Building Blocks

Mubassirah Khalid Khatri may have been born into a family of Ajrakh printers and inherited the entrepreneurial genes of her father, but she has broken the barriers by becoming the first female artisan of the traditional craft.

- -Benu Joshi Routh

Mubassirah Khalid Khatri (26)

Artisan designer, Elysian

Khatri was three when, following the devastating 2001 earthquake, her family moved from Dhamadka to Ajrakhpur—a village in Gujarat’s Kutch district that is globally recognised as a hub for traditional Ajrakh hand block-printed textiles. The intricate and labour-intensive craft—comprising 14 to 16 stages of washing, dyeing and resist printing—had remained a male-dominated practice for centuries, until Khatri decided to step in and handcraft textiles that merge age-old block-printing techniques with contemporary aesthetics.

The turning point came when she saw her father and her brother—who had returned from Somaiya Kala Vidya (SKV), an institution offering formal design and entrepreneurship education to traditional craft practitioners—experimenting with their practice. They introduced freehand painting and new textures to traditional block printing. “When I saw novelty in the craft, I developed an interest in it,” she says.