GAJDAL

About the collection :

Inspired by the Sohrai mural tradition of Jharkhand.

Sohrai is one of India’s oldest living art forms. Practiced primarily by women from tribal communities in the Hazaribagh district of Jharkhand, it is a mural painting tradition created every year before the harvest festival of the same name. Women gather and paint the walls of their homes using natural earth pigments — colored clay, charcoal, rice paste — applied with fingers, twigs, and simple tools.

This is not decoration. It is devotion. A ritual act of welcoming the harvest, invoking protection for the family, and celebrating the bond between humans, animals, and the land they live on.

The motifs of Sohrai are drawn from the immediate world around the artist. Peacocks, elephants, deer, tigers, horses. Suns, flowers, leaves, and interlocking geometric patterns that describe the interconnectedness of all living things. Every image on a Sohrai wall is an offering — painted collectively by women, renewed each year, rooted in the earth it comes from.

What makes Sohrai visually distinct is its warmth. The pigments are earthen — deep reds, ambers, blacks, and creams that feel like they were pulled straight from the ground. Because they were.

मिट्टी से मिलो is Cloy’s reinterpretation of this tradition into four minimal, wearable pieces — each one carrying a different creature, a different feeling from the Sohrai world.

Design Description:

A framed border print centred on the chest — three rows stacked in classic Sohrai style. Suns across the top. A geometric pattern in the middle. A line of elephants walking through leaves at the bottom. Everything contained in one quiet rectangle.

This is Sohrai at its most rhythmic. The repeating motif is the point — one after another, patient and full of life, the way women painted their walls row by row before the harvest. In Sohrai tradition, elephants represent strength, prosperity, and community.