A Timeless Journey: Reflections on the Crafts Heritage of Pakistan

A Timeless Journey

My journey exploring, protecting and promoting the crafts heritage of Pakistan has spanned almost five decades. In this time, I have witnessed the world change in many ways and yet the importance of our crafts—the knowledge and skill passed down through generations that link us with our past and tell the story of who we are—has never waned. In Pakistan, traditional crafts have suffered many setbacks due to a host of socio-economic factors, but as my personal experience can attest, hope persists. I believe now more than ever we are in need of the vision, imagination and collective effort required to keep our crafts alive and flourishing in the modern world.

The KOEL Story

As a young wife and mother raising two daughters in the 1970s in Karachi, I started off on this journey with little more than a degree in Fine Arts and an endless curiosity for discovering my city. While working on an interior design project with my architect husband, my search for a printed handloom fabric led me to a rundown workshop in the old city. Bent over a table in the workshop were a few men block-printing small square dastarkhans (tablecloths). With impressive dexterity, they were transferring patterns on to a yellow cloth, using carved wooden blocks dipped in red dye. While the patterns they were creating were not the beautiful traditional ones I would discover later, the process itself instantly captivated me, and before I knew it, I was drawn into a vortex.

This chance encounter drove me to search for more printing workshops tucked away in the old areas of Karachi. I was fascinated to learn that before Partition, the city had been a vibrant centre of this craft, boasting countless chapai karkhaney (block-printing workshops) that were a source of livelihood for many. Most of the large workshops were located in an area called Khara Dar—one of the two original gates of the old port city of Karachi, which brought in the salty seawater of the Arabian Sea (the other gate was Mitha Dar or ‘Sweet Gate’, which brought in fresh water from the Lyari River). The block-printed saris produced in these workshops were worn across the subcontinent. But with Partition and the subsequent lack of demand for saris, skilled printers, dye makers and block makers were forced to turn to other professions, and the craft began to decline.

I started frequenting the old workshops I found in the city, experimenting with printing on paper and cloth and hunting down preciously carved wooden blocks. I also started visiting the craftsmen’s homes in an effort to convince them to start block-printing again. Eventually, a friend offered me her garage to set up my own small printing studio, which would save me driving daily to the old city in heavy traffic in the hot afternoons. This is where my small atelier KOEL was born—a platform that I have built and sustained over the past 44 years. The name I chose was a tribute to the small, shy koel bird native to the subcontinent, that heralds the monsoons and signifies romance in poetry in our part of the world.

But the early days of KOEL were extremely challenging, as not only were the craftsmen completely disconnected from their ancestral family skills, they were also sceptical and resistant towards me. They could not fathom what a lone woman was trying to do with a craft that nobody was interested in anymore. Often, they wouldn’t bother with the work I had left for them or just threaten to pack up and leave.

I quickly understood that to gain their trust, I had to learn the intricacies of the craft. It took me several months to learn block-printing from master craftsmen—the varying techniques of preparing the dyes and finishing fabric. In time, the craftsmen realized I was serious, and when the income became steady, they developed confidence in me. The results of the few printed textiles we produced intrigued my friends, and they urged me to carry on.

In the 1970s there were hardly any fashion designers in Pakistan. The textile mills were producing mainly polyester, nylon and synthetic fabrics for export and local consumption. The most sought after were the fancy smuggled textiles from Japan, silks and satins from China, and chiffon from France. High-society women would travel long distances to coveted, hidden markets to procure these. Any locally produced pure cotton had to be sourced from handlooms in the rural areas.

I had no idea then how people would respond to hand-printed cotton fabrics, but I was greatly encouraged when my first exhibition of block-prints in 1978 was a total sell out, with many orders and enthusiastic reviews in the press. The positive response demonstrated that a great appetite exists for traditional crafts presented in a contemporary way. There has been no looking back since.

