Category: Fashion

Interviews, Art Direction and Photography by Asad Sheikh.

Anmol Venkatesh
Degree: Bachelor of Design (Fashion Design)
Home town: Bengaluru

How would you introduce your graduate collection?
Baara Thangi is an amalgamation of the past and the present; it is steeped in nostalgia and yet has elements that bring out the quirkier graphic aspects of who I am today. This Pre-Fall collection puts craft at its centre, with an emphasis on hand embroidery, hand block printing and hand quilting, and appeals to anyone who would appreciate a slower, more conscious approach to life.

“Baara thangi” literally translates to “come, sister” in Kannada; it’s a term of endearment, one that takes me back to a childhood defined by a free-spirited way of living. This collection prompts the wearer to pursue a future that values crafts that are timeless and to keep that flamboyant child within alive at all times.

What are the underlying concepts — the primary inspirations — behind your collection?
I seek inspiration from a more sustainable pursuit of living and one that upholds the virtue of upcycling. I drew from my upbringing, and that of a lot of people from my generation, during the early 2000s, in a Bangalore that still had a certain old-world charm to it. I also drew from childhood memories of exquisite kolam patterns [decorative designs drawn on the ground, traditionally with rice flour, in southern India] strewn across jet-black tar roads, the comfort of my grandmother’s cotton saris, stark white kasuti work [a type of counted-thread embroidery practised in northern Karnataka] on heirloom clothing and Madras lungi fabrics, and paired them with quirkier heart motifs, or silhouettes that are geometric and asymmetrical.

Many of my fabrics were painstakingly collected from second-hand sari shops or donated by my grandmother or other relatives back home. It was important to not use any fresh fabric and to reuse fabric waste or textiles that had stories to tell. I also wanted to present textiles and crafts that are common to our everyday existence in a manner that prompts us to look at them through a new lens.

Tell us about the techniques you have used and your design ideology.
My design process began by enriching the narrative that I wanted to bring forth through the collection. This involved the extensive curation of images that then became very detailed mood boards. It was a reflection of how important craftsmanship is to me and represented a seamless blend of textures that could go together alongside a fine-tuning of a colour palette.

I then embarked on a month-long trip to the craft clusters where these traditions hail from. I first went to lungi-weaving clusters around Cuddalore, in Tamil Nadu, where Madras checks are woven for export. I understood the effort that went into creating something that I had taken for granted while growing up — the humble lungi now had so much more to tell.

I also visited Ilkal, in northern Karnataka, where the famous Ilkal saris are woven and traditionally finished with kasuti work. Here, again, motifs and techniques that had been perfected over centuries came to life in front of me.

I had been simultaneously working on quilting recycled fabrics and putting together fragments of old saris, dhotis and textiles that I had collected through my time at NIFT. The silhouettes that I had in mind drew extensively from minimal-waste pattern-making and had a geometric asymmetry that was integral to them.

Could you describe your favourite look?
My favourite look comprises a hand-quilted jacket with very detailed kasuti and kolam patterns embroidered on it. The base fabric took over a week to be painstakingly hand-quilted, and this was then overdyed to suit the colour palette. The jacket comprises an asymmetric front panel, attached from each shoulder. These panels have subtle stripes on them, an imitation of a black tar road with kolam. The pattern takes inspiration from the kimono, and the remnants from the basic structure were used to create the collars in an attempt to minimise fabric waste.

The embroidered motifs are scattered — asymmetric and yet balanced. Lilac and bright-pink hearts add that much-needed pop of colour and give life to a quirkier sensibility that I wanted to highlight. Small trinkets made with fabric buttons, metal beads and overdyed lace have been attached at certain places, almost like little secrets waiting to be discovered. The jacket is lined with an overdyed lungi.

The lilac top worn underneath has been made entirely from a repurposed silk sari. Braided tassels from either shoulder are tied at the front, mimicking elements that I’ve observed on children’s clothing. Brightly coloured loop buttons hold the top in place at the side seams.

Block-printed culottes complete the look, and these are held in place at the waist by using lungi fabrics that have been converted into tassels.

Conversations around personal representation are becoming increasingly prominent in today’s fashion world. In that regard, how would you say your work reflects who you are?
As someone who doesn’t dress according to conventional gender norms, I didn’t want to impose the same on my collection. For instance, using the lungi, which is a fabric that is traditionally worn by men, as part of garments that could be worn by anyone, irrespective of gender, reflects the same sentiment.

Which format would best translate your work to the consumer — physical retail spaces, online stores, demi-couture, or purely as a form of visual consumption through images only?
My work is very textural. It would be best translated when exhibited in a physical space, whether it is a retail store or an exhibition of some sort. These, supplemented by images, videos and other means of virtual display would be ideal. It is very important for me that people actually interact with the clothes and understand where I come from.

How has the shift towards digital fashion affected your creative process?
The shift towards digital fashion is certainly a boon to someone like me, who is geared towards reducing textile waste — it allows me to make changes digitally before implementing them on fabrics. Without access to a lot of resources, working on digital 3D prototypes has been a lifesaver for me. Considering how fast-paced the virtual world is, my creative process gets a boost, and I can enable my vision to be translated onto clothes at a much faster rate.

Previous: Anusha Parashar
Next: Anya Wahi

Interviews, Art Direction and Photography by Asad Sheikh.

Anya Wahi
Degree: Bachelor of Design (Fashion Design)
Home town: Hyderabad

How would you introduce your graduate collection?
More than anything else, my collection is an inquiry into how I’ve processed my transition. In June last year, when I came out as a transgender woman, I had no idea how my life would unfold. But today, about a year later, I think I know.

Changeling Vol. 1 is a narrative about growing into oneself, and it navigates the complicated ideals of beauty, womanhood and the image of the idealised body through garments that are transmutative, sculptural and inclusive. The whole collection is made out of deadstock polyesters that were upcycled and elevated through micro pleating and draped into forms that both follow and challenge the curves of the human body.

What are some underlying concepts — the primary inspirations — behind your collection?
Everything that I have learnt about the world as Anya has shaped this collection, right from when I began the design process. In that sense, my transition has been this almost overbearing, overwhelming force in my life.

I have also been fascinated by fay folklore from a very young age, and that has inspired the way I’ve used colours and textures. The diaphanous quality of some of the fabrics lends an ethereal look that conjures up in my head images of a gossamer spider-silk gown worn by mythical fairy queens. Each look tells the story of the birth of a distinct fairy queen, whether she has risen from an enchanted lake, bloomed from a lily or emerged from a chrysalis.

Tell us about the techniques you have used, your design ideology, and the process and details behind your favourite look from the collection.
A lot of my work has been centred around the body, and this collection is no different. My favourite design from the collection has to be the burgundy-and-champagne look modelled by me. It was born from some very specific emotions.

As a transgender woman who is currently in the middle of legally transitioning, there are so many instances wherein I have to prove my womanhood, my transness, and I am genuinely exhausted by it. To me, this look says, “I am who I am, and I am unafraid of being perceived any other way.” It has taken me a while to get there.

