BackWhite magic | Kutch, Gujarat
The world's largest salt marsh is a place of desolation, mirages and a magical annual fair
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It is an expanse: a vast, immaculate white landscape stretching as far as the eye can see. It is also a void: the uninterrupted whiteness making it appear blank, as though this was land’s end and I had my nose up against a big empty space. One more step and I would fall into a parallel universe. It is the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida’s concept of the “hymen": both separation and a point of convergence; it is horizon and boundary, infinity and cipher.
I am standing at the edge of the “White Rann", a hypnotic salt desert that stretches all the way from Gujarat’s Kutch district to Pakistan’s Sindh province, covering around 30,000 sq. km. Also known as the Great Rann of Kutch, it adjoins the Little Rann of Kutch. These together make up the world’s largest salt marsh.
The low-lying mudflats of the White Rann fill with water during the wet season (June-September) and then dry out over the rest of the year. By December, once evaporation has done its work, the saline crust hardens to form the signature luminous white colour. By January, the marsh is an unending white desert.
The Rann is about 100km from Bhuj, the main town of Kutch. It is possible to stay in Bhuj and make a day trip to the Rann, but I have chosen to stay at Dhordo, the last inhabited village before the access road to the White Rann. The journey from Bhuj to Dhordo is relentlessly empty, the occasional wild shrub the only relief from the flat browns all around. The World Wildlife Fund calls the Great Rann of Kutch “the bleakest, dustiest, and hottest region in India". I can feel the dryness on my face, the sandpaper heat leaving calluses. It is a reminder that the Rann itself is part of a yet more extreme landscape—the Thar desert.
There isn’t much to do when you are on the edge of a desert and time begins to loosen its grip on the mind. Without the demands of schedules crammed with “attractions" and “things to do", and—more importantly, without the distraction of a phone network—one is free to be, free to read a book in its entirety, free to let thoughts unravel, reflect, or simply tune out.
Like the Rann itself, that silence, that solitude, is an expanse unto itself. As a break from our city lives, it is a luxury, an escape. As a survival experience, it is terrifying. Make no mistake—for all its photogenic features, the Rann is a force of nature. Really travelling to the Rann would mean allowing it to permeate you, gnaw at you, to contemplate its ferocity, its fearsome ability to sap strength, dehydrate, and pour strange visions into your head.
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In his 1991 book Wild India: The Wildlife And Scenery Of India And Nepal, Guy Mountfort described the Rann as “a desolate area of unrelieved, sun-baked saline clay desert, shimmering with the images of a perpetual mirage". When Saleem Sinai, the protagonist in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, finds himself “anchored off the Rann of Kutch on a heat-soaked afternoon", he says:
“I stared through the heat-haze at the Rann. The Rann of Kutch…I’d always thought it a magical name, and half-feared-half-longed to visit the place, that chameleon area which was land for half the year and sea for the other half, and on which, it was said, the receding ocean would abandon all manner of fabulous debris, such as treasure-chests, white ghostly jellyfish, and even the occasional gasping, freak-legendary figure of a merman."
To experience this, I tramped through the salty crust at midday, the sun on my head, not a soul in sight for miles. I had carried no water with me—and in just the first 20 minutes I could feel my body shrink from the threatening heat.
In Road, Movie, Dev Benegal’s film about an epic journey across barren, thirsty landscapes, the desert becomes a place for elaborate stories and existential introspections, as imaginatively elastic as cinema itself.
Improbable though it sounds, the fair is a reference to the annual Rann Utsav, which runs from December-March. This is how most tourists to the White Rann know it—as a place where people across Kutch gather to hawk their craft and trinkets, as a cultural postcard filled with ethnic flavour. This is when the desert actually recedes, allowing itself to be tamed, to be made into a showpiece. All the bhungas are full, tents come up, there is even traffic.
Yet if you want to see the desert on its own terms, you need to see it without all this. In the film, the morning after the fair, the landscape is as stark as it was before. It could all have been a mirage.
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