Threads of India: The Textile & Weaving Trail

To Jaipur, and straight into the percussion of the print tables. In Sanganer's workshops, master printers drop teak blocks in four-colour registration at a beat per second, exactly as their great-grandfathers did. You'll carve a corner of your own block and pull your first metre by afternoon.

West to Bagru village, where the dabuDabuA mud-resist printing technique in which clay paste is block-stamped onto cloth to protect it from the dye.Read in the glossary mud-resist tradition survives in open courtyards of drying yardage. Sink your hands (gloved, or not) into a living indigo vat — green liquid oxidising to blue on the cloth as it meets the air, the day's one honest magic trick. Sunset over fields striped with drying cloth.

Fly to Ahmedabad — the Manchester of the East, and home to the subcontinent's most important textile collection. An appointment-only afternoon among the Calico Museum's MughalMughalRelating to the Muslim dynasty of Central Asian descent that ruled most of the subcontinent from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.Read in the glossary tents, jainJainA follower of Jainism, an ancient Indian religion whose central commitment is non-violence towards every living thing.Read in the glossary temple hangings and trade cloths, then dusk in the carved-wood polsPolA gated residential quarter of old Ahmedabad — a self-contained lane of courtyard houses entered through a single doorway.Read in the glossary of the old city, a UNESCO quarter threaded by weavers' lanes.

A day of appointments with living traditions: the double-ikat mathematics of Patan patolaIkatA weaving technique in which the threads are dyed to a pattern before they are woven, so the design emerges as the cloth is made.Read in the glossary silk (one sariSariAn unstitched length of cloth, several metres long, draped to form a garment — the principal traditional dress of Indian women.Read in the glossary, seven months), ajrakh block masters working sixteen-stage indigo-madder sequences, and the mirror-and-thread universe of Kutchi embroidery in a private collection. Evening flight east to the silk city.

Varanasi by morning: ghats, bells, and — turn two lanes inland — the clack of jacquard looms running gold zari through crimson silk. In the weaving quarter of Madanpura, watch kadhua brocade grow a centimetre an hour, then trace the finished cloth to the gaddi houses where saris are sold seated, over tea, as they should be.

The trail becomes yours: a morning with a master weaver and his naqsha (pattern) maker translating your chosen motif into a punch-card program, silk and zari selected by hand, the loom dressed. Your commissioned piece — stole or sari — will take weeks to weave and arrives by courier, with the loom photographs, when it is done.

The city itself, at last: sunrise by boat past the ghats where pilgrims' saris dry in hundred-metre ribbons of colour, the evening aarti from a private balcony — and between them, the flea-textile market where dealers unfold old Banarasi wedding saris, tribal quilts and temple cloths for those who know to ask.

A last riverside breakfast, and the trail closes where all of it began — with cloth in your hands. Your block prints, indigo yardage and vintage finds travel with you; your commissioned Banarasi follows in its own time, photographed at every stage. Fly home dressed, in the truest sense.