Conversations around personal representation are becoming increasingly prominent in today’s fashion world. In that regard, how would you say your work reflects who you are?
This may come off as a touch too conceited, but I am my own muse. My transness is at the centre of this collection. The reason I am vocal about it is that throughout history, and especially today, trans voices across the world have been ruthlessly and mercilessly squashed. I can confidently say that the quality of my life has declined since transitioning because there is no institutional support, in terms of education, healthcare or governance, and I have suffered first-hand at the hands of bureaucracy, negligence and cis-heteronormativity. And this is despite the privilege I enjoy — my background, and the absolute and overwhelming support from my family.

Fashion is just as convoluted; there are hardly any trans designers at the moment. To quote Hari Nef, who has inspired me for years now: “I don’t think fashion is interested in trans issues. I can’t think of many fashion institutions or artists who have addressed ‘trans issues’ by name, can you? How many openly trans people are getting major work in the industry — models, designers, photographers? Can you count them on more than one hand? Fashion is having a moment with trans aesthetics, not trans issues.” I feel exactly the same way about it, and many trans people that I have interacted with do too.

This is also why I have very consciously stayed away from certain ways that the trans body is looked at, talked about or represented. I find it quite tasteless and extremely inappropriate to fetishise an identity like that, which is why I am not using my work to talk about the purely fetishised physical aspects of being a trans woman, like how much my breasts have grown since I started on hormones. There is some maturing that needs to happen on the part of the audience before trans creators can be expected to have these conversations. I hope my collection is one among many that encourage that maturation by talking about the emotions that trans people often feel because we are people first, trans second.

Which format would best translate your work to the consumer — physical retail spaces, online stores, demi-couture, or purely as a form of visual consumption through images only?
I don’t believe fashion is still rigid about demarcating spaces for all these segments separately. Some pieces in my collection would do really well as ready-to-wear; there are others that would be ideal to present to clients to be made as per their requirements; and there are others that make for some fabulous imagery. However, what I’ve explored is an idea, a narrative in its rawest form, and I think it’s an interesting concept to see how even deadstock fabrics can be reclaimed to create garments that don’t look like they might have been upcycled.

Where do you think fashion is going with AI and the metaverse?
Artificial intelligence is tricky; there needs to be more public discourse on the morality of creating a system that claims personhood, and I don’t think that the people who are pumping money into AI are considering that. Fashion is, at the end of the day, a business.

How has the shift towards digital fashion affected your creative process?
What people don’t know about my collection is that the toile of each piece was converted to a vector file that was used to laser cut the final fabric. The result is a clean edge that doesn’t require further processing and has a superior finish.

Do you feel digital design is the answer to fashion’s waste problem?
Fashion doesn’t have a waste problem; it is the waste problem. So, no, I don’t think digital design is the answer. A major shift needs to happen in the way fashion is consumed. And if I can be frank, people need to stop trying to ease the guilt that comes with participating in this vicious cycle of wearing clothes and disposing of them by buying into “sustainable fashion” — it’s just a marketing buzzword.

What are the driving forces behind the silhouettes in your collection and how have you tried to achieve them?
One of my favourite artists happens to be Georgia O’Keeffe, and many of the silhouettes take inspiration from her paintings. I have also tried to follow the body and break away from it in unexpected places to both generate interest and challenge ideals. I’ve done this through draping micro-pleated fabrics and manually heat-setting them in the forms and shapes that they take.

Previous: Anmol Venkatesh
Next: Kahkasha Sidra

Interviews, Art Direction and Photography by Asad Sheikh.

Kahkasha Sidra
Degree: Bachelor of Design (Leather Design)
Home town: Patna

How would you introduce your graduate collection?
Belle Epoque: A Beautiful Time is a demi-couture collection consisting of eight complete looks. One word that I’d use to describe it is “romantic”. The looks have been created in pairs, with each one sharing similar design elements to convey the idea of companionship.

What are some underlying concepts — the primary inspirations — behind your collection?
I’ve always wanted to translate my happy memories and beautiful experiences into something tangible; I wished to create something comforting and pleasing to both the wearer and the viewer. The primary inspirations are the memories of my grandfather’s rose garden in Bihar. Whenever I visited them during my summer vacations, I would spend hours with my parents strolling there every evening. It was one of the most beautiful times of my life, so I thought translating it into a collection would be a meaningful start. I was also inspired by the idea of romanticism — the worship of nature, devotion to love and beauty, and the idea of placing imagination above reason. There are a few artistic influences reflected in some pieces as well, inspired by the art nouveau style and [Salvador] Dali’s surrealism.

Tell us about the techniques you have used, your design ideology, and the process and details behind your favourite look from the collection.
My favourite look from the collection is the finale look — a white mesh bridal dress with red suede vegan leather appliqué work. The dress itself does not look complicated, but it was not easy to achieve. I had to study old-school couturiers to create the silhouette of the dress, but at the same time it incorporates a modern surface technique. It took me more than two weeks to make it; the intricate suede leather appliqué was laser cut by digitally placing the motifs on a scanned pattern of the dress. The suede was temporarily fixed onto the mesh fabric with double-sided adhesive, and its edges were then embroidered with rhinestones to fix it permanently.

It’s hard to define my design process; I think it’s a constant string of thoughts and actions. I extract inspiration from experiences and emotions. It’s almost like method acting, starting with identifying the emotions I want to evoke with the collection and then trying to embody those in everything I do. The only ideology I follow while designing is to create something that can stir the senses even without any knowledge of art or design.

Conversations around personal representation are becoming increasingly prominent in today’s fashion world. In that regard, how would you say your work reflects who you are?
I am here because of these cultural conversations. Human civilisation has progressed enough that we don’t need more people to make clothes only for the sake of it. It is about representation; it is about seeing someone on the other side of the globe wearing clothes designed by, say, a hijabi South-Asian designer from Patna. These representations don’t just hold cultural value; they are of monetary value as well and mean a lot for our community of skilled manpower that is often exploited. It is about being perceived as a creator and not just a producer.

Visually, I think a lot of Bihari as well as Islamic sensibilities are reflected in my work very subconsciously, whether in the form of cuts and styling derived from traditional silhouettes, colour combinations or surface embellishments. I like the idea of bringing elements from Bihari Muslim households into my image creation as well.

Where do you think fashion is going with AI and the metaverse?
AI is very instinctively incorporated in the process of this era of creatives, whether it’s used in design, production, presentation or advertising. As someone who’s trying to understand the global market, I find things like trend forecasts to be very helpful. Communicating with followers using personalised AI filters is one thing I wish to try soon too. But on a macro scale, I think it’s going to take some time for both creators and consumers to understand these concepts and their applications.

How has the shift towards digital fashion affected your creative process?
I like to remain free from the pressure of participating in this shift towards digital fashion. I think there is certainly an audience for that and some incredible things are already happening. But as a designer, I believe in the physicality of things, in mastering the craft of dressmaking. In witnessing someone twirl in my garments at fittings. I do, however, believe that catching up with digital tools is important, and I utilise various techniques like UV printing, laser cutting and pleating, and wish to experiment with 3D printing as well.