Over the years, KOEL has hosted numerous exhibitions and fashion shows in cities in Pakistan, India, the USA, Canada, Japan, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). But perhaps most importantly, KOEL’s success has catalysed a significant change within Pakistan. Within a decade, unknowingly, I was called a pioneer of block-printing in the country. Inspired by the response KOEL was receiving, many women started similar workshops from their homes, employing a number of block-printers, block makers, embroiderers and tailors. This crucial support encouraged skilled workers to return to their family profession, in some instances, opening their own workshops and training the next generation. Textile mills started producing cotton cloth for export and local markets, with many of them starting local ready-made apparel as well. Designers who worked for me went on to establish their own businesses, and with textile designers becoming more in demand, students from art schools joined the larger manufacturing units and opened their own designing units. The demand for block-printers that had declined after Partition is now flourishing here, with printing facilities all over the country.

Looking back now, the experiment that began with a simple curiosity for a process grew far beyond my expectations and intentions to become the story of a craft that was embedded back into the urban fibre of Pakistan, providing livelihoods to countless artists and ancillary craftsmen.

Today, KOEL operates a flagship store in Clifton, Karachi, along with a courtyard café and art gallery. Through the store, we continue to champion local craft in domestic and international markets, while the space has become a popular hang-out for the city’s artists, intellectuals and youth.

From Ajrak to Indigo

KOEL’s efforts towards the revival and sustainability of traditional crafts have taken many interesting directions, but the one that remains closest to my heart is our work with the sacred Ajrak cloth and the magical indigo dye. At a Lok Virsa Mela held in Islamabad many years ago, I came across a variety of Ajraks in different stages of completion, displayed at a stall of the master craftsman Bhalle Dino from the town of Tando Mohammad Khan in Sindh. Till then, Ajrak to me was a simple red and blue block-printed cloth worn as a paghri (turban) or chaddar (wrap) in the villages. But I was intrigued by Bhalle Dino’s description of the intense process of making the cloth and readily accepted his invitation to personally witness this process in the Ajrak workshops located in villages and towns across Sindh.

Ajrak is a complex, layered textile with great cultural and historical significance. It is created through a complicated process, involving 21 stages that take almost a month to complete, with the fabric going through the Indus River at every stage. It is resist–printed, mordanted and dyed in madder and indigo. The artisan works in total harmony with his environment, using only indigenous materials.

Travelling along the banks of the Indus River, one encounters Ajraks spread out in different stages of preparation; artisans can be seen sprinkling water intermittently on the madder-dyed cloth as it dries. The alternate drenching and drying help the colours to mature, while the sun bleaches out the white areas. Camel dung is used to remove excess tanning from the base of the fabric to make the white clear and brilliant. Printed again with the mud resist mixture and sprinkled with dry, sifted cow dung, the cloth goes through two indigo dips before it is taken to the river for a final wash. The result is the precious, jewel-like Ajrak.

The people of Sindh hold this textile in great reverence—they regard it as almost sacred. It is common to see men, women and children all wearing it. There is no stigma of class or status; Ajrak has the same significance for the rich and poor. This cloth is not just used for special occasions but has multifarious usage in everyday living. From birth to marriage and until death, the Ajrak commemorates all significant events of the life cycle. It is used and reused as rallis (quilts) till threadbare. The master craftsmen believe that the ‘Priest King’—the 4,000-year-old stone statue discovered at Mohenjo-Daro, the ancient capital of the Indus Valley Civilization—wears an Ajrak. While this has not been verified, the trefoil motifs and circles on the draped shawl of the statue do bear a striking resemblance to the kakar—the cloud pattern commonly used in the Ajrak. Sadly, there has been a steady decline in Ajrak karkhanas (workshops) in Sindh, which numbered in the thousands in the twentieth century, but have dwindled down to a few dozen at present. The labour-intensive process, however, has persisted for well over a millennium.

Prior to Partition, the craft of Ajrak making stretched from the Indus River delta to Barmer, Gujarat and Rajasthan, with Muslims and Hindus working harmoniously together and dividing different tasks between them. Massive migration at the time of Partition disrupted the activity and divided the workshops, leaving the craft languishing. While the practice remained integral in the rural areas of Sindh, on the other side of the border, it became a commodity for urban markets and export, and its usage within the community was minimal.

