creating unique textile wall art, stoles, saris, and stitched garments in cotton and silk. She paints and hand-block prints to create her distinctive designs. Some patterns are printed partially by placing paper on the cloth (so that part of the pattern is stamped on the paper and later removed) or printed within a paper cut-out. She applies resist on the white ground fabric (to obtain white lines, motifs, or patterns after dyeing) and paints and block prints with natural dyes. She often blends different natural dyes and tweaks her technique to achieve variations in colour.
After the final wash, the textile comes alive with a story! A flowing cape has raindrops at the shoulders and a rising sun at the waist to mark the movement of time and the seasons. Textured earth spreads below, with a buried clock painted within it to convey that there is no concept of time in the ground below. Kintsugi—a collection of oversized tops with dots and lines akin to cracks—is an ode to the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. A wall hanging depicts a hand filled with Ajrakh prints drawing a curtain to reveal a landscape composed of several patterns, conveying the immense possibilities of her art—all of it rendered by hand.
Mubassirah is always thinking of new designs and aspires to continually create unique, storytelling textiles—perhaps inspired by her own experiences as she and her art evolve in the years ahead.
Words by Brinda Gill
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Further Information:
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Image Credits:
All images courtesy of: Mubassirah Khatri / Munira Khatri / Shrishti Kumari