ELLE Weaves: A Journey Through India’s Living Crafts With Swadesh

Step into Swadesh and you are immediately surrounded by India’s living traditions. Created as a platform to preserve and promote the country’s arts, it celebrates the skill of the more than 70 lakh artisans whose work defines our cultural identity. Here, textiles are not just displayed for admiration; they are understood through the people, processes, and legacies that shape them.

Zardosi, for instance, is one of the centrepieces. In Swadesh’s collection, artisans in Bhopal and Ujjain continue the painstaking embroidery once reserved for royal robes. Using an ari (hooked needle), they couch metallic threads — once pure gold or silver, now contemporary alloys—into dense arabesques and floral designs across silk and velvet. The result is as intricate as jewellery, a craft passed down strictly through generations of skilled hands.

From Rajasthan comes Syahi Begar, a resist block-printing technique practised in Bagru. Artisans carve wooden blocks with geometric patterns, apply natural mordants, and then layer the fabric with vegetable dyes to create sharp contrasts in only two colours — red and black. Each length of cloth involves multiple rounds of dyeing and drying, making the simplest design a process of patience and precision. Sujini embroidery, native to Bihar, carries another narrative. Traditionally stitched onto discarded sarees, it relies on fine running stitches (similar to kantha) that outline daily life, folklore, and cosmological symbols. At Swadesh, women artisans continue this storytelling through thread, turning old cloth into vibrant panels of cultural memory.

From Tamil Nadu, Kanjeevaram silk showcases the engineering of the loom itself. Woven on a three-shuttle loom, the borders, pallu, and body of the sari are interlocked so seamlessly that they cannot be separated. Gold or silver zari threads are woven into the silk warp, producing designs that combine strength with brilliance — a technique that has made the weave a cornerstone of Indian bridal trousseaux as well as the collections of Swadesh. Kashmir contributes Kal Baffi carpets to the collection, where the art lies in the knot. Each design begins as a taalim, a coded script handed to the weaver. Knot by knot, artisans tie wool or silk into the warp, with one carpet often taking months or even years to complete, depending on its size and detail. What emerges is a dense, durable textile, its patterns as precise as a map. 

From Bengal comes Jamdani, a weaving technique so intricate it has been recognised by UNESCO. On fine muslin, supplementary weft threads are inserted by hand using a small bamboo or horn tool. Motifs appear to float on the surface of the fabric, while the base remains almost sheer—an effect that requires extreme dexterity at the loom.

Ikat, seen across regions like Odisha, Telangana, and Gujarat, takes a very different approach. Instead of designing on the loom, the threads are dyed before weaving. Warp, weft, or both are carefully bound and dyed in sections so that, when woven, the pre-dyed segments align to reveal the final motif. It is a process that requires careful calculation — one misaligned thread and the entire design shifts.

Chikankari from Lucknow relies on delicacy rather than density, and is also one of the highlighted textile crafts at Swadesh. Artisans draw patterns on fine cotton, then embroider them with stitches that play with transparency and shadow, creating a three-dimensional effect. Chanderi weavers in Madhya Pradesh blend silk and cotton yarns, producing fabrics known for their lustre and lightweight quality, often patterned with coin, floral, or geometric motifs. Bandhani, practised in Gujarat and Rajasthan, is one of the most labour-intensive techniques, where fabric is pinched and tied into thousands of tiny bindings before dyeing, each knot protecting the base colour to form intricate dotted patterns.

Banarasi brocades, woven in Varanasi, remain iconic at Swadesh for their grandeur. Using jacquard looms, artisans weave silk with metallic zari threads to create dense floral and architectural motifs, often inspired by Mughal design. These textiles have long been associated with ceremonial wear and are safeguarded today with GI protection. Even the relatively lesser-known Jat Garasiya embroidery of Kutch is represented by the brand—its striking geometry achieved without preliminary sketches, only through careful counting of threads on the fabric.

By presenting these crafts together, Swadesh highlights not only the finished textiles but the skill and patience behind them. The movement is about ensuring these age-old techniques remain viable, creating opportunities for artisans to sustain their practice while making heritage relevant to modern audiences.

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At Swadesh, every weave and stitch feels anchored in continuity. What could easily have been reduced to museum pieces are, instead, thriving traditions—alive in the hands of the people who make them and in the wardrobes of those who choose to wear them. It is a reminder that India’s textile heritage is not frozen in time but is constantly in the act of becoming better and thriving with the changing times. 

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