My education in this area opened up a new realm for me. I felt a sense of duty to document what I saw to make the world aware of the story of this incredible textile. I spent months gathering information from all the centres I visited, recording everything which until then, had mostly been passed down orally from father to son. My team and I measured, weighed and noted all we could, except the amazing experiential wisdom of the artisans—for instance, how the fragrance of mango pickles (aam key achar ki khushboo) would determine whether the oil had saturated the fabric that was tied in a bundle steeped in castor oil and camel dung for 10 days.

Years of this research into Ajrak subsequently led to the publication of a book—‘Sindh Jo Ajrak’—in 1990, and later to the making of the documentary film ‘Sun, Fire, River, Ajrak: Cloth From the Soil of Sindh’. The most important contribution of the book was a directory that listed all the Ajrak craftsmen of Sindh, enabling many buyers and scholars to reach them.

When the Government of Pakistan initiated AHAN (Ek Hunar Ek Nagar)—a pilot project inspired by the One Village One Product (OVOP) initiative from Thailand—many futile meetings later, I offered to work quietly with Ajrak, a craft I had become very familiar with through the network of craftsmen I knew. I worked with four Ajrak centres in Sindh with the mandate to develop a model that could be replicated in other centres. The objective was to give Ajrak a new lease of life by introducing it to the urban areas. The blue and red cotton textile, more suited for sheets, was difficult to market in the contemporary world. I conducted a series of workshops in Sindh, at Matiari, Bhit Shah, Khyber and Sehta, to reintroduce the lost tradition of the use of natural indigo and madder in Ajrak.

While documenting for my book, I had come across a craftsman in Tando Allah Yar in Sindh, who sheepishly confessed that he was mixing natural indigo with chemical indigo. With him, I visited the sole indigo grower who had continued his family practice of growing natural indigo on a few acres of land in Budh, Multan (a city in southern Punjab). The small quantities of indigo dye that he was producing would be bought by a few printers or traditional dyers. The remaining leaves of the plant were dried and sold as powder to the UAE for kari mehndi (black indigo), which is used by women to stain their palms. It is from here that my long association with indigo began.

Through the Ajrak workshops we ran, the master craftsmen were trained to revert to natural dyes that have a softer, more luminous and earthy feel. With the use of these dyes, the fabric became mellow, and different textures of pure cotton, silks and chiffon could be introduced. What was astonishing was the ease with which the Ajrak craftsmen adapted to natural dyes, despite having abandoned their usage for such a long time. Strangely, the processes they used with synthetic dyes were perfect to receive the indigo and madder dyes. With great excitement, the craftsmen watched as the colours from leaves, flowers, roots and barks saturated the Ajrak cloth. The centuries-old tradition of using natural dyes was brought to the living present. Another highlight for the craftsmen was learning the technique of making Ajrak with silk, since historically it had only been printed on cotton. Master craftsman Abdul Aziz from Dhamadka in India was invited to demonstrate Ajrak printing on silk, enabling a wonderful exchange of information between the Ajrak ustos and the forming of strong bonds between them.

The workshops resulted in bringing an awareness about Ajrak as a comfortable fabric available at a reasonable price, and the naturally dyed muted colours made it attractive as a wearable fabric for Pakistan’s burgeoning middle-class population. The result was a rapid increase in demand, which enabled many craftsmen to market their products independently, in turn leading to a steady expansion of the craft.

Indigo had captured my interest ever since I made that first visit to the indigo grower in Budh, becoming an integral part of my work and life from then on. This mysterious, poetic dye—which changes from liquid yellow-green to the palest watered blue and the deepest blue-black— has grown in abundance on the banks of the Indus River from the time of the Indus Valley Civilization, dating back to 3,500 bc. A coarse, madder-dyed fragment was discovered at Harappa, and indigo vats were also found in the dyers’ workshops at Mohenjo-Daro.

