Going to India as a Western filmmaker is easily one of the most exciting things you can do. Wherever you point your camera you are able to capture beautiful colours, intriguing contrasts, interesting people and captivating situations.
In late 2017 my father Arne Weidemann and I came up with the idea for a three-week-long journey through Rajasthan with the goal to create an interesting video and photography project. Apart from the awesome opportunity to go to India alongside someone who has travelled there extensively, I was also very excited about the prospect of spending some time with my father whom I had not seen very often during the past years. My father's friendship with Ramnarayan Choudhary and his family, that goes back almost 30 years, gave us the idea to dedicate our project to the traditional and artisan Rajasthani textile production since Ram has strong ties to that business. This, of course, would give us the ability to create an interesting narrative for the videos and photos while also providing greater value to the project.
In the following months, we were really interested in the idea of going to India together but it proved difficult to find a sufficiently overlapping time frame that allowed both of us to spend three whole weeks there. Everything less than those three weeks seemed insufficient as we intended to dive deep enough into the subject matter and not only scratch the surface. The whole project, as we imagined it, also relied heavily on Ram's availability and that it would be possible to witness all the different production processes during that time.
Around summer 2018 we were at last able to finalize our respective schedules and book our flights to Rajasthan. That was also the moment that my friend Fabio Marciano decided to accompany us. In November 2018 the three of us flew to New-Delhi and our journey began.
Thus, a big part of the process depicted in this video took place in Bagru: the block carving, the printing, the dyeing and the drying of the fabric. But this was only possible thanks to some luck and Ram’s enthusiastic help. After spending nearly a week in Jaipur and Bagru we travelled on to Pushkar, a sacred town in the heart of Rajasthan. Our main objective was not the beauty of the enchanted desert town, though. At Pushkar, Ram’s family had started manufacturing ethnic clothes, bedsheets etc. from traditionally produced block printed materials some 25 years ago. And now we wanted to follow the fabric printed at Bagru to the production facilities owned and run by Ram’s nephews Rajendra, Jitendra and Mahindra Neel to see (and film) how the printed and dyed cloth was cut, stitched and transformed into high-quality shirts and dresses for export.
Some value of my video “Fabric of Rajasthan”, in my opinion, comes from being able to follow the whole production process from start to finish. This is the reason why we decided to go on a day trip to Junia where Abdul Matin and his family spin raw cotton and hand weave the cloth (i.e. Kadi) that the artisans in Bagru use for block printing. Sadly, on the only day that we were able to visit Junia, they were not producing Kadi but weaving Dhurries, colourful traditional Rajasthani rag carpets. Anyway, as the setting was visually stunning, and the general process does not differ too much between the different cloths we were really happy about this opportunity and left with some useful material.When we initially came to India my goal was to only create a little “documentary” about a small part of the artisan Rajasthani textile production. But once we arrived more and more opportunities opened up. In addition to this rather “straight forward” video I was able to gather some incredible material with Ram, his wife and daughters, and my father that I will use to create a second, more narrative and “artistic”, short film.
Stay tuned for more and in the meantime enjoy “Fabric of Rajasthan”!