This project was supported by the India Foundation for the Arts through the Archives and Museums Creative Grant. It is a visual exploration of five stories from the textile archive of the MARG Foundation.
It’s a privilege to have access to the Marg textile archive, as it is full of extraordinary stories, studies and histories of the fabrics of this subcontinent. From the very beginning, I knew I wasn’t attempting to create a representative project of “Indian textiles.” That idea felt both impossible and reductive. The textiles universe is so vast that moving through the archive was overwhelming, though tremendously inspiring.
I did feel a responsibility to construct a conclusive theme that could neatly draw a coherent thread bringing many stories together. But the more I read, the clearer it became that the history of textiles in this region resists containment of any kind and any single thread kept unravelling into multiple. Its dimensions are expansive, layered, and often contradictory.
So instead of forcing a singular narrative, I began asking what I felt were foundational themes to handicraft itself. I kept returning to community, ecology, storytelling, and identity. These became my lens through which to revisit “Indian” textiles – not as a category to define, but as a field of relationships.
I wanted to foreground stories that revealed particular dimensions of textile-making cultures – their embedded knowledge systems, their social worlds, their negotiations with environment and memory. Over time, through trial and error – questioning whether I had sufficient visual material, whether a story genuinely moved me, whether I could do justice to its complexity – I arrived at five pieces.
For me, these five works open up remarkable depth and dimension.
The first one was the story of Indigo. Indigo is one of the world’s oldest and most widely used blue dyes, with a history that stretches back thousands of years. But in the story of indigo, colour is never just colour. It is agriculture, trade, colonial extraction, labour, rebellion, industrialisation, and ecological return all at once. The dye connects the chemistry of a plant to the politics of land and labour, showing how something as seemingly simple as a colour can shape economies and lives.
Chintz affected me differently. What stays with me is not just the trade history, but the power of the soft floral surface itself. These were cottons painted with such technical confidence that colour entered fibre and held. But beyond technique, there is something else: the quiet power of those trees, those flowers. They are still everywhere – on bedding, curtains, fashion, wallpapers – globally absorbed into visual culture. A textile that began by destabilising European markets now reads as almost generic domestic familiarity. I am interested in that shift. How something visually gentle can carry enormous structural force, and how its aesthetic vocabulary can outlast the systems that tried to contain it.
Chizami matters to me because it is not about survival in the abstract. It is about a community that is still intact, still weaving, still farming. The textile culture there thrives because it is embedded in identity, not detached from it. The waist-strap loom is tied to the body; the patterns belong to the Chakhesang community; weaving sits alongside millet cultivation, food festivals, and women’s organising. Ecology and community are not separate themes – they are the same system. It is intimate and contemporary at the same time.
Jadunath Supakar introduces another layer. A formally trained artist entering Banaras and choosing to learn the language of the loom before redrawing it. I see in him as a prototype : the contemporary practitioner drawn toward craft not to aestheticise it, but to work within its intelligence. His collaboration with weavers complicates authorship. Innovation does not appear as rupture. It appears as proximity, translation, and shared authorship. That model feels more significant now in a society turning to late stage capitalist modes of production, where this idea of revivalism has turned into something far more exclusive and money oriented.
Kathiawari embroidery begins at the threshold. When carved doors and built ornament were not possible, women marked their homes with thread instead and textile stood in for architecture. But the surface carries more than decoration. Gujarat today may be narrated through rigid political and religious lines, identities sharpened or erased in cycles, yet the embroidery predates and outlasts these arrangements. Motifs shaped by centuries of trade, movement and exchange remain embedded in stitch. Mirrors, geometries, beadwork – they hold the imprint of communities that have passed through, settled, mingled. The textile does not adjust itself to match the political climate and the cultural narrative. It continues to hold the layered presence of the people who have lived on that land.
Placed together, these five stories move across very different terrains – pigment chemistry, global trade, community ecology, collaborative revival, regional migration. They show how deeply textiles intersect with systems : economic, environmental, political, and social, without losing their visual force. They show how expansive the frame is and that textile is never only surface.
Selected Stories from The Marg Foundation Archive :
1. Chizami Weaves Chizami Weaves of Nagaland and the North East Network Vol. 73, Issue 4 | Author: North East Network
2. Kathiawar The Survey of Embroidery Traditions Vol. 17, Issue 2 | Author: Jasleen Dhamija
3. Indigo The Story of Indigo Vol. 73, Issue 4 | Author: Ritu Sinha
4. Jadunath Supakar Jadunath Supakar and Design Revival in Banaras Brocades Vol. 73, Issue 4 | Author: Anjan Chakraverty
5. Chintz The Significance of Chintz Vol. 31, Issue 4 | Author: Jasleen Dhamija