It is evident from these discoveries that cotton was cultivated at that time, and the people had complete mastery over the highly complex processing of the plant fibre in spinning, weaving, bleaching, dyeing and printing. Dyed and printed cotton was in great demand, and long before the arrival of the Europeans, textiles from the subcontinent were major trading items in the Mediterranean, Middle East, Africa and various parts of Asia. In the first century ad, the cloth imported by the Romans was known as ‘Cendatus’ or ‘Cloth from Sindh’.

By the sixteenth century, the dyed and printed textiles from Sindh had become a national industry, and by the mid-eighteenth century, the world was virtually clothed by textiles produced from here. With the skilful use of mordants, a wide spectrum of colours were developed, which were unsurpassable in both fastness and brilliance. The creativity and skill of the dyers brought fame and fortune to the traders, plying between the Occident and the Orient. Their technological superiority remained unchallenged until the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century.

When the British annexed the Sindh Province in 1843, indigo was one of its chief exports. The first synthetic dyes were brought to the subcontinent by the British in the nineteenth century. Chemical indigo was developed by Bayer of Germany in the beginning of the twentieth century, following 12 years of research costing over DM 8 million at that time. The introduction of chemical indigo triggered a rapid decline in cultivation of the natural dye. Tragically, over the past century, the traditional indigenous techniques that had evolved over thousands of years have almost disappeared. Today, almost all dyeing and printing of textiles is carried out with imported chemical dyes, which have caused extensive damage to the environment and polluted our streams, rivers and lakes.

Throughout the world, indigo has been shrouded in an aura of mystery; the dyers have guarded their secrets from each other. Its cultivation, wherever it persisted, was largely a family legacy and was protected from the gaze of outsiders. In the memory of the oldest of farmers and dyers, indigo processing has become a hazy blur. Some recalled that in Multan, the centre of the city once housed a colony of indigo makers, called Neel Garhan (neel is indigo, and garhan is the centre), where men could be seen with their hands and feet stained blue during the indigo making season. It is our great loss that in places where indigo once thrived, hardly any trace of it can be found anymore.

Teaming up with my entrepreneur friend Masuma Lotia, and with assistance from the Department of Forests (Government of Sindh), I ran a pilot project to cultivate the indigenous Indigoferra Tinctoria plant on a two-acre area in Miani Forest. We planned to extract the dye, using the traditional methods.

In 1996, natural indigo and other natural dyes were introduced at KOEL. A line of silk and cotton handloom textiles, dyed with an array of natural dyes, including indigo, were developed for local and export markets. Through sensitive intervention, new designs were developed within the framework of the traditional design repertoire. The interlinking of traditional skills helped to restore the harmony that had been lost to ‘progress’ and mechanization during the past century. For over a decade now, these handloom natural-dyed textiles have sustained and created a popular niche market in Pakistan.

I have also explored the use of indigo on different mediums for home products at KOEL. We stained terracotta floor tiles in rich hues of deep blue, and for a few years, I experimented with staining wood with indigo to make contemporary furniture. As a painter, I have used indigo dye on paper with graphite and mixed media. Textile-making processes and working with the dye have thus overlapped and fed into each other. Unearthing the limitless possibilities of this rich, mysterious dye is an ongoing process.

The Japan Foundation Fellowship by Tama Art University that I was awarded in 2002 enabled me to go further in this exploration through a comparative study of the traditional method of indigo cultivation, processing and usage in Japan and Pakistan. During my year-long sojourn in Japan, I visited the indigo cultivating centres in Tokoshima and Okinawa to meet and study the works of many traditional and contemporary indigo dye practitioners, including the great indigo practitioner and contemporary textile artist Hiroyuki Shindo Sensei, in Miyama village.

My time in Japan enriched me like no other and allowed me to witness first-hand the respect given to indigo by the Japanese. On this trip, I met the late Jurgen Lehl and was blessed to learn so much from him on finishing of apparel manufacturing. KOEL was given the opportunity to export our natural-dyed textiles to the prestigious Jurgen Lehl & Co., with garments and textiles made to their exacting, challenging specifications. We also exported to Kosoen, the traditional aizome (indigo) dyers. Their atelier in Ome draws many tourists with its picturesque surroundings in the outskirts of Tokyo. We continue to learn and work with them.

