Dhunya; a craft world

This morning we were excited to learn that we would take an afternoon trip to one of Rangsutra's 40 production houses; Rangsutra Craft Dhunya.

A short auto ride away from Bikaner town, we stopped on the side of the road and walked down a short sandy path to a building that from the outside, didn't look occupied. We walked through grassmat doors to a large room with metal framed racking up all walls, occupied by huge piles, both organised and unorganised, of beautiful woven cottons, mainly block colours. For some of us it was a little suprising that the scale of the place was so small but that didn't seem to matter since it still worked very efficiently.

 We were introduced to one man of three who were snipping hang threads from hems and cuffs of a Kurta shipment, who was no less than the main man of Rangsutra Craft Dhunya, directly translating as Rangsutra Craft World. It was lovely to see that every part of the team gets involved in finalising the products and making sure everything is up to standard.

The sewing workshop was also not as expected; a second large room consisting of just 12 spaced out Juki sewing machines, 8 of which were being operated at the time. We are later informed that Rangsutra Craft Dhunya has 16 seamstresses or tailors and a further 10 staff, 26 in total with 21 machines in total.

 Scraps of beautifully coloured fabrics and bags of threads lie everywhere but to us this sparks creative inspiration. 

In the cutting department, two men fold yards and yards of fabric by hand into large squares, the pattern block (front and back) is then placed ontop of the fabric, marked by hand and is then cut with a straight knife.These sit on the table on lay, ready for construction. 60- 80 complete pieces are produced per day with finishing.

What we find most wonderful about the production line, is that each seamstress or tailor constructs one whole garment from start to finish including bindings, instead of each garment being passed around an assembly line. This has the obvious benefit that the seamstress/ tailor learns complete garment construction from a technical point of view.

This day was also significant for us because we were able to have a real one to one chat with Anand and discovered his passion for the Rangsutra company. In fact, the whole observation of today was that every employee of Rangsutra that we have met so far seems to love their occupation and has physically sought out to work for Rangsutra based on their principles and not just for the sake of having a job. A lot of the employees also seem to show a personal connection with Sarita Ghose and the whole Rangsutra family is just that... a family; aunties, uncles, babies and all.