Bhuj

Bhuj takes its name from the hill of Bhujiyo Dungar that rises behind it, and was made the capital of Kutch in 1549 by Rao Khengarji I of the Jadeja dynasty, whose father Rao Hamir had taken the site in 1510. The Jadejas ruled the region as a princely state for four centuries, walled the town in the 18th century and built the Bhujia Fort on the hill to defend it. The state prospered through the ports of Mandvi and Mundra, whose ships traded with Zanzibar, Muscat and Malabar, and Kutchi merchants and seafarers settled along the shores of the Arabian Sea and East Africa.

The court was an unusual one. Rao Lakhpatji, who ruled in the mid-18th century, employed the craftsman Ram Singh Malam, who had spent eighteen years in Europe, and who returned to make the glass, tiles and clockwork of the Aina Mahal. Kutch came under British protection in 1819, the year a British detachment took the Bhujia fort in March and a great earthquake in June damaged the town and reshaped the Rann. The Kutch Museum was founded in 1877, and Prag Mahal was built in the 1860s and 1870s in an Italianate style.

Kutch joined India in 1947 and was merged into Gujarat in 1960. On the morning of 26 January 2001 an earthquake of magnitude 7.7 struck near Bhuj, destroying much of the town and killing more than 20,000 people in all, some 10,000 of them in Bhuj. The walled town lost whole streets, the palaces were cracked and the museum was damaged. Reconstruction over the following decade widened roads, rebuilt housing on the edges of town and restored some of the monuments, while others remain propped and part-ruined; the Smritivan memorial on Bhujia hill was opened in 2022 for those who died.

Kutch is a crossroads of communities, and Bhuj is where they meet: Jadeja Rajputs, Jain and Bhatia merchants, Muslim pastoralists of the Banni grasslands, Rabari herders with their distinctive white turbans and black woollen wraps, Ahir and Meghwal farming and weaving communities, and families with generations of trading ties to Africa and the Gulf. Kutchi, an Indo-Aryan language without an official script of its own, is spoken alongside Gujarati and Hindi.

The region's reputation rests above all on craft. Kutchi embroidery, worked in many named styles by different communities, mirror-work, bandhani tie-dye, ajrakh block printing on cloth resist-dyed and washed in river water, Rogan painting worked by a few Khatri families at Nirona, lacquered wood, silver work, leather and copper bells are all produced in the villages within an hour or two of the town. Craft organisations founded after the earthquake helped artisans rebuild and market their work, and many workshops receive visitors directly.

Music and dance follow the communities: Sufi kafi singing among the Muslim herders, the drums and jodiya pava double flute of the pastoral villages, and garba during Navratri. Hindu and Jain temples, Sufi shrines and mosques share the town, and the Rann Utsav season each winter has given Kutch a new public face as a destination, with performances staged for visitors at the tent city near Dhordo.

More than 200,000 people live in Bhuj, which is the district headquarters for the largest district by area in India — a territory of grassland, salt desert and scattered villages where the population is thinly spread. The town runs on administration, trade, crafts and services for the surrounding villages, and on tourism in the winter. Heavy industry lies elsewhere in Kutch: the ports of Mundra and Kandla and the industrial belt at Gandhidham draw workers from across India.

After 2001 the town was largely rebuilt, and that shapes daily life still. Housing colonies on the edges took families out of the walled town, roads were widened, and building codes changed; some of the old fabric was lost and some carefully restored. Water is the constant preoccupation, drawn from Hamirsar and its feeder channels, from wells and, since the Narmada canal reached Kutch, from the state system, with shortages in dry years.

Mornings are early, with markets and offices starting before the heat; afternoons in summer are slow; evenings bring families to the lakeside and the bazaars. Remittances from Kutchi families abroad remain important, many households keep livestock, and migration to Gandhidham, Ahmedabad and the Gulf for work is common. Wind and solar farms have spread across the plains around the town in recent years.

Kutchi cooking is drier and less sweet than the rest of Gujarat, built on millet rather than wheat. The staple is bajra rotla, a thick pearl-millet flatbread patted by hand and eaten with white butter, jaggery, garlic chutney or buttermilk. Khichdi with kadhi, a yoghurt and gram-flour soup, is the everyday supper, and the thali adds dal, a seasonal vegetable such as gavar or tindora, pickles and papad. Dairy is central in a pastoral region: buttermilk, ghee, curd and thick milk reduced to mawa.

The town's most famous export is dabeli, a bun filled with spiced mashed potato, tamarind and date chutney, roasted peanuts, pomegranate seeds and sev, invented in Kutch in the 20th century and now sold across India. Other snacks include fried gathiya and fafda of gram flour, patra, and the Gujarati pairing of fafda with jalebi. Muslim and pastoral communities in the Banni eat more meat, with mutton cooked simply over fire, but most kitchens in Bhuj are vegetarian.

Sweets are rich and milk-based: mawa, milk reduced over a slow fire, goes into pendas and much else, along with gram-flour mohanthal, and the winter treats of adadiya and gund pak made with ghee and dry fruit. Drinks are chaas, sugarcane juice, sherbets and chai from stalls in the bazaar; Gujarat's prohibition means no alcohol is served anywhere in the town.