An Impossible Dream

In the 1980s, violence was becoming increasingly common in Karachi, as the city began fragmenting along ethnic and sectarian lines. Responding to this situation, a group of artists, designers and architects came together in an urgent effort to introduce positive energy to the strife-torn metropolis. Our vision was to establish a place of learning that would stand as an oasis in the parched city. An institution where art and architecture would be under one roof, and young minds would be inculcated with an understanding and appreciation of our cultural heritage and our fast-eroding indigenous knowledge systems. By constantly looking to the West and the Arab world for inspiration and approval, we had marginalized traditional knowledge and were thus losing touch with local realities.

With no space or financial backing available to us, or any experience of running an educational institution, this seemed like a dream impossible. For the first 3 years, we were able to operate from a large family house, resplendent with almond and coconut trees, that had been offered to us by a philanthropist. An outdoor drawing studio was constructed under a wooden trellis, with a makeshift lecture hall and a printmaking studio in the garden. The ceramic studio was under the porch, and the textile design studio was in the servant quarter, while sculpture classes were held in the garage, and the kitchen became the Executive Director’s office. We launched with 8-week workshops, from where many students and teachers stayed on for the formal school that started a few months later. Such was the beginning of the IVS.

With stringent budgets, everything acquired for IVS was donated by friends and well-wishers; while other institutions in the country were being eroded, we were helped at every step to build. The first batch of students were admitted in September 1990, and I served as Executive Director of the School for 5 years.

During this time, many individuals and institutions within and outside the country were consulted. The faculty of the National College of Arts in Lahore generously shared their teaching expertise with us. A visit from Ashoke Chatterjee, Professor Emeritus and a pioneer of National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India—one of the leading design schools of the world—inspired us to form linkages with the institution.

I visited NID along with three IVS heads of department to closely study their curriculum, its implementation and the teaching methodology. Around the same time, we explored Doshi’s Centre for Environmental and Planning Technology (CEPT), also in Ahmedabad, and then proceeded to Baroda to study the Fine Art College there. NID was truly inspirational, with its meditative environment, its excellence of design sensibilities in concepts and skills and, above all, the simplicity and humility that pervaded throughout its campus. Our visit was soon reciprocated by three teachers from NID who came to share their teaching expertise with our faculty.

Subsequently, Aditi Ranjan from NID and the legendary educationist Helena Perheentupa of Finland, helped us formulate the curriculum for the Textile Design Department. Our Department was greatly enriched by NID’s model for craft documentation, and it has been encouraging to see how it has been working closely with the craft sector in design development and marketing ever since.

At a conference held in Manila, Cho Padamsee, an architect and former Dean at London University, read a paper on the need for a different architectural education system in the Asian region. At the end of the talk, I asked him if there was any school he could point out that represented his theory, and he replied that there was none. A challenge was thrown at him to look afresh at the IVS curriculum. Padamsee spent a month at the school and, after many sessions with the founders and faculty, designed the Architecture programme.

In 1994, IVS moved to its new campus in Clifton. With it came the relocation of an imposing, Victorian-style warehouse built about 100 years ago by Jamshed Nusserwanjee Mehta, the first Mayor of Karachi. The four-story yellow stone structure had been marked for demolition, as the authorities deemed the land on which it stood too valuable and so decided to build multi-storied complexes in its place.

Transferring the heritage building from its original site in Khara Dar to the IVS Clifton campus was, indeed, a feat unique in the subcontinent—a testament to the skill of our craftsmen. Following detailed documentation through drawings, photographs and video, each of the 26,000 stones and hundreds of pieces of timber were numbered and painstakingly removed, carefully transferred and re-erected at the new site. The extensive funds required for the project were met entirely through voluntary contributions, as the citizens of Karachi opened up their hearts to the cause. At no stage did IVS have to rely on government funds for its survival, helping it to forge a symbiotic relationship with the city, which continues till this day.