Do you feel digital design is the answer to fashion’s waste problem?
No. I think digital designs are an exciting addition to fashion. But people still need real clothes to wear. Fashion’s waste problem needs to be addressed on a physical and psychological level. There is overproduction because there is an over-demand, so it starts with the consumer’s mindset.

I think it’s too soon to conclude that digital fashion is sustainable as well — just as we recently got to know about the carbon footprint that is left by emails, we may find a similar fallout in the case of NFTs as well. Ethical buying practices, setting high standards for quality and utilising efficient digital tools for zero-waste production may contribute more.

According to you, where is the world of design and fashion heading?
Indian fashion is unapologetically returning to our age-old silhouettes. In terms of design, it is undergoing a transformation in its narratives. Eurocentric ideas of what is expected of an Indian designer on a global platform are changing. Unexpected aesthetics are emerging, and I think that just as we had the avant-garde trio from Japan or the Antwerp Six from Belgium, the next decades are going to be about the new-school designers from India.

Previous: Anya Wahi
Next: Purvasha Singh

Interviews, Art Direction and Photography by Asad Sheikh.

Purvasha Singh
Degree: Bachelor of Design (Knitwear Design)
Home town: Bhopal

How would you introduce your graduate collection?
Inspired by the process of metamorphosis, which in itself is a very strong metaphor for transition, my collection Under The Vault In Our Head is a journey about that second chance at life. It is a narrative of my personal growth, an embodiment of my fight as a sexual assault survivor and an ode to all the other survivors out there.

Metamorphosis — the biological process that brings about physical transformation in some insects, ushering in a state of complete change between birth and death — is also relevant to the human mind where, in a sense, it is always growing in correlation to the experiences it comes across. These internal changes are often invisible to the naked eye and generally hidden inside the “vaults of our minds”. The common denominator across all species is the ability to overcome past tribulations and break the chains of these ordeals to grow anew.

In metamorphosis, the leap from immaturity, the peak and then the eventual decadent death are translated through five stages: ovum, nymph, larva, pupa, and chrysalis.

Each look in the collection takes from its synonymous stage, either through physical appearance or the experience. For example, the over-shoulder accessory in the last look has been inspired by the wing of a chrysalis. In the same vein, the fourth ensemble corresponds to the process of a pupa coming out of a cocoon. This, along with the first ensemble, is one of my most structured pieces of work — the metal elements and 3D crocheting are so prominent. The ensembles are a collection of hand-knitted, hand-crocheted, 3D-crocheted, webbed, embroidered, and constructed circular knit pieces.

What are some underlying concepts — the primary inspirations — behind your collection?
The sorrow, the terror, the growth — the collection has grown with me. I was developing it and simultaneously evolving in the process. The collection showcases five wearable-art ensembles synonymous with the metamorphic stages of a fly. The woman is seen overcoming her past adversities and metamorphosing into a sacrosanct individual. The “me”, presently.

Tell us about the techniques you have used, your design ideology, and the process and details behind your favourite look from the collection.
My favourite look is the very first ensemble, which has been inspired by the structure of an egg — “the beginning”, as I like to call it. The story cannot start without it, and hence it is crucial to the series, and to me. The look showcases a panelled bustier with a tie-up closure at the back, paired with an ombré-dyed skirt and a metal structure shaped like a deformed egg.

Welded metal wires created the structure of a semi-egg onto which I hand-crocheted very fine yarn, resulting in a floating textured shape, if looked at from afar. The metallic edges blend into the yarn, giving a very organic shape to the crochet — the reason why I also call it 3D crocheting. The woman is emerging from an egg — the first step, and also the hardest one in my opinion.

Conversations around personal representation are becoming increasingly prominent in today’s fashion world. In that regard, how would you say your work reflects who you are?
It has been a very interesting journey because the series is a piece of myself. I was sceptical about the translation of such a sensitive topic into fashion but, to me, fashion is a collection of ideas and experiences. And, truthfully, I was just scared to talk about my experience. It is a difficult process, especially when you have to relive the trauma every time you talk about your collection. But in contrast, the story also follows an absolutely positive narrative: it is about the perseverance and personal growth of a sexual assault victim.

Where do you think fashion is going with AI and the metaverse?
The metaverse is currently a very hot topic, and one of the most interesting things outside of fashion and wearability is the case for brands to create hyper-engaged communities. Although at the moment, it has to be paired with the physical because everyone is so new to the space. But it is exciting to see brands and consumers moving towards this immersive phygital world, which can be so transformative and inclusive with its vast potential.

How has the shift towards digital fashion affected your creative process?
Although I am an advocate of traditional methods, the shift will definitely affect my creative process in a positive way. The audience on social media is so hard to market to; it’s very hard to get their attention for longer than 10 seconds. “Metaversing” fashion is the only way to market to this demographic. The creative process should be an adaptive exercise, otherwise it becomes stagnant.

Do you feel digital design is the answer to fashion’s waste problem?
The damage is done and ongoing, and it is a far-fetched dream to expect something so new to remedy a large-scale issue that is exploitative on so many levels.

Previous: Kahkasha Sidra
Go back to: Introduction

Interviews, Art Direction and Photography by Asad Sheikh.

Anusha Parashar
Degree: Bachelor of Design (Knitwear Design)
Home town: Guwahati

How would you introduce your graduate collection?
Plastic Fantastic is a feel-good concept that captures the essence of youth. It’s playful — the idea is to have fun with what one wears — and it isn’t an embodiment of what the male gaze wants.

It is a wearable-art collection and involves elements inspired by the Barbie and bimbocore cultures as a feminist message that reclaims these tropes as empowering rather than derogatory and shallow, as seen in popular culture. Colour is used in unapologetic and unexpected ways — pink, purple and other sunset hues all have a home here — and the silhouettes range from fluid, feminine forms to younger, playful shapes with DIY elements. The range uses asymmetrical details and cut-outs, layering, experimental materials, fur, beads and hand-knitting.

It’s self-indulgent, it’s unapologetic and it’s pretty!

Tell us about your favourite look from the collection.
My favourite look from the collection is a single-sleeve ombré gown with exaggerated sleeve and bottom-hem details and a crochet bikini made of hearts. The colours are bright and playful while the silhouettes are fluid and sultry. This was one of the more wearable looks, and the idea was to strike a balance between art and wearability. My design process includes creating a mood, doodling, combining words with visuals and research.

Which format would best translate your work to the consumer — physical retail spaces, online stores, demi-couture, or purely as a form of visual consumption through images only?
Online consumption and demi-couture would suit it best, as it is intended to be a wearable-art collection.

Where do you think fashion is going with AI and the metaverse?
Fashion is becoming extremely personalised. It is bringing in customisation and more accessibility while reducing environmental impact.

Do you feel digital design is the answer to fashion’s waste problem?
Maybe it is not the solution, but it is definitely a step in the right direction. Digital design will almost negate the waste created in the development and experimentation stages, as well as production waste.

