This year marks 40 years of Chanakya International and 10 years of the Chanakya School of Craft. For four decades, Chanakya has been guided by a commitment to elevate and sustain the pluralistic beauty of India’s craft heritage, while creating the conditions for these knowledge systems to remain dynamic and continually evolving. At the heart of this has been a belief in the intelligence of the hand and in recognising artisans as active participants in the creative process. As their practice has evolved across generations, disciplines and cultures, this ethos has remained its enduring foundation.
To celebrate this milestone, they have also unveiled three exhibitions across Mumbai. En Route, first unveiled at the Vatican Apostolic Library, features embroidered maps and handcrafted globes at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum. Garden of Gestures, on view at the Chanakya ateliers, explores the languages of making through monumental textile and sculptural works, celebrating craft traditions and the hands behind them. Belong at Experimenter, Colaba, also explores these ideas of craft and preservation. Karishma Swali, Creative Director of Chanakya International & Chanakya School of Craft and Chairperson of Chanakya Foundation took us behind the scenes of building these exhibitions, celebrating this milestone and keeping craft relevant for younger generations.
This year marks 40 years of Chanakya International and 10 years of the Chanakya School of Craft. What a feat. Looking back, what feels like the most meaningful milestone in this journey?
When I look back, I don’t think I could isolate one milestone. What feels most meaningful is the continuity of people, knowledge and relationships across these four decades. Within couture, Chanakya has played a pivotal role in advancing the highest expressions of craft, bringing together 13th- and 14th-generation master artisans whose extraordinary depth of knowledge has shaped enduring creative partnerships with leading fashion houses and continually expanded the possibilities of material, technique and design. Many of the master artisans who began working alongside my father remain an integral part of Chanakya today, and we now have their children working alongside them. To witness that knowledge move across generations, evolving through each pair of hands while remaining connected to its lineage, is incredibly meaningful.
Education became another expression of this philosophy. I still remember founding the Chanakya School of Craft in a modest learning space in Dharavi, at a time when much of this knowledge was transmitted patrimonially and women had very little access to it. I spent months going door to door, sitting with families and slowly building trust. A decade later, more than 1,400 women have trained through the School, which has evolved into a collective with a vocabulary and creative agency of its own.
Alongside this, our cultural and artistic practice has created new contexts for this knowledge and new forms of creative expression. Through works presented at La Biennale di Venezia, the Vatican Apostolic Library, Musée Rodin and other significant cultural platforms, we have sought to dismantle long-standing hierarchies between craft, fine art and other forms of creative expression, allowing textile and embroidery to be encountered through sculpture, installation and contemporary art. For me, these three expressions are part of the same living continuum: knowledge moving across generations, acquiring new perspectives and forms while remaining deeply connected to the people who carry it forward.
En Route brings together embroidered maps and handcrafted globes. What drew you to these themes at this moment?
En Route began at the Vatican Apostolic Library, where Maria Grazia Chiuri and I were invited to respond to the Library’s holdings for the Jubilee year. Within its collections, we encountered the stories of six women who had travelled the world in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: Nellie Bly, Annie Londonderry, Gertrude Bell, Elizabeth Bisland, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson. This became the starting point for the 6 maps - Il Viaggio. Alongside these, we created two handcrafted globes: Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, showcasing 88 distinct global textile traditions, and Antrik Vishwa, a deeply personal reflection of the artisans of the Chanakya School of Craft. Many of these women, having rarely ventured beyond their communities, have woven evocative landscapes of their homes, temples, and rivers—transforming personal memory into universal artistry.
Bringing En Route to Mumbai in Chanakya’s fortieth year felt like a natural next chapter, but also an opportunity for the project to acquire an entirely new context. At the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, the works enter into dialogue with a collection that holds within it the material and cultural histories of Mumbai, a city itself shaped by centuries of movement, migration, trade and continual reinvention.
