Baku’s Rag Book: Stories of Discarded Fabrics

Description

This book is set within the larger canvas of Ahmedabad’s erstwhile textile industry and its fabled heritage value. Each story here is a reconstructed narrative put together by NID’s students who interacted with former textile mill workers as part of the institute’s International Open Electives 2018 workshop. The book shows how these workers interacted with each other back then in the newly-formed working class milieu and it touches upon issues such as migration in search of job opportunities and better life. In a departure from conventional book publishing norms, this book has been screen printed on discarded fabric seconds which have been procured from various markets in the old city area of Ahmedabad; this aptly depicts the sense of pain, unfulfilled aspirations, and an entire way of life lost as far as these mill workers are concerned. Baku’s Rag Book focuses on the lives of its subjects—both as textile mill workers in the past and their lives in the present times; in doing so, it presents a convincing socio-economic portrait of this specific section of society.