Previous: Introduction
Next: Anmol Venkatesh

Interview by J. Shruti; Illustrations by Mallika Chandra.

Content Warning: This interview contains descriptions of sexual and caste violence.

Edited excerpts from the conversation:

J. Shruti (SJ): I watched Gargi not too long ago. In the film, we are led through the perspective of the female protagonist, whose father has been accused in the case of the gang rape of a nine-year-old girl who lives in the building where he works as a security guard. We do not see the act of rape itself, but we are given a glimpse of what is about to happen through an opaque window pane, where we see one of the men take off his shirt. We also see the girl’s hands and how they move in response to this act of violence. The director had chosen to focus — voyeuristically, I would argue — over a sequence of the girl’s trembling fingers, and I was incredibly disturbed after watching this scene. Later in the film, the girl’s injured body is shown, left bleeding on a staircase. The reason I am going into such detail is because I want to understand your perspective on this visualisation. What kind of sensitivity and sensibility are required when a director conceptualises such a scene?

V. Geetha (GV): It’s part of a wider conundrum, I think. How does one represent what one wishes to criticise or condemn? Whether it has to do with sexual violence or abusive language towards women, how does one frame that without censoring anything and, at the same time, make it evident to the reader or viewer that you really have to see this as deeply problematic, if not downright evil?

There are many issues that get conflated here. One is that it’s for the public gaze, so you want to be clear-cut about the intentions of your work. There’s a certain rhetorical overkill that belongs to the general grammar of popular Indian cinema — you explicitly mark the villain as villain, the virtuous hero as virtuous and so on. And what is forgotten is that it [sexual violence] exists on the continuum of various other acts of discrimination, which are also registered [by women]. It’s not that women just silently put up with all this stuff — if they do respond, if they do resist, the questions then become about why the camera is not able to bring in that aspect of resistance, or any other kind of response. You will see this as an exceptional act, which has been marked as exceptional. Therefore, the kinds of things that you just described — the bloodstains, the opaque window pane, the fingers and so on — they’re part of that approach as well. And the third thing is a structural inability to separate feelings of revulsion, anger and critique from being held in thrall to that image; you are enthralled, in a very fundamental sense, because it is a female body that is focused on. And that is a body to which you do not relate in any manner except that of possession and control, generally speaking. I mean, even if we wished to deal with it differently, that is the mode of framing most available to you.

Film-makers, especially if their own experiences are removed from this act of systemic violence, don’t really reckon with feminist thought or practice when they seek to understand it. They’re largely guided by their sense of absolute self-righteousness or angst or revulsion or anger, but nothing that helps them question why they cannot get away from this figure pinned onto the screen.

SJ: But Gargi is trying to engage in many of the conversations that emerged post the MeToo movement. The choice to focus on the girl’s trembling hands is what I am having trouble grappling with because, even though the movie makes its empathies clear, it felt jarring and inconsistent within that framework of empathy. I found myself asking who this visualisation is for and thinking about the director’s assumption about how women would react to that scene, as I felt extremely unsettled and overwhelmed. However, I was willing to try and understand where he was coming from. What do you think of the argument that people need to see the truth of a situation to feel something about it?

GV: You don’t need to remind anyone that women have a bad deal in a generally patriarchal and misogynistic culture. But how we are socialised into gendered beings is seldom part of the way film is structured when it shows an act of sexual violence. What is seen as rightful social and sexual behaviour has been cultivated over millennia — not just months and years — in a familiar social space. We could then ask why film-makers are not telling us that. Why are they so insistent on showing this act of gendered violence? Because one act is ultimately only symptomatic rather than the cause of anything within a complicated social structure. How does one understand that symptom, then? You need to do a better mapping of the larger context to convey how it is normalised by these social structures, especially when the act of violence is directed against social unequals: Dalits, Adivasis, workers in a factory or domestic helpers. There’s an enabling structure, which we’re not shown in all its horror. Or if it is shown, it’s only by way of a plot line.

SJ: What is your point of view on and approach to trigger warnings as someone who has written extensively about sexual violence? In the last 2–3 years, more critical approaches, which include writings in both the digital as well as academic space that challenge the practice of adding that kind of disclaimer have emerged. Jeanine Suk Gersen wrote in The New Yorker about how warnings about content do not necessarily affect people’s responses, and can sometimes even increase anxiety beforehand.

GV: I came into feminism at a time when we believed or thought that it was important to share experiences of what you have endured. And some of us might have had worse experiences than others, while others might have been through stuff that we couldn’t even begin to understand, so we didn’t experience that kind of…let’s say, anxiety or panic. We were anxious and panic-stricken for other reasons — sharing our stories and realising that “it’s not just me; there is something else that’s systemic and structural that’s going on here”.

In the 1980s and after, when autonomous women’s groups emerged across the country, they became arguably “safe” spaces for women to speak of what they endured and to think through the justice they sought. And in all women’s conferences since 1991, the sessions on violence or atrocities, or any sort of political idea, had women sharing their experiences of terror, assault, their fear of sexual predators… and such speak-outs, if one can call them that, produced a sense of “collective” angst. For various reasons, it’s not been easy for a sustained collective to exist — not that it was easy in the past either. Today, I wonder if young persons have not found such collective spaces enabling. Over time, there has grown a psychological discourse around suffering and trauma, and while it has helped many of us engage with our unexamined fears and sorrow fruitfully, it has also rendered suffering individualised. And it appears that we are somewhat trapped by this discourse. There’s a barrage of information; our sensorium has to deal with a lot in terms of what we see on our screens, what comes to us through our phones. We also know a great deal more about feminism. For people of a certain generation, that wasn’t the case. Some stuff was available, but we made sense of it as we went along and made mistakes, took risks and were unmindful of many things.

In the law, I think the call for a trigger warning is also a call for imagining another space where you can actually speak. You may be able to do other things with that phrase and find other ways in which people can actually listen and speak about what they are going through without being pushed into inaction, paralysis or depression. Even in my time, we realised that experience-sharing can become very routine. And sometimes it’s important to stop and say, “Look, what’s the argument we’re making?”

SJ: Gargi shows you that somebody you love is capable of sexual assault while reinforcing several stereotypes about how sexual violence occurs within a certain milieu. It tells you that someone who commits such an act can be a stranger, but it also tells you that stranger could likely be a person from a marginalised socio-economic background, when there are statistics on how child sexual abuse is very likely to happen within the child’s family or circle their parents move in. What is the responsibility of a film-maker in such cases? How strong should their sense of obligation be to stay close to the truth, according to you?

GV: The film-maker has to reflect on why they are making certain choices for a plot. For instance, the vulnerable middle-class woman who is preyed upon by either “roadside Romeos”, the working-class man or a stranger in the city and so on, why is that a choice? I think it goes back to what we were saying earlier — that we tend to think of these occurrences as one exceptional moment, as a single atrocity.

