Reminiscing Ajrakhpur
Jan 19, 2025
It took me over 6 years to write another blog dedicated to a craft cluster which was my primary inspiration for starting Bunavat. Ajrakh, it is, of course! Before I got writing, I couldn’t help but first revisit my earlier blog ‘Chronicles of Ajrakhpur’ and oh boy! what a beautiful walk it was down the memory lane. If you have been following our work, you would by now know that Ajrakh is one of our favorite crafts and last year we were able to restart our work in the cluster after our little pause in 2022.
27 January 2018 is a day that is equally important and powerful in Bunavat’s journey as our inception a month later. An escapade to Ajrakhpur on a chilly winter morning while on a trip to the Rann of Kutch changed the trajectory of my life and how! 7 years later, I can only but be grateful for having met Ismail bhai and his wonderful family and the experiences thereafter.
When we started working with Ajrakh in 2018, we were curating – that is, selecting, procuring, and selling what Ismail bhai and his team were making. The base fabrics were good quality machine woven ones (except for linens), although that’s what most handcrafted products are like – the textile craft is hand done but the base fabric isn’t usually handwoven.
We loved what we did then but today with our own production in the cluster, it is an even more thrilling and fulfilling experience. We are able to suggest and control many parameters, for e.g. all our Ajrakhs are printed on handwoven fabrics – cottons, silk cotton Maheshwaris, and mulberry silks. We work with only natural fibres. We get the base sarees handwoven in our other clusters and send those over to Ajrakhpur for the block printing. While we are yet to carve our exclusive blocks, the design sensibilities are our own – we mix and match existing blocks, work around placements, colors, and treatments to get the desired outcomes.

In 2018 I had written – ‘He (read Ismail bhai) also adds, that though the conditions are better than before, they are still not convincing enough to motivate his brother to join this business’. Now imagine our joy to be working with Sohel bhai, Ismail’s bhai’s brother to create our collections! Their youngest brother, Javed, is finishing design school at Somaiya Kalavidya. The whole family is completely invested in this generational craft, toiling very hard to constantly improve and innovate and are prospering.
As I write this, the heart craves for another visit to Ajrakhpur only to touch and feel those 200 year old blocks of Ismail bhai’s great grandfather. Thanks to technology, we use video calls for our design discussions, overseeing production and creating products, but nothing beats the human connect. Failed experiments are a part of our learning process and we are constantly researching, unlearning, creating, revising, and recreating every day.
That trip to Ajrakhpur has been special in more ways than one. Ismail bhai, in our first meeting had asked me ‘paise banana hai ya achha kaam karna hai?’ (do you want to make money or do good work). So profound, that over the years it has helped us define Bunavat’s philosophy of ‘doing well by doing good’. Today, at Bunavat, we prioritize the planet and its people, work with traditional textile crafts, design with integrity, and create products that are relevant for the urban world. We have been able to create an Ajrakh language of our own - rooted in its shared cultural heritage that transcends boundaries with a little Bunavat touch, only hoping it touches your soul one block at a time as it did to ours