The School’s first Convocation, held at the Clifton campus in December 1994, was an unforgettable experience. We congregated under an awning that had been designed using the waves of the nearby sea as a metaphor, while the theme music—composed in Raag Malhar—was performed live by revered ustads. The graduating students wore gowns of cotton susi—a traditional cloth woven exclusively in Sindh—which I had designed based on the Mughal chogha, and caps that were evolved from the Hunza topi.

Since that first convocation 29 years ago, many more batches have graduated and have contributed towards raising awareness of our heritage in myriad ways. The success that they have achieved in Pakistan and abroad is the fruition of our impossible dream.

Stepping into the Public Space

It is my enduring belief that if our crafts are to live on, they must occupy public spaces and prestigious institutions alike, where they can be accessed and enjoyed by people from all walks of life. When I was offered the opportunity to curate the New International Airport in Islamabad, I felt it was the perfect space to showcase Pakistan’s superb but largely hidden craftsmanship. Built as a spacious, glass-encased contemporary structure, the airport is a thoroughfare for people of all ages and from all corners of the globe—an intersection between past, present and future. Through large-scale, site-specific works, I aimed to present our neglected craftsmen at par with our most celebrated international artists, thereby redefining the aesthetics for public spaces and fostering a sense of pride among Pakistanis in what we have to offer to the world.

Master craftsmen Ustaad Wajid and Ghulam Hussain Kashigar were enlisted to produce large murals in traditional ferozi (turquoise) and deep blue, echoing the mystical shrines of the Sufi saints of Uch Sharif in Multan. Chitarkar Aurangzeb worked on slabs of grey schist stone, using simple tools of hammer, compass and ruler to chisel the finest lines in absolute perfection. These pieces reminisced the monolith gravestones of Gadwalian in the Gangkhar Valley. Most of the sculptures from the Gandhara Civilization found in Taxila and the Swat Valley are also carved in schist. The taanba (copper) and peetal (brass) panels were large-scale experiments that defied the earlier risk-free commissions by Peshawar Metal Works. Naqash craftsmen displayed their mastery on wood panels with intricately painted patterns. Most important was a spectacular 600 ft mural in the luggage concourse, created by truck art painters, with all the diverse styles they use to adorn the trucks that carry goods across Pakistan’s cities.

The airport project led me to carry out a similar intervention in one of the country’s leading universities, the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). The modern octagonal brick structure was designed by the late great architect Habib Fida Ali—a panoply of minimalist white internal spaces around a central brick courtyard. I worked with master craftsmen to create kashi (tilework) panels and frescoes inspired by the stunning Mughal-era Wazir Khan Mosque in Old Lahore. The project became a learning experience for the students and faculty of the university, as they were able to interact with the artisans at work and witness how their campus transformed and came alive through craftsmanship.

A step further in these interventions is the curation of the Pakistan Pavilion at the Dubai Expo, which is scheduled to take place from October 2021–March 2022. I am currently working with a group of artists, filmmakers and craftsmen to present a showcase of ‘The Hidden Treasures of Pakistan’ on the global stage. With over 25 million visitors expected from all over the world at this event, it is our hope that the Pakistan Pavilion shines a much-needed spotlight on our invaluable heritage.

A Sustainable Future

There is no doubt that traditional crafts in Pakistan are struggling as mechanization and modernization threaten their very existence. When researching for my publication, ‘The Craft Traditions of Pakistan: Clay, Cloth, Wood, Metal & Stone’, I saw evidence of this on my travels across the length and breadth of the country. I attempted through this book to stress the need for urgent intervention to change this course and avert the dangers posed to craft heritage, but I have only scratched the surface, for hanging by a thread are the last of the stalwarts of this knowledge and skill.

With the COVID-19 pandemic bringing the world to a virtual standstill this year, weeks of isolation and lockdown provided me the time and space to look inward and reflect on the many trials, discoveries and triumphs this journey has afforded me. What is increasingly clear to me is that the survival and growth of traditional crafts lie in long-term support through national policies that encourage the return to indigenous materials, elevate the status of craftsmen, streamline the economies of local craft production and look for solutions within rather than without. I can only hope that this opportunity will be grasped before it is too late, and others will continue to come forward to carry this torch.