I mean, look at the reluctance to consider marital rape as a crime in this country. I think that even the Justice Verma Committee, which was so open to suggestions, couldn’t push on this one. And it has to do with our fundamental reluctance to question the basis of the social in our context, which is the caste family; the moment you discuss the caste family, you’re really, really rocking something that’s very constitutive of the social.

So, a question that we might want to ask film-makers and others is why they chose a certain narrative. Because by doing so, they insert it within, as you said, a stereotypical pattern that has very distinctive visual correlations. And then you are trapped by a particular visual logic, of which you need to be very sensitive and visually transgressive to either do away with or transplant the established protocols. And I think that takes a lot of work, not to mention familiarity with feminist criticisms of the case. There’ve been decades of scholarship on how feminists have understood the way a film works on its audience, but women’s studies remains ghettoised. Only some of us end up talking about these things, you know, and that’s part of the problem. There’s a lot of gatekeeping that goes on.

But the larger issue, I think, is that there’s a charge put on the upper-caste girl, that she’d better “stay with her own kind”. And if she doesn’t, she must ask herself what she has done wrong, which makes it as if she’s got to constantly guard herself. And for her, rather than seeing her brother, father, uncle, grandmother or whoever else as restricting her life choices, it’s far easier to see someone from the outside who might look at her in a certain way and want to touch her inappropriately. And he becomes the focus of our critical attention; she becomes complicit in what she actually wants to escape.

This doesn’t mean that the stereotypes are entirely untrue, however. There is also the possibility of stranger violence, which has to do with the city — who lives there, who’s allowed to inhabit what space? One needs to look beyond this encounter between two people. When we talk of stereotyping, or making people “see” things, clearly, we are looking at a set of extremely complex social developments and issues that need to be part of this conversation.

SJ: I want to talk about the idea of closure and justice, specifically how it is portrayed in film. The revenge genre is very prominent when it comes to the subject of sexual assault. When you have male protagonists, like in Simmba and Khuda Haafiz 2, rape functions as a plot point for them to exact revenge — but let’s keep the focus on female-led narratives. In Mardaani, Rani Mukerji’s character hands over the main villain to the girls he trafficked, who fatally beat him up, and in 22 Female Kottayam, Rima Kallingal’s character castrates her rapist. There is an argument that films like these do not address the conditions within which gendered violence emerges but are masculinist endeavours instead. Depending on the movie and how the violence is framed, this perspective seems valid to an extent, but I also think they hold more nuance, where this urge to hurt something, break something, comes from a place of helplessness.

GV: This makes me think about the story of someone like Phoolan Devi, which is both tragic yet logical, and heroic in many ways. But I wouldn’t say that she conforms to a masculine aesthetic; she was part of a social milieu that provided her very few options to resist, and she made the most of whichever she had. She also paid for it — she was arrested and imprisoned, and many other bad things happened to her. So, I wouldn’t essentialise this as a masculinised response, as that’s just one aspect.

And let’s not forget the number of vengeful devis [goddesses] we have in this country — women with spears, sitting on all kinds of ferocious animals and drinking human blood. There’s also the tradition of the angry “empowered goddess” who crosses all limits. The goddesses that are worshipped across the Deccan and South India are the iconised forms of women who have died under what today’s criminal justice system would term “suspicious” circumstances, or in sad contexts. Assault and death, death during childbirth, virgin deaths that appear unnatural — all these instantiate a “fear” of the spirit that might prevail even if the body of the individual has left this earth. And the person thus comes to be worshipped. A brilliant redeployment of this icon is to be had in Mari Selvaraj’s film Karnan, where a child that dies on a highway becomes a guiding spirit for those fighting caste injustice. So, the vengeful goddess comes in more than one guise: she can haunt you, or she is waiting to have her say in how justice will be done. There’s a sense of a compensatory mechanism that has to be put in place.

There are ways in which resisting and fighting back have also been part of histories of female resistance, even if only in the imaginative sense of wanting to use the master’s weapons to bring down the master’s house — though we do tell ourselves that it won’t help us build a new house.

SJ: In her book The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan writes about how the way we think about accountability in the cases of sexual violation and harassment is tied to a very carceral idea of punishment and consequences, and how we do not couple this discourse of gendered violence with a critical look at the current criminal justice system. In Gargi, Guilty and Pink, we see the accused arrested and jailed for their crimes, and that is supposed to convey a sense of justice to the audiences. Lately, this kind of resolution has been more difficult because of how our legal system often does not come through for women who are seeking accountability for a crime. Why do you think it is so hard to imagine accountability and/or restorative justice for those who commit rape outside of our existing criminal justice framework?

GV: I think in public portrayals of violence in cinema, at least in the Indian context, the courtroom stands for the final resolution. It’s also part of the trope of how we imagined ourselves as a nation state — that the courts of justice are very central to the making of the modern nation state, that modernity has to do with the witness box, truth-telling, rationality and all of that. That none of these courtroom scenes are rational is another matter altogether; they are occasions for speech-making rather than showing you people pursuing an evidentiary argument.

So, we’re seeing a conflation of two very common tendencies in our public lives. One is the courtroom, which is constructed to be the space where a resolution might be handed in a narrative. And second is the public sphere, where you can make speeches and argue and get people’s attention. The courtroom serves both purposes. And the criminal justice system is inevitably part of this genre of film-making, which started out in the shadow of the Indian nation state and continues to stay there.

Nowhere is the criminal justice system itself in question; it’s never brought to book as such. For example, in the more recent Jai Bhim, from Tamil Nadu, lawyers investigate the inquiry into the killing of a man from a scheduled tribe. The film points to several kinds of fudging that happen in the criminal justice system. But then the way you get back at it is again by using the court of law. One would imagine that no conversations are possible in the social or cultural spheres, or that people don’t settle issues on their own, but I believe it happens all the time.

There’s also the everyday material exercise of power. We all occupy hierarchical and unequal spaces, and even among so-called equals, not everything truly is equal, as we know. Therefore, questions of dignity and consent and equality become central in both a legal sense as well as an everyday social and intimate sense. There’s a consensus amongst us as a society that “if this is actually not problematic for me, then it might be okay”.

Columns

Illustrations by Prashant Kanyalkar

This column was originally published in Verve Magazine’s Volume 5, Issue 3; July-September 1997. 

You would think, wouldn’t you, that the Government of India had enough notice that this year’s 15th August was somewhat special? And that it needed long-term planning to commemorate it in a way beyond the routine?

But clocks and calendars run differently for the government. So instead of the three years or so which should have gone into the organisation of national celebrations, we have had nine months of committees. (Is there a Freudian symbolism hidden there?)

The National Committee was the mother of all committees. It had 227 members including cabinet ministers, all chief ministers, presidents of all major political parties and all ex-prime ministers. That’s a lot of politicians, which is probably why in their two meetings, members came up with ideas like these for a 50-year celebratory bash: Eliminate scavenging. Encourage the growth and welfare of the farming sector. Set up an institute for Comparative Religions. Establish a multi-religious centre at Ayodhya. Build a Hall of Freedom in Delhi. “We want to celebrate in such a way as to ignite the imagination of our youth,” said one of the members of these and other ideas. Oh well.

