A single millimetre. That is the margin of tolerance at which the artisans at Chanakya School of Craft are expected to work. It is a strangely revealing number for an organisation now presenting monumental works of fibre, sculpture and embroidery. The scale may have changed, but the principle has not: the spectacular is built from tiny, repeated acts of attention.
The Chanakya craftspeople
| Photo Credit:
Hashim Badani
This September, Chanakya International marks 40 years since its founding, alongside a decade of the Chanakya Foundation and School of Craft, with three exhibitions across Mumbai.
En Route at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum runs from September 8 to October 20; Garden of Gestures at the Chanakya ateliers till September 30; and Belong at Experimenter, Colaba, from September 10 to October 17. Together, they offer something more interesting than an anniversary retrospective. They trace how a Mumbai embroidery atelier became a cultural practice spanning fashion, education, research and contemporary art and, along the way, ask why craft is still so often treated as something adjacent to art rather than part of it.
From left: Maria Grazia Chiuri, Tasneem Zakaria Mehta and Karishma Swali
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement
Chanakya International is, at its core, a Mumbai atelier founded in 1986. It grew from a belief in the value of India’s master craftspeople and their accumulated knowledge, eventually becoming a major force in global couture while expanding into research, education and artistic practice. Today, under Karishma Swali, Creative Director of Chanakya International and Chanakya School of Craft, the Byculla-based practice has creative relationships with more than 50 international fashion houses.
The unfolding
At the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Byculla, En Route begins with a journey that started thousands of miles away, at the Vatican Apostolic Library in Rome. There, Karishma and the Chanakya Collective encountered the stories of six 19th-century women, namely Nellie Bly, Annie Londonderry, Gertrude Bell, Elizabeth Bisland, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, whose extraordinary travels had largely disappeared from popular histories.
The seven layers installation
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement
“We chanced upon the journeys of six women, remarkable journeys that changed the world as we know it. But nobody was talking about these journeys,” Karishma says. “We chose to map them and celebrate them through our fibre.”
The works made for the Vatican in 2025 are now being shown in India for the first time. But in Mumbai, the idea of mapping expands. The museum has an extensive collection of rare maps documenting the evolution of the city, and Karishma and the Chanakya Collective use those histories as a starting point for a much larger installation.
En route at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement
The main installation unfolds through seven layers of cartographic drawings worked in thread, recalling Mumbai’s earliest form as Heptanesia — the seven islands that existed before reclamation joined them into the city we know. From there, the work traces Mumbai’s transformation through reclamation, trade, the cotton mills and the Art Deco seafront.
The seven layers are important. They give the work a sense of accumulation, but they also evoke the way Mumbai itself is experienced. The city is always being built, rebuilt, reclaimed and reinterpreted.
Garden of Gestures at the Chanakya ateliers
| Photo Credit:
Ryan Martis
And the material is not incidental. Cotton runs through the installation as both fibre and history. “We worked on it in cotton because of the cotton mills,” Karishma says. The choice connects the physical material of the work to one of the industries that helped make modern Mumbai, while the references to trade and exchange point to the city’s older role as a meeting place for people, goods and ideas.
“This ode to Mumbai is especially [meaningful] because it is the city where I was born and raised. It’s the city of Chanakya,” Karishma says. “What I hope to capture somehow is the chaos, but also the connected energy of the city.”
That connected energy is what makes the installation feel like a portrait.
For Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, Managing Trustee and Honorary Director of the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, and an art historian and curator, that movement between histories is also central to what the museum is trying to do. “I have been trying very hard to break the silos between art and craft. This is a colonial legacy,” she says. “In the Indian tradition, art and craft were all one integrated… You were artisans. You were also craftsmen. You were also artists.”
Garden of Gestures at the Chanakya ateliers
| Photo Credit:
Ryan Martis
It is a distinction with consequences. Craft has traditionally been discussed through preservation, skill, and tradition, while contemporary art is granted the more glamorous vocabulary of ideas and concepts. En Route deliberately pushes against that hierarchy. “To do the research, to bring it all together, and then to translate those ideas into these remarkable works of art — and they really are works of art,” Mehta says.
Coming together
En route at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum
| Photo Credit:
RYAN MARTIS
The relationship between Chanakya and Maria Grazia Chiuri, who was present at the unveiling, sits at an important point in that evolution. Their professional association stretches back decades, beginning with Chiuri’s work with Chanakya on embroidery before her years at Dior. When she became Dior’s Creative Director of womenswear in 2016, the relationship expanded into a much larger conversation between fashion, craft and artistic practice. Chiuri has since moved back to Fendi, where she is now Chief Creative Officer, but her connection with Mumbai and Chanakya remains part of that history.
“Mumbai is inspiring. Every time I come here, I see how the city has evolved and how that evolution is interpreted through the work. There is something about the working hands of the people here that reflects the working hands of the artisans. It gives gravitas to what I do, and I truly appreciate the extraordinary skill of Indian craftspeople,” she says.
That idea of knowledge moving from hand to hand runs through Garden of Gestures at the Chanakya atelier in Byculla, which runs through September 30. Drawing on the ancient Indian garden traditions of Upvan, Tapovan and Kunj, the exhibition considers how knowledge is first observed, then practised and eventually absorbed into the body. It is about what happens when a gesture is repeated so many times that it stops feeling like a technique and becomes instinct.
At the centre are seven large Saptamatrika sculptures — the Seven Mothers — made from bamboo, raffia and cotton. Their forms are built through weaving, basketry, knotting, plaiting, coiling, and herringbone and twill structures.
Belong at Experimenter, Colaba
| Photo Credit:
Ryan Martis
And then there is Belong at Experimenter, on view until October 17. It is Chanakya School’s first solo exhibition at Experimenter’s Colaba space and its second solo with the gallery. Here, the hand becomes almost impossible to separate from the object. Threads, beads and fibres accumulate until textile begins to behave like landscape, architecture or sculpture. Organic cotton and silk threads, glass and recycled seed beads build dense surfaces; coconut, banana and jute fibres are braided, coiled, bound, wrapped and woven into forms that occupy space rather than simply sit on a wall.
The effect is to reverse an assumption about scale. Something monumental does not necessarily begin with something monumental. It can begin with a single thread, a knot, a repeated stitch, a hand learning the same movement again and again.
