Amazon Goes Where No Retailer Has Gone Before for Endangered Art
Aditya Agarwal and Viraj Thakkar, trainers, at the Amazon seller workshop in Bhuj, India.
Photographer: Saritha Rai/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Abdul Gafur Khatri lives on the fringe of great salt marshes in far western India. He doesn’t own a smartphone. He’s never surfed the web. Still, the 53-year-old thinks the internet may be his last hope of reviving a fading art called Rogan that’s been passed down through eight generations of his family.
“If I can sell online, demand will go up,” says the grey-haired artisan, one of the last living custodians of a skill that uses gummy, colored pastes to paint intricate motifs on cloth.