About

Bandhani from Jodhpur. Molela clay from the road to Nathdwara. Block print struck by hand in Sanganer. All of it held in the UK, so it reaches you in days rather than weeks.

What we actually are

We should say this plainly, because the alternative is a nicer sentence that is not true: garba is Gujarati, and Ganesh Chaturthi is Maharashtrian. Neither festival belongs to Rajasthan. A chaniya choli is a Gujarati garment, and calling one “traditional Rajasthani” would be marketing rather than fact.

What is Rajasthan’s is the craft. This is where cloth is tied and dyed knot by knot, where teak blocks are carved and struck one impression at a time, where clay has been pressed into deity reliefs for a thousand years. Rajasthan has its own Navratri dance, too — Ghoomar, from Marwar, danced under the Rajput courts, and itself credited with popularising the full-flare skirt that garba now spins in.

So that is what we sell. Not a borrowed festival: the craft it is worn and kept in.

Three lines

Jaipuri rajai

The one line with no asterisk. A rajai is a cotton-filled quilt whose warmth comes from air trapped in fine carded cotton rather than from weight — which is why a good one feels far too light to work, and does. The shells are usually mulmul, a fine cotton voile, and the prints come from Sanganer and Bagru near Jaipur, both crafts with Geographical Indication protection.

Garba and Navratri wear

Rajasthani craft made for the season: bandhani from Jodhpur, whose bandhej holds a GI tag; leheriya, the diagonal wave; gota patti gold-work; and Kota Doria, the fine square-check weave. The craft is Rajasthani. The dance floor is shared, and we are happy to say so.

Ganpati

Molela terracotta is a thousand-year-old clay deity-relief craft from a village on the Banas river near Nathdwara, and it holds a GI tag. That lineage is what stands behind our Ganpati: hand-formed shadu clay, made to dissolve.

Everything in this line is clay. We do not sell marble or resin. Rajasthan has a marble tradition — Jaipur’s Murti Mohalla is India’s largest centre for carved marble deity statues — but a marble murti is a permanent altar piece and cannot be immersed, so it does not belong in a line made for visarjan. Offering both would mostly create a way to buy the wrong one.

Stocked here, not shipped from there

Everything is held in the UK and dispatched from the UK. Nothing on this site is drop-shipped from India, which is the difference between a few days and a few weeks, and between a returns address you can use and one you cannot.

What we will not say

• We will not call something Rajasthani because it happens to be sold under our name.
• We will not claim “all-natural dyes” as a blanket statement. Azo-free is a claim that can be checked; “all natural” usually is not, so we say the one we can stand behind.
• We will not write our own reviews. Every rating on this site comes from someone who wrote it, and a product with none simply shows none.
• We will not describe hand-work as flawless. Block impressions vary, bandhani knots resolve differently along a length, and clay is pressed by hand. That variation is the evidence, and we would rather explain it than photograph around it.