Rajkumari Ratnavati Girl’s School in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, which is slated to open this December has been bestowed with the craftsmanship of Ace Designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee. The designer has come forth with a unique clothing pattern from Rajasthan – Ajrakh which comes out well in the uniforms.
The initiative is part of the project of upliftment of girl child along with conserving the crafts of Rajasthan that is taken up by CITTA – a non-profit organization. Rajasthan has one of the lowest literacy rates in India, (with women being a huge casualty of this occurrence). The NGO is founded by American artist Michael Daube who started to work in India with Mother Teresa in 1988. It confronts health, education, and economic development through the empowerment of women in remote or marginalized communities in the world. They have worked on various projects, including the ones in Nepal, where they constructed a hospital, as well as a women’s center that creates knitwear and crochet in cashmere and wool. Their work features in the collections of J.Crew, Anthropologie, Kate Spade, and Donna Karan.
In an Instagram post, Sabyasachi announced his collaboration with the NGOs and expressed his utmost joy in being able to invest in education. He thanked Artist Daube for the opportunity.
It all started when Daube got an order for yoga bags by Donna Karan and Christina Ong who wanted to start product development with underprivileged women in a venture with Bali’s Como Shambala. Soon after in Jaisalmer, he discovered ajrakh, a unique form of woodblock printing from Sindh, known for its geometric shapes and its crimson and indigo color palette, an art used by men for cummerbunds and women for dupattas. With anything between nine to 21 stages of printing and dyeing, ajrakh is one of the most complex craft techniques in the world today that dates back to the Harappan civilization of the Indus valley. What makes the form truly compelling socially is that this textile is still being practiced by both Hindu and Muslim craftsmen, mostly from the Khatri community.
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Following the format of his previous projects, Daube brought together education and textile craftsmanship to help economic development in the city, deciding to build a girls’ school and a women’s economic development center focused on preserving the dying handicraft traditions of the region of the Thar and the Sindh. With a capacity to educate 400 girls, Rajkumari Ratnavati Girl’s School also includes a training center where local women (often mothers of the children attending the school) can be formally trained in the traditional skills of the region such as ajrakh.
Sabyasachi has referred to ajrakh in many previous collections like the autumn/winter collection 2009, ‘Neela aur Bagardandi ki Kahani’ – which means “indigo and burgundy story”, which included a chottu sari. His uniforms bring out the indigenous textile in a contemporary form.
The uniform has been created with the intent to bring alignment between children in India and Indian clothing. It sensitizes children to the importance of local heritage; helps to give them a better understanding of our culture and helps in sustaining the crafts of the region. This collaboration between CITTA and Mukherjee may lead to a trend where school uniforms begin to reflect local culture by incorporating the workmanship of local craft.
The project has also been backed by the royal family in Jaisalmer, Harmeet Bajaj, consultant fashion and lifestyle marketing and education specialist, and New York architect Diana Kellogg who has created the three buildings that are at the center of the project: a school, a cooperative for handicraft production and an exhibition hall/marketplace.