For this iteration, we created two new embroidered maps alongside a series of interdisciplinary works that extend the language of En Route through the histories of Mumbai and the Museum itself. The first map draws from historic maps of Mumbai, tracing the city’s changing geographies and the ways in which land, communities and cultures have continually converged and transformed over time. The second is conceived as an ode to the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, responding to its extraordinary collection and bringing objects from its archives into a new cartographic composition. The accompanying interdisciplinary works further this dialogue, drawing from the Museum’s collection to explore the intersections between material, place and cultural exchange. The Mumbai chapter brings En Route into a more intimate relationship with place, asking how knowledge travels, how cities are shaped through encounter, and how the handmade can offer another way of reading our histories.
Garden of Gestures centres the act of making and the artisans behind it. Walk us through the creative process behind ideating this exhibition.
Garden of Gestures began with a reflection on learning itself, and on the idea that to tend a garden is also to study. There is something profound in planting a seed and tending to it through a long period of germination. It teaches us that knowledge, much like a seed, cannot be hurried into flowering. Within Indian thought, learning has always been understood as a lifelong pursuit, one that transforms the self as much as the work. A gesture follows a similar arc: it is first observed, then repeated and practised, until knowledge becomes so deeply embodied that the gesture becomes instinctive.
We drew from an ancient Indian taxonomy of gardens and groves, looking at each as a metaphor for a distinct mode of learning. The Upvan, the forest brought close, represents our earliest encounter with material, when knowledge is transmitted through observation, repetition and shared practice. It speaks to a time when knowledge travelled through the body before it was written down, when the hand itself became an archive of tacit intelligence.
From there, we enter the Tapovan, the forest of contemplation, where assiduous practice begins to deepen into enquiry, discernment and invention. Within it sits the Kunj, the most intimate of the groves, a space of introspection where accumulated knowledge gives way to individual expression. Together, these spaces trace how learning gradually moves from transmission to interpretation, and ultimately, transformation.
At the heart of the exhibition are the Saptamatrikas, the seven mothers, whose enduring presence within Indian visual culture became our point of departure for seven qualities that sustain the act of making: curiosity, protection, resilience, nourishment, insight, transformation and collective strength. Seven monumental sculptures are handwoven in bamboo, raffia and cotton through weaving, basketry, knotting, plaiting and coiling, alongside herringbone and twill-weave structures. These are processes built through rhythm, patience and repetition, mirroring the very trajectory of learning that the exhibition explores.
Ultimately, Garden of Gestures traces the life of a gesture: from its first transmission from one hand to another, through years of practice, enquiry and discovery, to the moment when knowledge becomes inseparable from the maker. It is a reflection on making as a lifelong pursuit, and on the generations of hands through which knowledge is continually carried forward.
How has your approach to craft evolved over the years? What is one thing that has changed and one thing that has remained the same?
My father taught me very early that excellence is cultivated through patience, rigour and integrity, and through a deep attentiveness to material, process and the people involved in bringing an idea into being. That ethos has remained immutable throughout my journey. What has expanded enormously is my understanding of what textiles can encompass. My early years at Chanakya were spent immersed in embroidery and textile traditions, learning alongside generations of master artisans. Over time, my curiosity has been about creating new contexts for this knowledge and exploring how it can engage with art, design, architecture and fashion, from the intimacy of a garment to monumental artworks and immersive installations. This porosity between disciplines has also created greater space for artisans to participate in experimentation, interpretation and authorship.
The Chanakya School of Craft, and more recently Chorus, have grown from this evolution, each creating different possibilities for education, expression and contemporary practice. When I first entered the atelier as a young woman, I could never have imagined the forms this journey would take. What remains unchanged is a respect for the maker, reverence for material and process, and an enduring belief in the capacity of craft knowledge to continually evolve and find new expression.
Since you've worked at the intersection of contemporary art and traditional craftsmanship for many years, how do you keep craft relevant for younger generations?
I think relevance begins with agency. For a younger generation to form a meaningful relationship with craft, they need to encounter it as a living knowledge system that they can question, interpret and contribute to. Tradition has always evolved in this way. Every generation receives a vocabulary and inevitably leaves its own imprint upon it.
