Design as documentation: A weave lost during partition

In 2018, NID textile students Arjunvir Singh and Rashi Sharma went looking for Majnu Khes, the most intricate form of a Punjabi double-cloth weave. No weaver in Panipat, Amritsar, or Ludhiana had heard of it. The search ended in Arjunvir’s own home in Jalandhar, in a trunk his grandfather had carried across the border in 1947. Their fieldwork revealed why the weave had vanished from Indian Punjab. Almost everyone who owned a Majnu piece had migrated from the west during Partition. The News Source: The Better India complex loom setup stayed on the Pakistan side. What began as a college project became a four-year archive, tracing the weave to living weavers in Multan and Sindh. It shows documentation itself as a design act, saving not just a pattern but the public memory attached to it. Other efforts to keep handloom heritage alive and revivals of nearextinct Indian weaves elsewhere depend on exactly this kind of work. Before a craft can be rebuilt, someone has to first prove it was lost, and find out precisely where.

Before a craft can be rebuilt, someone has to first prove it was lost, and find out precisely where.