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Our tempo traveller cruises smoothly through the state highway. As usual, I have my head popped out of the window, watching the bleak landscape as it perfectly contrasts the shrill, Gujarati pop music that blares on the speakers inside. The Banni Grasslands lie on both sides of the road, stretching out as far as I can see. At a distance I see the side profile of a lady dressed completely in black, walking a camel adorned with a cloth that has a colourful embroidery and a lot of mirror work glistening in the afternoon sun. A man dressed in a white kediu, dhoti and a red turban reveals himself. For those split seconds that the tempo zooms past the duo, the mustard banni grasslands (with the occasional bottle green shrubs) comes alive with colours. For a fleeting second, I lock eyes with the woman. She seems young and stares back at me with her hazel eyes and grim expression. Soon, they are out of sight. “Perhaps they are on another nomadic adventure, the Rabaris are wandering gypsies,” my co-passenger tells me. I did not think much about the pair until I was reintroduced to them the very next day through a very gripping, at times quirky story.
The Rabaris have said to have migrated from Afghanistan via Baluchistan, hundreds of years ago and settled down in Kutch. Traditionally cattle herders, the name of their tribe literally means outsiders but that’s really not how they seem to be treated in Kutch. Highly nomadic in nature, they are on the move for almost 8 months every year in search of seasonal rains. The Rabaris are majorly a matriarchal society with women taking control of most affairs while men usually look after cattle and camel-herding. The women usually wear black while the men dress-up in white. The blouses of the married women are beautifully pleated. One of the legends of women wearing black is to do with the continuous mourning of the death of Lord Krishna, who they have been worshipers of. Like most Kutchis, Rabaris spend time doing exquisite embroidery and have a unique chain stitch. They also employ a lot of mirror work in their craft. Their patterns gain influence from mythology and their surrounding environment.
I gather all this information at the Shrujan (a not-for-profit organisation that empowers Kutchi women through craft revival) LLDC Museum. As I look around, I see a few mannequins in a panel, adorned in the same kind of clothes that I saw on the woman the previous day. As I look and admire their intricate symmetrical, big and bold embroidery on display, my thoughts are politely interrupted by Ami Shroff, director of Shrujan who interacts with women of different Kutchi communities almost every day. Noticing my curiosity, she reveals a shocking fact. For most Kutchi people, apart from being a way to sustain themselves, embroidery is a form of identity and self-expression. However, the Rabari community has banned the use of embroidery for personal use for a very weird reason.
Apparently, marriages in the Rabari community were fixed at an early age and women would be required to take finished pieces of embroidered cloth material, torans, and such, to their in-laws’ house as dowry. Over the years, women deliberately started taking too much time to finish their embroideries as a way to avoid going to their in-laws’ place. “What if I have 4 children? I need to have a cradle cloth for them ready as well. Oh, my to-be husband has a camel. Why should I not make a covering cloth for him?” Ami says animatedly, narrating anecdotes of the Rabari women she had interacted with. There have even been certain cases where women have proceeded to their respective husband’s house in their mid-30’s or early 40’s. Looking at this practice, the elders of the community, a few years ago, banned embroidery not just as a dowry gift but for personal use as well.
The ban also meant that their unique embroidery and design tradition may ultimately see a tragic death with no formal documentation of the art. Moreover, it may result in future generations not learning the embroidery technique, and we may end up losing this tradition forever. Recognizing this, many NGOs’s and women self-help groups started promoting the Rabari embroidery for commercial use. Today, Rabari women do not embroider for themselves but do so only for commercial purposes.
Was then the heavily embroidered cloth I saw on the camel a dowry gift by the hazel-eyed woman to the kediyu clad man? The only good thing that comes out of this is that Rabaris perhaps do not expect dowry anymore and women are not pressured to embroider to leave their parents house. As I leave Kutch that day with this riveting piece of information, a very perplexing question burdens my mind. We talk about preserving cultures and also about progressiveness. But there are occasions where they both may not necessarily be in tandem. How then, do you then strike a balance to make sure the archaic practices of a culture are banned but the true, good essence of it isn’t compromised?
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