Much of our work has therefore been about creating contemporary contexts in which this knowledge can continue to evolve. We have seen techniques such as lacemaking, appliqué, quilting and phulkari acquire entirely new expressions through conversations with contemporary art, fashion and design. Materials such as raffia can move between sculptural works and garments. These encounters allow younger makers to understand the extraordinary versatility of textiles and, importantly, to imagine their own possibilities within it.
Education is central to this. At the Chanakya School of Craft, learning begins with a deep understanding of technique and gradually moves towards experimentation, interpretation and individual expression. Over time, the women develop their own visual vocabularies and emerge with a sense of creative authorship. As we enter the School’s next decade, we are also exploring digital learning as a way of making this knowledge more accessible to young women across geographies.
We are equally interested in creating new avenues like The Swali Craft Prize, established with India Art Fair, supports emerging artists who are expanding the discourse around craft through their own practices. Chorus represents another expression of this continuum. Working alongside Avantika has brought a generational perspective to how accumulated textile knowledge can inhabit contemporary life and culture.
Ultimately, I think craft remains relevant when it retains its capacity for metamorphosis. Younger generations need the freedom to inherit these traditions on their own terms, to experiment with them and eventually extend their vocabulary. That is how knowledge remains alive: through transmission, curiosity and the creative agency of each generation that carries it forward.
The Chanakya School of Craft has become a space for education as much as preservation. What do you hope the next decade will look like?
The Chanakya School of Craft was founded with a very clear purpose: to institutionalise craft knowledge and create equitable access to craft education for women, through a rigorous framework in which these knowledge systems could be studied, documented, transmitted and continually expanded. For generations, much of this knowledge had travelled through familial and community lineages, often from father to son. The School sought to widen that lineage of transmission, creating a space where women could learn, interpret and eventually become custodians and authors of this knowledge.
As we enter our second decade, my hope is to deepen this mission while expanding its reach. Alongside growing our presence in Mumbai and Bologna, digital learning will allow us to transcend geography and make this knowledge accessible to women across different communities, while retaining the rigour and depth fundamental to the School.
The next chapter also extends beyond the School itself. We want to work more closely with schools, universities and design institutes to embed craft thinking within education from an early stage. Craft offers a profound way of understanding material, process, ecology, collaboration and problem-solving. Through sustained interventions with educational institutions, we hope to build a more expansive pedagogy around textiles and craft and allow younger generations to encounter these knowledge systems as an integral part of how they think and create.
Equally important is creating a self-sustaining ecology of learning. Through our Train the Trainer programme, graduates return as educators, allowing knowledge to move from learner to teacher and gather new perspectives with each transmission. Ultimately, I hope the next decade establishes craft more firmly within contemporary cultural and educational discourse, creating greater access and agency while giving these knowledge systems the recognition and rigour to shape how future generations think, design and create.
What do you believe is the future of craft in India, and what role do institutions like Chanakya have to play in shaping it?
I believe the future of craft in India lies in recognising it as a dynamic knowledge system, carrying centuries of material understanding, cultural exchange and human ingenuity. India has an extraordinary plurality of traditions, each shaped by its geography, community and history. Their future depends on creating the conditions for this knowledge to be practised, studied and continually expanded by the generations that inherit it.
At Chanakya, we approach this responsibility across three interconnected verticals: couture, education, and culture and artistic practice. Within couture, we continue to advance the possibilities of material, technique and design alongside generations of master artisans. Through the Chanakya School of Craft, we are creating equitable access to craft education for women, while building a rigorous framework for knowledge to be documented, transmitted and reinterpreted. Our cultural and artistic practice creates another space for this evolution, dismantling long-standing hierarchies between craft, fine art and other forms of creative expression, and positioning the knowledge of the maker within contemporary cultural discourse.
I also believe craft must occupy a more significant place within education. Deeper engagement with schools, design institutes and universities can allow younger generations to encounter craft as a way of thinking through material, ecology, collaboration and design. There is an extraordinary perspicacity embedded within these practices that extends far beyond the object being made. For us, the future lies in creating an ecology where inherited knowledge can evolve through new generations and contexts, while the people who carry that knowledge remain at its centre.
Words Neeraja Srinivasan
Date 11.9.2026