Ritu Kumar

| via @ritu.ritukumar Travelling on the Silk Road in Uzbekistan, we were on the search for the origin of the famous ikat. Margilon in Fergana Valley with its silk factories held the answers...Margilon’s bazar known as Kumptepa has been around since the 4th century, its merchant clans remaining key players in Central Asia’s commerce and silk trade until the last few decades of Soviet rule. I had high hopes of finding several varieties of the famed ikat here.The bazar threw up hundreds of options-at very cheap, wholesale prices-of ikats from factories and workshops from all over Margilon. There were silk, cotton and some synthetic ikats too which were aesthetically underwhelming. What I noticed instantly was that some substance of the original ikats seems to have been lost. Most appeared shiny, flat and devoid of subtle patterns and colour palettes of the traditional Fergana variety.Upon reflecting on what exactly was missing in these ikats compared to the revival fabrics I was working with in the villages of Odisha or the antiques found in museums up and down Uzbekistan, I settled on an answer. It was that they were using modern tie-and-dye techniques, that is, employing a lathe and plastic to dye the yarn so as to prevent any dye leakage, which deterred the the fuzzy, cloudlike effect of the old ikats. Increasing mechanisation had transformed these handicrafts as they rolled out millions of meters of iridescent rainbows of dubious sensibility each year #RKArchive