Mojari

Rajasthan has a rich, and long practice of leather crafts. Each rural community had its own families of leather workers. The Juti, Mojari, or Pagarkhi are the leather shoes and slippers made by such artisans, and worn by both men and women of all communities.

Mojari, in particular, is a generic name for handcrafted ethnic footwear produced in India and Pakistan. It is the staple footwear of rural Rajasthan. “In Rajasthan, there are about 1,00,000 households engaged in the production of this traditional hand stitched pair of shoes made out of coarse vegetable-tanned leather”. In Jaipur, the embroidery on the Mojari is done on velvet, while in Jodhpur, it is done on leather with proficient golden ornamentation.

Traditionally, Mojari was made by specialized craftsmen with heavily embroidered upper parts, but with the passage of time, these were replaced by artificial materials like beads and bells.