Perhaps it’s easy to sneer. The reason why a National Committee has to exist is that no government can take a chance by leaving anybody out: it anticipates criticism of non-inclusion by co-opting just about everybody. It’s a time-wasting but necessary ritual.

If they had asked a small organisation to simultaneously get on with it and staffed it with men of ideas and vision supported by men of action, even nine months might have produced one healthy body. But the secretariat which was set up, was neither given its full staff nor was its budget released in time. Its time, instead, was spent in organising meetings of the National Committee plus the Special Cabinet Committee, the Implementation Committee, state government committees and as many as ten advisory committees.

Come to think of it, this was a celebration of sorts, and an apt one at that.

Government By Committee

After all, our 50 years have been notable for the fact that we are like this only: government by committee so that there’s a lot of talk but no action: the constant striving to please everyone that in the end no one is pleased; an absence of forward planning and the last-minute scramble to retrieve the situation; the sanctioning of plans on paper and the inability to release funds when they are needed; a lack of will masked by the paperwork of bureaucracy… And, finally, the inevitable reassigning of dates. So here it is: the government has officially decreed that there will be a year-long celebration of our golden anniversary. Beginning 15th August 1997. Neat.

As it happens, the mood in the country was sombre rather than joyous. Laloo Prasad Yadav, Sitaram Kesari, Mayawati, Rabri Devi, H. D. Deve Gowda… That was our roll call of honour; these were our freedom fighters of today (the freedom to have unfettered ambition and to hell with the cost). We needed a very large shove to get us out of our slough of despond and the government was not providing it. There we would have remained, moping and dragging our feet, if it hadn’t been for the Foreign Hand.

The Foreign Hand was, first and foremost, British. The BBC led the way with The Dynasty, its documentary on the Nehru-Gandhi family. It didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know (that’s the problem everyone was faced with), but the archival footage was fascinating. I found the Indira Gandhi episode especially interesting as it showed the transformation of a painfully shy woman into the dominating politician of her later years. Even here was a surprise: so deeply has the image of Indira Gandhi as Empress of India become embedded in our minds that we expect to see a disapproving martinet with a stern voice. Instead, we see that the shyness of her manner never really left her, and that her voice remained that of a schoolgirl even till the end.

That’s only one of many programmes on British television. But the printed word wasn’t going to be left behind: every publication worth its name brought out at least one cover story in its colour supplement or magazine section.

Even Americans who were immune to Indophilia all these years, succumbed to the 50-year infection with cover stories from Time and Newsweek and special issues from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. So we, who have always looked to the West to usher in our trends, even if they were based on purely ‘Indian’ things like the sitar or meditation or yoga or ayurveda, now in supreme irony took our cue from the West to celebrate the 50th anniversary of our freedom from the rule of the West.

The 50-Year Infection

Once we had begun, there was no stopping us. The trickle became a stream, the stream, a torrent, the torrent a flood. To make any sense of it, here are some classifications.

The Unexpected: The rehabilitation of Jinnah. A re-appraisal of the founder of Pakistan had to happen someday. Who would have expected it now? But it came strongly. A book by Philip French sowing the seeds, and magazine and newspaper articles following it up, either pro or con.

The Faces Behind The Knives: Outlook magazine’s brilliant cover story on the Partition worked because it went to the other side of the divide as well, and talked to people in Pakistan who were affected. Time too showed the human tragedy of our holocaust. Other publications took up the theme as well. At last, collectively, we have begun to look squarely in the face at this horrifying chapter of our history which we had all buried very, very deep in our consciousness. For a younger generation for whom Partition is only a word, it must now be very clear why India and Pakistan can never really get together.

The Face Behind The Knife: The mad story of the Radcliffe Award and the man behind it, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, given — against his will — the job of taking a pen and drawing a line across undivided India, to forever decide what went where, and who became a Pakistani and who an Indian. Lahore, unbelievably now, was a touch and go case. It may well have been an Indian city.

Tales From The Border: Maseeh Rahman’s story for Time from the Wagah border and Robert Nichelsberg’s surreal photograph of two sentries standing next to each other at touching distance, one an Indian, the other Pakistani, both frozen in postures of hostility, both about to begin a daily war dance, much like ritualistic movements of birds marking out their territories.

Cultural Bonding: We know about the cultural bonding across the border, but we never think of cultural bonding elsewhere. It needed Span magazine to remind us about individuals who forged surprisingly close links between India and the USA. Like Mark Twain and Swami Vivekananda, like Emerson, Melville, Whitman and Thoreau, like Elihu Yale, an American who worked for the East India Company as Governor of Fort George in Madras when he gave a donation to an American college which then became Yale University. Or like Sam Stokes, scion of an old Boston family who came to India at 22 and never went back, becoming a follower of Gandhi. He settled in Himachal, imported thousands of apple seeds from America, gave them free to the mountain people and thus gave birth to the state’s flourishing apple industry.

Big Brother India

Pakistan, anyone? In the theme of India, 50 years, everyone seemed to have forgotten that it was also Pakistan, 50 years. OK, so we couldn’t remember, but what about the rest of the world? Books, magazines and television all over, harped on the first theme and had collective amnesia about the second. Even satellite television in this region Star, Sony and the rest, adopted an Indian motif for their special logos, while beaming to other countries including Pakistan. How do you think people there felt? Big Brother India strikes again?

Never The Twain Shall Meet: Given the above, the jubilee provided an unparalleled opportunity for joint celebrations. Yet no one thought of it, except Asia House, a recently set up organisation in Britain, which organised a gala dinner at the Royal Albert Hall in July with Prince Charles as the chief guest. If only others had followed that example….

Windfalls – I: The Times of India, on successive days used as its main edit page article, Nehru’s famous “tryst with destiny” speech and Jinnah’s not so well-known address to the constituent assembly in Pakistan. It was a joy to read the full text of the Nehru speech, with its complex syntax and its rolling cadences. After reading Jinnah’s words, one wished that they were better known. They make such a ringing declaration for a secular Pakistan that copies of the speech should be circulated to all the fundamentalists of that country.

Windfalls – II: Another unexpected bonus of the jubilee is the British Museum’s exhibition, The Enduring Image, which will come to Delhi and Mumbai in October. As many as 300 priceless art objects and antiquities will do the journey, collected from ancient Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire, the Americas and East Asia. The Museum is deliberately not bringing its Indian antiquities, after the hullabaloo that was raised when the Padshahnama was exhibited in Delhi last year (“This is ours and must not be allowed to leave India,” some people said). Further good news: the Museum’s director has said that this is only the beginning. Many more exhibitions will follow.

Windfalls – III: This has to be the most far-fetched yet, but welcome nevertheless. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation decided to celebrate the jubilee in a unique way by declaring 15th August, “Zero Garbage” Day. In a city where being a pedestrian is injurious to health, a day of freedom from garbage was a blessing. Everyone wants encores.

