Romancing the Rann

The unforgiving environment of Kutch brings out the best in the people who live there. Their colourful thatched, bhungas (huts), and bright and intricate embroidery are expressions of their soaring artistic spirit, write Hugh and Colleen Gantzer

They were high-stepping in their own reflections like timorous ballet dancers. This was on a drive on the road from Gujarat’s Bhuj to Hodka in the scrub and saline wildernesses of the Banni lands of the Rann of Kutch. In an unexpected stretch of marsh, a flock of flamingoes foraged fastidiously. The more shellfish they found, the more they plonked.

A village woman creating a bright appliqué in front of her decorated hut.

Hodka’s resort, aptly named Shaam-e-Sarhad (sunset on the border) is intriguingly beautiful. Circular, thatched, bhunga, huts rise at one end of a large, saucer-shaped compound floored with mud plaster. Inside the huts, there were beds on earthen platforms with thick, and very comfortable, mattresses; the intricate mud-and-mirror work of Gujarat giving an understated elegance to everything. The public area of the resort was at the other end of the basin. A metal frame supported an open-sided shamiana (marquee) and a ceiling bright with squares of locally woven fabrics. A buffet platform held sigri-braziers at meal times.

Next morning, it was a bumpy ride through dusty scrub, past fat, scuttling, partridges and this seemingly hostile land, which is richly embroidered with folkways. There was a village where the descendants of ancient migrants still retain the traditions and customs of the legendary North-West Frontier. They breed horses, ride bareback, wear beaded bride and bridegroom masks, and their moorchank-twanging headman would have merged effortlessly into the population of Kandahar.

Clearly, an unforgiving environment often brings out the best in the people who inhabit it. There is a particular family that has raised the craft of rogan to an art form. Rogan designs are created on fabrics using castor oil boiled down to the consistency of a tacky resin. Holding reed pens, rogan artists draw pictures as intricately delicate as fine embroidery.

Embroidery and appliqu`E9 are common folk arts in the Rann: seemingly as essential an accomplishment of virtually every housewife, as knitting had been in early 20th century Europe. Working on colourful skirt, Baya-bai was an interesting discovery in the quest to find the most skilled appliqu`E9 artists. She was also the proud part owner of five bhungas, designed for tourists.

These circular and thatched huts are called bhungas. The walls of the huts have intricate mud-and-mirror work of Gujarat, giving an understated elegance to these mud-plastered structures. Photos by the writers

The kaleidoscope of handicrafts is enormous: wood carving, pottery, lac-ware, stuffed toys of dancers and camels and turbaned riders on horses and bell making. The sounds of the Rann were a gentle orchestration as visitors drive through the scrub wilderness: the clonk-tonk of buffalo bells from the half-wild black herds; the honking of an enormous squadron of cranes winging in the soft light of evening; the distant, lonely, yowl of a jackal setting off a cacophonous chorus of howls like demented spirits beckoning from the underworld. "They are singing for their supper," remarked a gaunt man with deep-set eyes in the parking lot of the Dattatreya temple. The shrine is wreathed in the eerie legend of a divine being, who fed himself to the jackals when all other food ran out

The evening aarti ceremony was over and there was a mass of devotees, assembled on a spur, gazing down at a platform built at the edge of the thorny cactus thickets. A priest approached, carrying a large bowl of consecrated food. He struck the bowl, emptied its contents on the platform and called out. Suddenly, the cactus thickets shifted and moved as a horde of dun-coloured jackals materialised out of the khaki shadows of the scrub, leapt on the platform and, snarling and yapping, began to feast on the prasad. It was an amazing sight and one that had been repeated every morning and evening ever since this sacred hillock emerged out of the salt flats of the Rann, thrust up by the earthquake of 1918. Or so a priest of the temple informed solemnly.

There was a parapet at the end of the escarpment that fell away from the shrine. Below it the vast expanse of the saline flats of the Rann shimmered like crushed glass, stretching to the curve of the earth’s shoulder. The sun was an angry red ball at the edge of the world, sinking slowly, implacably. For a moment the salt flats picked up its reflection and then, after a swift and almzost imperceptible, flash of green, the sun was swallowed by the dusk. The sky stretched velvet black over it all, spangled with the mirror-chips of stars.

A cool night wind, scented of incense, brought the far yowl of a jackal choir master followed by his cacophonous choir. Obviously, they, too, were romancing the Rann.

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