Chanakya International turns 40 and refuses nostalgia: no parade of old collections, no greatest-hits montage of their collaborations with over 50 fashion houses, artists and institutions. Instead, the textile and embroidery house founded by Vinod Shah, with its School of Craft now 10, marks both anniversaries across three Mumbai venues.

Deep inside its Byculla atelier, in an enclosed grove called Kunj, fibre falls from ceiling to floor around a 9th-century stone Varahi, a boar-headed goddess. She belongs to the family, and has been “a massive source of inspiration” for Karishma Swali, Shah’s daughter and creative director of Chanakya International. Nearly two decades ago, while cataloguing the family’s antiquities, Swali found Indus seals stamped with seven female figures and wondered who they were. They were the Saptamatrikas, or Seven Mothers.

Karishma Swali, creative director of Chanakya International and School of Craft
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Chanakya International

The legacy that Shah built

Women, both divine and real, run through all three exhibitions. At the atelier, Garden of Gestures sets seven goddesses in red raffia among workshop tools, tracing how a skill passes into the hand. At the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, En Route turns to real women — six travellers and the women who once stitched the world’s globes — asking how knowledge travels. At Experimenter in Colaba, Belong brings the goddesses back in plain fibre to consider what we carry with us. Behind all of it are the artisans, many of them women.

Installation view of Upvan at the Garden of Gestures
| Photo Credit:
Ryan Martis

When Shah founded Chanakya in 1986, he invited craftspeople from across India to Mumbai. “He’s an artist and aesthete. His idea was simple: to share India’s finest craftsmanship with the world,” Swali says. His first client, she recalls, was Italian designer Alberta Ferretti. In their early 20s, Swali and her brother Nehal took four suitcases of swatches to Italy and approached 400 fashion houses; only one, Fendi, signed on.

Since then, Chanakya has grown and now Shah, 83, worries about his 49-year-old daughter’s pace. “He wants me to rest,” she laughs. But 30 years in, she does the opposite. “I feel an urgency to learn more, to learn quickly.”

‘I feel women are long-limbed’

Garden of Gestures at the Byculla atelier is laid out as groves from ancient texts, each a stage in learning a craft. Visitors enter Upvan, the garden brought close, lined with tools, natural dyes, fabric scraps, textile studies, and photos of hands at work. Next comes Tapovan, the forest of contemplation. At its heart, the Saptamatrikas stand in a red arc, taller than a doorway. The Matrikas’ bodies are date-palm raffia dyed with madder root, bamboo and cotton cord, each fibre split, soaked, shaped by hand, then knotted, plaited, coiled or woven.

Vaishnavi’s vast bell of a skirt narrows to a fragile torso; Maheshvari turns architectural, trident raised; Varahi swells at the waist; Narasimhi rides a dark, crocheted tree trunk; Brahmi, the tallest at 2.6 metres, rises in a narrow column; Indrani holds a lotus and a curved blade. Macramé flares out in Chamunda’s skirt; flames rise from her head, yet the fiercest mother looks gentle here. “She operates from compassion,” says Swali.

Karishma Swali with Maria Grazia Chiuri, chief creative officer at Fendi
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Chanakya International

All seven are long-limbed. Swali sketches each figure and sets its scale before the artisans take over, and she draws her women this way. “The long limbs are a part of my practice because I feel women are long-limbed,” she says. “Just the idea of being able to carry so much, hold so much, transmit so much.”

The proportions are hers, but 25 artisans from the School built the bodies, dividing faces, hands and torsos before assembling figures larger than anything they’d ever made. Jethu Bhai, a veteran murti (temple idol) maker, knew how to give them depth. Abdul Hanif Jamadar, a crochet and macramé specialist from Howrah — who worked on the 46-foot toran (a traditional decorative door hanging) for Dior’s 2023 show at the Gateway of India — knew little of the Matrikas, until Swali explained each goddess and her power. “It was an adventure for us,” he says.

Preeti Khimsaria left IT for the School to learn crochet, tatting and macramé; the Matrikas were her first big project. “Through these devis, I felt the strength of being a woman,” she says. “Earlier, we didn’t know we had so much talent, but when it comes out, we feel proud.” That confidence, she says, came from women teaching one another. Since 2016, the School has taught more than 1,400 women, drawing on over 300 embroidery and weaving traditions.