Windfalls – IV: Begum Sumroo has nothing to do with the Jubilee, but Partap Sharma’s play brings to life a fascinating yet unknown bit of minor history. The play has flaws, especially its leaden dialogue, but director Alyque Padamsee keeps you engrossed.

More Than A Thousand Words – I: Art exhibitions of all kinds, all over the world, some with rather tenuous connections with the Jubilee. But nevertheless it was an opportunity to get precious art out of mothballs and into galleries for us to enjoy. RPG Enterprises’ two exhibitions, 50 years of Freedom of Expression, was splendidly organised and featured some work of a very high order (with some which wasn’t, but that’s to be expected).

Abroad, there was the six-month long exhibition of contemporary prints from India and Pakistan which began in April at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The V & A also showed Shamiana, an exhibition of Mughal and Rajput decorative arts. Then there was India: A Celebration of Independence, 1947-1997 which ran in the Philadelphia Museum of Art till the end of August. This showcased 250 photographs taken by 21 photographers over the last 50 years.

Asia Society in New York put up an exhibition of miniatures God, The King and Tiger: the Art of Kotah which got rave reviews. Its show in Washington, King of the World, was devoted to the artistry of the Mughal dynasty which peaked in the region of Shah Jahan in the 17th century. The Padshahnama was also shown.

More Than A Thousand Words – II: The National Film Theatre, London’s season of Indian films. Instead of choosing the movies themselves, NFT asked Indian authors to choose one each. You thus got an interesting — though disconnected – mix.

The Thousand Words Themselves: Actually there were millions, as book after book, hit the stands. But the one which made the biggest impact was Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West’s The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-97. Thanks to Rushdie’s now notorious essay in which he took all of India’s non-English writing and dumped it into the Arabian sea. Ridiculous, agreed. But supposed he had called the book Indian Writing in English no one would have created a fuss, and the book would have been like any other. Publications – newspapers and magazines – added their two bits to the celebrations. But, tell me, do you remember a single article of the thousand or so written for the occasion? All that happened was the publications made a lot of money on ads. And we made a little extra from our raddiwala.

The Discovery Of India – I: Every product discovered ways of putting the tricolour in its ad and some connection with the freedom movement, however remote. One product epitomised it all. It was from a foreign soft drink manufacturer who dressed his bottle like a champagne bottle. You paid more for the privilege of celebrating with it, and celebrated the Jubilee with fake fizz.

The Discovery Of India – II: Everyone stumbled across an old song which had it all: fine words, lilting melody and patriotic feeling. Who could ask for more? So it was that Vande Mataram was orchestrated into documentaries, sung at the drop of the flag, spoken into the camera by celebrities and made into a pop-hit by the thumping percussion of A.R. Rahman.

The Last Word: The final word must belong to Ravi Shankar. At the Tata Theatre, he played from 10 p.m. to past midnight on 14th August, thus ushering in the Jubilee. His playing, as usual, transported you to a different plane (floating somewhere in space), and at the stroke of midnight the raga he was playing metamorphosed into Sare Jahan Se Achcha Hindustan Hamara, the tune he wrote to Iqbal’s words. He signalled the packed house to join in, and we – stiff upper lipped, not given to singing in public – began hesitatingly, then joined full-throatedly.

It was magical. So magical, in fact, that we almost believed the words.

Travel

Text by Avani Thakkar. Images courtesy Pavan Srinivas.

How do you like your coffee? Piping hot and black or ice-cold with swirls of Nutella? Strong enough to lend you a surge of productive energy that could potentially turn into jittery anxiousness by your third cup or lightly dosed with just enough caffeine to pretend like you have your wits about you on yet another Monday morning?

Ashish D’abreo likes his fermented with beer, which might sound like an unusual choice to those who swear by their trusty cappuccino, but he makes no excuses for it. The Bengaluru-based barista, mixologist and one-third of the brains behind Maverick & Farmer Coffee, an artisanal coffee brand (with a namesake cafe) that’s been brewing in the IT city since 2018, gets a kick out of unlocking new flavour profiles to showcase Indian coffee in a way that he maintains hasn’t been done before.

D’abreo, who grew up in Mangaluru (Mangalore), speaks for most South Indians when he describes his fondness for filter coffee — an integral part of their food culture. “Traditional filter coffee is and always will be comfort for us,” he says, before going on to question why desi coffee is so underrated. “Places like Ethiopia and Colombia pop up first when you think about quality coffee beans. In fact, most international baristas don’t even know that India produces coffee, and a distinct one at that,” he reveals. Along with partners Sreeram G and Tej Thammaiah, D’abreo set his sights on bringing innovative variations to this unilateral Starbucks-engulfed drinking segment that was also momentarily possessed by the TikTok-propelled Dalgona coffee craze while in the throes of the 2020 lockdown.

Top: Different stages of roasting for 2 Beans In A Pod (cocoa fermentation); bottom: Manual grading, done for sample roasts to work out a basic roast profile to test the experimental lots

“The pandemic changed coffee-drinking habits of Indians across the country. We had this massive generation of workers who would go to their fancy offices, and they had gotten used to their daily cup of coffee either at work or in a nearby cafe. Suddenly, they found themselves cooped up at home with no access to that coffee, so they started doing some research and discovered brands like ours. And so, we were busy as ever,” says D’abreo.

Maverick & Farmer fine-tunes coffee beans’ cultivation, fermentation and drying processes on their sprawling 150-acre plantation nestled in Coorg, Karnataka’s lush hill station that’s home to some of the best panoramic views in South India. Think of it as a laboratory where all the magic happens, which is all but confirmed when D’abreo speaks of a smoke chamber: “A lot of us love smoky notes in our coffee, but unless you really dark roast the coffee and almost burn it, you won’t get those notes. Unfortunately, when you do that, you risk losing the subtle, nuanced flavours. So, to achieve smoky notes in light-roasted coffee, we created an airtight smoke chamber on our farm out of the old estate manager’s bungalow that was on the verge of crumbling. We introduced cold smoke into freshly pulped Arabica coffee beans to concoct Ol’ Smoky – Cold Smoked Coffee, now known as one of our signature drinks.”

Cold-smoked coffee process

Thammaiah, co-founder and a third-generation coffee farmer, lends his technical know-how and expertise to the business; together the duo spent the first harvest season testing new roast profiles to come up with exciting flavours that steer away from the all-too-predictable chocolate and caramel. But they’re aware of the risks that come with taking a chance on the unconventional — a fruit-fermented, citrus-infused coffee may be too niche for traditional coffee lovers, and, after all, the customer is king.

“But at the end of the day it’s the story of our lives, and we want to keep feeling excited about the coffee we make,” D’abreo explains. “We run these ‘what if’ sessions every other week with our team over Zoom to vocalise the most random things that could be done to coffee, a sort of wish list of the kind of radical flavour notes we’d like to taste in our coffee someday. There are more horrible ideas than good ones to be honest, but that’s part of the process!” he chuckles.

