In 1993, a year after a cyclone had damaged large parts of Kutch and disrupted the artisan communities that had made the district the most craft-dense region in India, an American textile scholar named Judy Frater arrived in the village of Sumrasar Sheikh. She had been studying Kutch embroidery for more than a decade. She had come to do something more than study it.
What she found was a community of Mutwa and Rabari embroiderers who possessed, collectively, one of the most sophisticated visual vocabularies in the world of textile art and no reliable path to the market that would pay what the work was worth. The embroiderers were selling pieces for a fraction of their labour value, to middlemen who resold them at multiples without knowledge of who had made them. The craft was surviving. The people practicing it were not being sustained by it.