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The house of Abhimanyu Rathi stands in a narrow street within sight of the barrel-sided walls of the ancient fort of Jaisalmer in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Sturdily stone-built, trim and tidy, the house is as narrow as the street it overlooks, its three floors and flat roof reached by a stone staircase whose steep, uneven steps are worn and polished to a marble shine. Outside, a small hand-painted sign beside the door reads: "Barmer Embroidiry House - Specialist in embroidiry and textiles". Discreet, quaintly misspelt, it is hardly the most enticing or descriptive of shingles, given the treasures that lie within.

Tall and slender, like the house he occupies, barefoot, softly-spoken and gracious to a fault, Mr Rathi is the specialist in question, his stock of traditional Indian textiles bulging from the floor-to-ceiling shelves that line his third-floor storeroom. It is a pleasantly hot afternoon in early March and for the last two hours, over glasses of spiced masala chai, he has been showing just a small selection of his treasures.

Tugged from the shelves are exquisitely embroidered top-coats from Baluchistan, light-as-a-whisper odhnis (shawls) from Kashmir and extravagantly-decorated juhls (ceremonial animal coverings) from Saurashtra. Here in profusion are tasselled torans (door hangings) and appliqued pachhitpatis (pelmets) from Gujarat, richly-coloured sujanis (quilts) from Bengal, mirrorwork cholis (blouses) from Sind and tie-dyed cotton and silk dupattas (head-scarves) from Rajasthan, each new item spread out, unfurled, floating down onto the growing pile in the centre of the floor.

With a few words of explanation from Mr Rathi come embroidered chaklas (squares) trimmed with cowrie shells by the Banjara tribes of the Deccan Plateau; a mashru-work gaghra (skirt) from Kutch in which the silk thread is woven or embroidered onto a cotton base to accommodate Muslim beliefs; and length after billowing length of the celebrated double-ikat Patola-weave sari that comes only from Patan, takes four months to make and costs tens of thousands of rupees - if you're lucky enough to find one, that is.

In this distant outpost on the scrubby edge of India's Great Thar desert, in a landscape as brown as a camel's hide, the colours, the compositions and the exquisite workmanship of Mr Rathi's textile collection simply dazzle the eye. Here are reds that range in shade from the palest pink to maraschino cherry, blues of the deepest indigo and lightest topaz, and yellows and greens that race in rainbow hues across the spectrum. Here is every kind of stitch, style and shape to suit every conceivable purpose, from cradle hammock to ox-horn covering, from spice pocket to money belt, from dowry bag to tobacco pouch, each piece worked with intricate patterns and motifs, naive and sophisticated, bold and subtle, abstract and figurative depending on their provenance (no Moslem would countenance a human or animal figure in their designs). Here are parrots and peacocks, scorpions and sunbursts, marigolds and mango trees, palms, elephants and camels, dancing stick figures and benevolent Indian gods; here are stripes and stars, squares and circles, spots and whorls, and everywhere that flashing, splintered mirrorwork - symbol of water and life in a parched land; everything printed, woven, tie-dyed, hand-painted, embroidered or appliqued in cotton, silk, wool and camel hair. In a single afternoon in Mr Rathi's storeroom I saw everything India knows about textiles.

I had come to India to learn about its traditional textiles, visit its museums and workshops and meet its master craftsmen. In four weeks I travelled from the Craft Museum in Delhi to the celebrated Calico Museum in Ahmedabad by a route through the twin states of Rajasthan and Gujarat that introduced me to every imaginable facet of India's textile industry, in every conceivable surrounding.

In the desert wastes of Gujarat, heavily-tattooed women from a village called Mitha Ghora demonstrated their intricate chain-stitch embroidery and shyly displayed their mirrorwork shawls, saris and blouses. In Khuri, no more than fifty kilometres from the Pakistani border in Rajasthan, an old woman called Saintibai showed me the tough, vibrantly-patterned home-loom desert blankets for which she is renowned. And late one afternoon in Patan I walked through a dusty papaya orchard to visit one of the four remaining families in India who still produce those incomparable Patola-weave saris.

In Malwan, on the edge of the Little Raan of Kutch, I saw how Mahatma Gandhi's influence still shapes traditional life in rural India, each family in the village employed in some aspect of the homespun cotton industry - from husking the cotton bolls to weaving the cloth. In Udaipur I learnt from a master craftsman the traditional art of tie-dying - not the blotted patterns beloved of university students in the Seventies, but masterpieces of delicate design and shimmering colour. (Can there be anything more compulsive or satisfying than pulling out the knots in a length of tie-and-dye?) And at Sanganer, past a river bank swathed in lengths of freshly-dyed cotton hung out to dry on towering wooden frames, I watched the mesmeric process of block-printing in one of the village's many workshops: the inking of the wood-carved block, its careful placing on the material, the "thud-thud" of a fist on the handle to fix the print to the cloth and, lo and behold, one more link in the pattern.

Along the way, there were always those seemingly unplanned moments, those unexpected delights that India provides in endless abundance. We took a camel ride into the desert for a sand-dune sunset; made a moonlit visit to the Sun Temple of Modhera and an expedition in search of wild asses across the desert landscapes of the Little Raan of Kutch. We saw an a capella performance of classical Indian raag singing in the home of a Jodhpuri businessman; an evening of traditional stick dancing in Zainabad; an encounter with Rabari nomads at a religious festival in Surendranagar. We took side-trips to Delhi's Mughal Gardens, open only 26 days a year; to the great Jain temple of Ranakpur; to the eighteenth-century observatory of Maharajah Jai Singh II in Jaipur; and to the monumentally-carved step wells of Patan.

And, of course, I shopped, sweeping across the sub-continent consumed with the acquisitive zeal of a marauding Moghul horde: silver jewellery in Udaipur; hand-woven rugs in Jaipur; antiques and spices in Jodhpur; and, everywhere, fabrics by the acre - shawls and jackets, skirts and scarves, wall-hangings and bedspreads, every exquisitely-worked thread haggled over and bartered for in what seemed like every merchant shop and fly-pestered bazaar between Delhi and Bombay.

Which was why I found myself in Mr Rathi's treasure-filled eyrie that hot afternoon in March: not just to wonder at his textile collection, not just to learn still more about India's great textile heritage, but to fight the good fight, to engage once again in that doomed conflict between conscience and credit card. Faced with such treasures, who was I to resist?

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