Karshan Bhimji

In a small workroom with mustard-yellow walls, the light comes in low through a window and lands on a loom that has clearly been used for a long time. The wood is worn pale where hands have rested on it for years. Karshan Bhimji sits at one end of it, threading the warp for a new stole, the way he does most mornings.

He is the eighth generation in his family to weave. Not the eighth to learn weaving as a trade, the eighth to grow up in a house where someone was always at a loom, where this was simply what the family did. His father did it. His father's father did it. Long before Rannova, long before there was a website or an Etsy shop or a WhatsApp number to place an order on, this craft already existed in Kutch, in rooms like this one, passed from one person to the next.

Rannova started with a fairly simple idea: that this kind of weaving, done exactly the way Karshan's family has always done it, deserved to be worn by people far outside Kutch. Not simplified for speed, not reproduced on a machine to cut costs. The same slow process, the same handloom, the same hands, just reaching further than it used to.

What you see in the photograph is the warping stage, setting the tana. Every thread has to go on in the right order and at the right tension before a single throw of the shuttle can happen. Get the warp wrong and the whole stole hangs wrong, no matter how careful the weaving is afterward. Karshan doesn't check this with any instrument. Eight generations of doing it are the instrument.

It's slow work, and it stays slow on purpose. A Rannova stole isn't finished until he's finished it, which is exactly why every piece carries small, honest differences from the next: a slub in the yarn here, a slightly different shade there. That's not a flaw to be corrected. It's what a handloom, in the hands of someone who has done this his whole life, actually looks like.