Ruma Devi is a woman from Barmer, in the remote western reaches of Rajasthan, who has spent twenty years building one of the most significant grassroots craft movements in India. Starting with ten women, one hundred rupees each, and a second-hand sewing machine, she has trained over thirty thousand rural artisan women across the Thar Desert. Most people outside India have never heard of her.

Ajrakhpur, on the outskirts of Bhuj, is a village built entirely around a craft. A visit to Khatri Sufiyan Ismail’s workshop, with his son Faizan as guide, and an education in one of India’s most complex natural dye traditions.

Each journey I lead is shaped entirely by the women who join it. What follows are the defining moments of October 2025, not everything, but what shaped the journey. Eighteen days. Five women. No standard itinerary.

There is a moment you notice in Rajasthan, once you have been there long enough to stop looking at everything and start seeing it. A woman crossing a courtyard, a load balanced on her head, the pallu of her odhni drawn forward over her face.

Ceremony, craftsmanship and climate. How a royal Indian symbol found a new life under English skies.

It was around twenty-five years ago. My daughter was six, and I was still working in television, producing and developing documentaries. After spending time with family in Bangalore, we decided to travel south to Kerala for a holiday. It was there, almost by accident, that everything changed…

I trace this particular obsession back to a single image - a photograph in a magazine, sometime in the late 1980s of a woman wrapped in an emerald green shawl, thickly embroidered in delicate flowers. I can’t remember who she was. I only remember the shawl.