Jat Bharat
Kutch, Gujurat
2019-Present
Life brings us to experience moments, places and people - even without the slightest ounce of a hint. Just a little twist and turn of events and we land upon our purpose of life! We never had imagined that a small chance would actually turn out to be a major turn towards our future venture. It was back in the year 2018, in the cold December month, we had gone for a scoping visit, to find embroidery artisans to work with. Here with the support of RSETI Kutch- Rural Self Employment and Training Institute, we found this community of Jat people with whom we would start this beautiful journey…
Now, the people of Jat Community have a history of their own. A tribe of nomadic pastoralists whose ancestry on the land of Kutch backs 200 years down the line, had first come from Balochistan. They settled in and around the arid land of Kutch. Today, for a living, the men divide mostly as haulers driving trucks or farmers farming small patches of land.
This speaks amply of their nature of work, their reachability and themselves - doesn't it? For us to put it out to them of what we wanted would make another episodic story. Yet, we were about to make the biggest appeal. Few months down the line, on May 2019 we went straight at it - and asked them if they would do embroidery for us.
And as we had expected, they refused! These villagers are not just a shy, isolated community, but also very rigid at accepting changes.From what we could gather, their rigidity was to remain unwavered till the last moment. Yet, we were not ready to take this defeat, for if we had come this far, we wouldn't go without trying our best.
It took a very long time to coax them, to win their trust. A community that did Jat Bharat style of embroidery - densely embroidered yokes on thick fabrics - had to be induced to deviate from their traditional style. They found it a bit tough to adapt to modernisation of tradition.
Yet, they gave in. With lots and lots of persuasion, a workshop was held wherein they were given patches to fill with their embroidery but this time, much lighter, lesser and freer in style and form. Gladly, to our surprise and also to their own, they were all immensely good in the process and they didn't deny of actually liking it. It took them 6 months to learn these scarce cross stitches the way we had wanted them to. They counted warp and weft to make cross stitches, horizontally, vertically and diagonally - as intricate as it sounds.
What traditional Jat Bharat is - in layman terms - Geometric patterned embroidery, containing Islamic patterns, in proper tessellations, filling patches densely. Well, hard as it sounds - is hard to do and as heavy too! Also, to ease it out, to widen its reach while not killing its integral properties, we came up with organic forms - broke the rigid geometric patterns and increased the flow, yet keeping it subtle and sober.
Morii thrives on the process of co-creation. Especially, intuitive co-creation, which demands a great amount of operational pliability and therefore, must be granted. For organic forms to develop, we kept an open ended approach and trusted each other’s intuitions. The slow yet steady experimentation led to a collective realisation - that this was exactly how one can make great things happen, in it’s symbiotic-ness!
We co-indulgently came out with ideas, patterns and the journey took off thereon.
Today, we work with 20 skilled artisans of Sumrasar, who are the foundation of Morii and integral to not just its birthing, but also, its nourishment. Only their skills, added with our vision and designs make outcomes/garments/art that speak a global language.
