Bhuj: A City Rebuilt

On the morning of 26 January 2001, while India was marking Republic Day, an earthquake measuring 7.7 struck Kutch. Bhuj, the old capital, was close to the epicentre. In something under a minute a large part of the walled city came down — houses, schools, the bazaar, and the great palaces of the Darbargadh. The death toll across the region ran into the tens of thousands. Photographs from the following weeks show a city reduced to rubble and dust with people living in the streets.

Twenty-five years on, Bhuj is a working city again, and how it got there is one of the more interesting stories in Gujarat. It is also a place that wears its history openly: you can walk from a restored eighteenth-century mirrored hall to a palace still visibly cracked, past new wide roads laid over the footprint of collapsed lanes, and out into craft villages whose revival was funded partly by the disaster that flattened them.

The Darbargadh: two palaces, two fates

At the heart of the old city stands the Darbargadh, the palace complex of the Jadeja rulers of Kutch, and its two main buildings tell the story of the earthquake as clearly as anything in Gujarat. Aina Mahal, the Hall of Mirrors, was built in the mid-eighteenth century for Maharao Lakhpatji by Ram Singh Malam — a Kutchi craftsman who, by tradition, was shipwrecked, spent years in Europe learning glass-making, tile-work and clock-making, and came home to build this. Its interiors are Venetian glass, gilded ornament, mirrored walls, a pleasure pool and a hall of extraordinary confidence.

It was badly damaged in 2001 and has been painstakingly restored since, largely through the efforts of the royal family's trust and conservation specialists working with limited money and enormous patience. Much is open again and it is the single best thing to see in Bhuj. Beside it, Prag Mahal — a heavy Italianate pile from the 1860s with a 45-metre clock tower — took the shaking harder. Parts have been repaired and the tower can generally be climbed for a view over the rooftops, but sections remain in a state of visible, cracked, propped-up disrepair. Walking from one to the other is a lesson in what restoration costs and what gets left behind.

The clock tower climb is worth doing precisely because of the view: you look out over a city that is unmistakably rebuilt, wider roads cutting through where dense lanes stood, new concrete beside surviving carved stone, and the outline of the old fortified walls still readable in places.

The clock tower of Prag Mahal, cracked and repaired, above a city that had to rebuild itself.

How a city was put back together

The reconstruction of Bhuj became a case study, and not a straightforward one. The state pursued a large-scale rebuilding programme with a new town-planning scheme for the walled city — widened roads, reorganised plots, seismic building codes — while a very large number of non-governmental organisations, trusts and international donors worked on housing, water, schools and livelihoods across the district. Money and attention arrived in quantities Kutch had never seen.

Wider roads cut through where dense lanes stood, new concrete beside surviving carved stone — the city's whole recent history is legible on foot

Some of it worked exceptionally well. Kutch's water infrastructure improved, the Narmada canal network eventually reached parts of the district, seismic standards were adopted, and the region's economy — helped by tax incentives that drew industry to the ports and to Gandhidham — grew faster afterwards than before. Some of it worked less well. Residents of the old city argued, often bitterly, over plot reallocation and the loss of dense, shaded, socially connected lanes to wide sunbaked roads. Heritage conservation competed with housing for scarce funds and usually lost.

The most quietly successful strand was craft. Kutch's embroidery, block-printing, bandhani, weaving, bell-making and lacquer traditions were already remarkable and already precarious. Post-earthquake funding channelled through craft organisations helped rebuild workshops, formalise artisan collectives, connect makers to urban markets and, crucially, make craft a viable living for a new generation. A great deal of what visitors now travel to Kutch to see — the artisan villages, the design collaborations, the museums — has roots in that period.

What to see in the city

Bhuj is compact and best walked. Beyond the Darbargadh, the Kutch Museum is the oldest museum in Gujarat, founded in 1877, and holds an important collection including Kshatrapa inscriptions, coins, textiles and material on the region's nomadic and pastoral communities. Hamirsar Lake sits at the centre of town, a reservoir at the heart of an old rainwater-harvesting system that fed the city; when the monsoon is generous enough to overflow it, the town celebrates. Above the city, Bhujio Dungar hill carries a fort and gives you the whole layout at once.

Then there is the Swaminarayan temple, rebuilt on a grand scale in marble after the original was destroyed, and the bazaars, where bandhani, embroidery and silverwork are sold in quantity — with the usual caveat that the best work, and the fairest prices for the maker, are found out in the villages. The Shree Ramkund stepwell and the chhatardis, the memorial cenotaphs of the Jadeja rulers on the edge of town, are both damaged, atmospheric and often empty.

Bhuj as a base

Bhuj is the natural hub for all of Kutch, and most visitors use it as one. It has an airport with flights from Mumbai and Ahmedabad, a railway station, and bus and taxi connections in every direction. Within an hour or two you can reach the weaving village of Bhujodi, the artisan settlements around Nirona with their rogan art and copper bells, Khavda and the craft villages of the northern Banni, the great white salt flats of the Rann, Mandvi's beach and shipyard, and — with a longer drive — Dholavira.

October to March is the season; December and January bring Rann Utsav and a corresponding squeeze on hotel rooms across the district, so book well ahead. Give Bhuj two nights at minimum, more if you intend to do the craft villages properly, and treat the city itself as more than a place to sleep. A morning walking from Aina Mahal to Prag Mahal to the museum and up Bhujio hill tells you a great deal about what happened here in 2001 and what has been made since.

If you go

• Do Aina Mahal and Prag Mahal together — the contrast between the restored hall and the still-damaged palace is the point.
• Climb the Prag Mahal clock tower for a view that makes the rebuilt street layout obvious.
• Give the Kutch Museum an hour; founded in 1877, it is the oldest in Gujarat and unusually good on pastoral communities.
• Buy craft in the villages rather than the city bazaars — better work, and far more of the money reaches the maker.
• Use Bhuj as a two- or three-night base for Bhujodi, Nirona, the Banni villages, the white Rann and Mandvi.

Bhuj is not a pretty city in the postcard sense, and the 2001 earthquake is the reason. What it offers instead is unusual legibility: a mirrored eighteenth-century hall lovingly brought back, a Victorian palace still visibly broken, wide new roads over the ghost of old lanes, and a district-wide craft revival that grew out of the rubble. Come for two or three nights, walk the old city in a morning, then use it as the gateway to everything Kutch does better than anywhere else in India.