The city in thread

Five minutes from the atelier, the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, the city’s oldest (formerly called the Victoria and Albert Museum), turns to Mumbai itself. En Route opens in the green-and-gold atrium with a freestanding map of the island city, stitched in seven layers of thread. It floats in pale lilac water, looped with black routes and flecked with pennants as it charts the city from the seven islands once known as Heptanesia through reclamation, trade, shipping and cotton mills to the Art Deco seafront.

An embroidered freestanding map of Mumbai
| Photo Credit:
Ryan Martis

The piece draws on the museum’s rare maps, which its honorary director, Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, invited Swali to study. “I wanted that journey to reflect the spirit of Mumbai,” Swali says. Every day, she reckons, some 3,000 people arrive from across India. “The city welcomes, absorbs them.” Chanakya is one of those stories.

Upstairs, in salmon-pink galleries Mehta likens to “a fairy-tale kind of castle”, hang works shown at the Vatican in 2025, now in India for the first time. Swali made them with Italian designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, who brought Chanakya’s embroidery to Dior’s women’s collections as creative director between 2016 and 2025, and backed the School’s collaborations with artists such as Judy Chicago. Chiuri is now chief creative officer at Fendi.

(L-R) Maria Grazia Chiuri, Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, honorary director of Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, and Karishma Swali
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Chanakya International

Invited by the Vatican Apostolic Library to make work for the Catholic Jubilee year, the pair found books by 19th-century women travellers in its archives. Four linen and hemp panels, held together with kantha, now trace six of their journeys, among them journalist Nellie Bly, writer Gertrude Bell and Annie Londonderry, the first woman to cycle around the world.

 Linen and hemp panels, held together with kantha, that trace the journeys of six women travellers
| Photo Credit:
Ryan Martis

In the same archive, Swali found old embroidered globes with disfigured continents, stitched by women hired because they cost less and were never taught what the world looked like. “Women have been left out of creative narratives historically,” she says. “So, they made it from their own memory, and what they thought the world should be.”

Chanakya’s two globes: Antrik Vishwa (inner universe) and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family)
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Chanakya International

Chanakya made two globes in response. Antrik Vishwa, or inner universe, is the work of artisans, many of whom have never left their hometowns. Its companion, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family), patches real continents with 88 textile traditions. As one artisan told Swali: “I may never leave India, but my hands will travel the world.”

The mothers, pared back

By the time you reach Experimenter, the mothers have shed colour and ornament. Belong is Chanakya School’s second solo with Prateek and Priyanka Raja’s gallery. Now, the goddesses are handwoven from jute, coconut and banana fibre, some dense and plaited, others open and latticed. Swali calls them stambhs: “pillar-like, like the trees of the forest”.

Goddesses handwoven from jute, coconut and banana fibreat Belong
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Chanakya International and Experimenter

Seven also become nine, with some mothers repeated. At the centre stands Brahmi, her four faces looking in every direction, flanked by two lion-headed Narasimhis. Maheshvari appears thrice, Vaishnavi twice and Varahi once; Indrani and Chamunda remain absent.

Even off their pedestals, the mothers are watching. On one wall hangs Within, three embroidered panels of dense foliage. Look closely and eyes peer out between the leaves; Prateek says Swali thinks of them as the Saptamatrikas. Across from the triptych stands Form, rotund black-stone women, about 45 cm tall and faceless, in knotted cotton-thread dresses. “They have flowers in their hands as if they are receiving what comes their way,” he says.

Within, three embroidered panels of dense foliage
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Chanakya International and Experimenter

Hand-sculpted black stone with cotton thread at Experimenter
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Chanakya International and Experimenter

For Prateek, what matters is who made all of this. “It’s fascinating to see how they develop these forms and how collectively women work together in making these come alive,” he says. For Swali, there is no line between the goddesses and the women who made them. “We are them, right? And they are us.”

‘Garden of Gestures’ at Chanakya Ateliers (until September 30), ‘En Route’ at Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum (until October 20), and ‘Belong’ at Experimenter, Colaba (until October 17).