In July 2018, textile design students Arjunvir Singh and Rashi Sharma wanted to spend their college fieldwork documenting Suzani embroidery in Kashmir. Their faculty at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, rejected the proposal.
The brief required a craft from their home states, so the two settled on Khes, a Punjabi textile they considered too ordinary to count as a craft worth studying. That reluctant choice became the most significant work of their academic lives.
A textile too common to be noticed
Khes is a handwoven cotton fabric from undivided Punjab, used as a bedcover, shawl, and light blanket, and woven with yarn coarser than that used for dhurries but finer than khaddar. It also formed a key part of a bride’s trousseau.
While researching it, Arjunvir and Rashi encountered an unfamiliar term: Majnu Khes, woven in a compound double-cloth structure they had never seen produced on a Punjabi pit loom without a jacquard machine.
Khes is a cotton fabric patterned with stripes and plaids
Curious, they set out to track it down across Jalandhar, Nakodar, Amritsar, Chandigarh, Patiala, Ludhiana, and Panipat. No one, not even practising weavers, had heard the name.
Found in a trunk at home
The search ended at Arjunvir’s own house in Jalandhar. His mother retrieved a fabric from an old trunk, one his grandfather had treasured and never let anyone use. It was a Majnu Khes, likely older than Partition itself.
The discovery raised a sharper question: what if this weave had never existed in the part of Punjab that is now in India at all? Reaching out to family and neighbours, the duo found that everyone who owned a Majnu piece had migrated from West Punjab to East Punjab during the 1947 exodus.
Family heirloom stories like this one keep surfacing across Punjabi households, each trunk holding its own quiet record of what survived the crossing.
Building the record, one interview at a time
The classroom project ended in November 2018, but the two carried it forward as The Khes Project and resumed it as their graduation thesis in January 2020. Khes, they learned, falls into three types by weave complexity: Saada, Gumti, and Majnu, the last requiring a professional loom setup too intricate for home weaving.
Portraits of Satinder Kaur, Joginder Kaur, and Tejinder Kaur, who are partition migrants interviewed by the duo
Interviews with Partition survivors Satinder Kaur, Joginder Kaur, and Tejinder Kaur filled in what objects alone could not. Majnu, they learned, was reserved for special guests and considered “khas,” meaning special, because it was bought from professional weavers called Julahas rather than woven at home like simpler Khes varieties.
Before the pandemic halted further field visits, the two had built a small but rigorous dataset: ownership of a Majnu piece correlated almost entirely with a family’s migration history, evidence that the weave had vanished from India, not merely faded.
Following the thread to Pakistan
Through faculty contacts, they reached Noorjehan Bilgrami, a Karachi-based textile researcher and founding member of the Indus Valley School of Design, who connected them to Zeb Tariq, whose 1990s thesis on Khes offered rare documentation of Majnu motifs.
Bilgrami’s network led further still to Iram Ansari in Lahore and Sohail Tareen in Multan, who confirmed Majnu Khes is still produced in Pakistan, though now mostly on power looms, with a visible drop in quality from the old handwoven pieces.
Khes weaving took place across the entire belt from Sindh to West Punjab to East Punjab, and the intricacy of the weave decreased as one moved towards East Punjab.
Weavers working with Tareen agreed to hand-weave fresh Majnu samples for the project, and a Lungi weaver named Rasool Bakhsh wove pieces in Sindh based on motifs the students sent across, testing whether old patterns could still translate from photograph to loom. With no direct courier route between the two countries, one package reached India via Dubai, the other via London, a roundabout journey for a textile separated by a border just a few hundred kilometres wide.
What the documentation adds up to
The pandemic shelved the exhibition the duo had planned around their archive, but the research itself, oral histories, motif records, and newly woven samples, remain the most detailed account of Majnu Khes available anywhere.
It does not bring the weave back to Indian looms. What it does is settle, with evidence rather than folklore, exactly how and why a working craft tradition disappeared from one side of a border while surviving, faintly, on the other.
Other efforts to keep Punjab’s handloom heritage alive and revivals of near-extinct Indian weaves elsewhere depend on exactly this kind of groundwork. Before a craft can be rebuilt, someone has to first prove it was lost, and find out precisely where.
All images courtesy of Brown History