Top: Ashish D’abreo and Tej Thammaiah; bottom: 2 Beans In A Pod in the fermentation vat, after 18 hours

Filtering out the doable is just step one, and it stays that way for at least seven to eight months because ideas can’t be executed until the harvesting season begins later in the year. Maverick & Farmer’s plantation in Pollibetta only comes to life in November, bustling with energy to put thoughts into action, but not at the cost of the surrounding environment. The brand’s sustainability efforts may not be plastered all over their website, but it’s because they’re not just surface-level gimmicks; these initiatives are an intrinsic part of their ecosystem. “Coffee pulping puts a lot of acidic water into the ground, which, over a period of time, isn’t good news for the crop or surrounding soil,” says D’abreo. “So, to tackle that, we strain out the flesh of the coffee at the pulping stage. Then it is passed through these calcium beds and collected in larger tanks to be treated in such a way that the acidity is reduced and the water is made completely alkaline. It is allowed to settle for three months and then this water is repurposed for cultivation and irrigation purposes.”

There’s an element of the human touch to artisanal coffee, as evidenced by the care that goes into nurturing the crop and building a loyal community of customers. And it’s clear that, along with an experimental soul, Maverick & Farmer is all heart when it comes to giving us a cup of freshly brewed goodness.

Moderation and Photography by Asad Sheikh. All images from FDCI India Couture Week 2022.

Top row (left to right): Falguni Shane Peacock, Dolly J, Suneet Varma
Middle row (left to right): JJ Valaya and Anamika Khanna
Bottom row (left to right): Amit Aggarwal, Kunal Rawal, Anamika Khanna.

Asad Sheikh (AS): Can everyone please introduce themselves?

Tanay Arora (TA): I’m a textile design graduate and currently employed as a design consultant by Srishti Trust for Aranya Naturals, an organisation that works with natural dyes, shibori and eco-printing techniques, and Athulya Paper Studio.

Anmol Venkatesh (AV): I recently graduated from NIFT [National Institute of Fashion], Delhi, and I work as an assistant designer at Péro.

Yash Patil (YP): I’m a fashion designer, currently working on custom design projects on a freelance basis.

Somya Lochan (SL): I have been exploring different crafts clusters for the past one year, and right now I am working with Raw Mango as a textile designer.

AS: Let’s discuss our understanding of couture in the Indian sense.

YP: I think, Asad, we could start with you. What is your understanding of it?

AS: Couture in India is seen as occasion wear, primarily based on the market it caters to, and also the price point. The Indian bridal wear market is one of the most lucrative segments of our fashion economy, and multiple designers have geared their collections around that. My understanding is that Parisian couture, its most famous global counterpart, is more geared towards selling fantasies, whereas Indian couture has a very commercial element to it in terms of brand strategies, which dilutes this aspect.

YP: It’s more of a bridal week here; many of the pieces that get made are focused on catering to a certain occasion. We don’t see a lot of explorations in terms of silhouettes that you would expect from a couture week. Globally, brands have been building their individual images around the idea and exclusivity that they present at Couture Week. But here in India, there are common silhouettes that run through different brands. There are only slight tweaks as far as the themes they refer to.

AV: Creatively speaking, that is the biggest factor for the Indian market. It’s so intertwined with the bridal- and occasion-wear market. That in itself comes with certain baggage and aesthetic templates that designers have to adhere to, right?

YP: It’s also about the clientele and what they are opting for.

Tarun Tahiliani

AV: Yes, because couture is a heavy investment from the designer’s side. Look at the pieces they put out there — the craftsmanship required to create that is not cheap.

SL: But I also feel that couture — its handmade, hand-designed, custom-made aspect in particular — is not new to us. This is what India stands for, and it’s just that the term is Western. Simply speaking, this age-old practice is now being reintroduced after the coinage of the term, just like with sustainability. But we can’t ignore the fact that this is something we have always done and are simply building on it.

TA: India has been synonymous with stunning craftsmanship communities for generations. The idea of the design process in a capitalistic sense — that it’s controlled by an organisation or a person — is still relatively new here. Most of the brands that are presenting are controlled by the designer that founded them.

YP: As Somya said, pieces would be made in every household and passed down from one generation to another. The whole idea of the personal touch to a piece that we call couture — where we say that it passes through so many hands — was always there, and on a more personal level. I think it was more detailed and now we have certain houses that work with a certain style. And that’s only presented to the market. So there’s not a lot of, umm…

TA: Diversity?

YP: Each segment, city and state has certain crafts, textiles and styles that were showcased earlier, but, now, it has been made homogenous, and a certain silhouette passes around from the top to the bottom of our country, which really wasn’t the case before, right?

TA: Also, a lot of the work that’s currently being shown is very similar in the form of techniques, and there are very few brands that are branching away from that. For instance, everybody’s doing aari work — the way it’s being done differs from brand to brand, but the base techniques are very similar.

Rahul Mishra

AV: It boils down to the kind of representation we have. The designers all come from specific contexts, and they cater to that same saturated market. As someone who comes from southern India, I see very little representation of where I come from in the Fashion Weeks, and I can say the same for other parts of the country as well. So even when we speak of the kind of expertise that’s being showcased, it’s very tied to the context it is coming from.

YP: There’s also the use of textiles. Historically, every state would use their own textiles as a base to produce a certain garment. We call it Couture Week, but the lehngas aren’t made out of Indian textiles. Designers rely mostly on mill-made fabrics. They use a lot of nets and tulles. For fabrics, we look to the outside world, and for embroideries, we look inside the country. The result is something that is not very Indian.

TA: But I think it’s important to highlight that the consumer base they’re catering to has been consuming Western content at increasing levels for a while now. Brands need to be able to sustain themselves commercially in order to bring about a change in the consumer pattern in some way. In the post-pandemic market, it’s important for brands to make profit.

SL: The consumer base is a very important factor. I was having this conversation with Sanjay [Garg] just two days ago, and he told me how a time came when women only wanted to look slimmer, taller, and fairer. Supply caters to demand, and that’s how this template came to be. And overall, because people started prioritising wider trends over their cultural heritage.

AS: Firstly, I think we all can agree that if couture is loosely defined by how difficult or unreasonable it is to produce a piece on a ready-to-wear mass scale, then the artisans are at the centre of it. And, for the longest time in India, a lot of the textile, sari weaves and motifs represented community storytelling, and there was a distinct sense of individualism that arrived from that. However, now we see brands making an effort to fit into a certain framework. Having said that, I think some designers have really started to explore how to make their designs look more individualistic while sticking to textural textile work because in India, couture happens on a textural level.

Amit Aggarwal

TA: We work a lot with textiles and embroideries, so the bulk of our work for Couture Week should be looked at through not just the silhouettes but also the textural work the designers use. I feel like Rahul Mishra and Amit Aggarwal have been able to capitalise on a classic silhouette and a particular technique in a way that’s not been done by others. When you look at a Rahul Mishra garment, the 3D embroidery that he does with the aari work is very classic to his label. Understanding how to capitalise on having a signature silhouette or style that people can easily identify but that also differentiates you from the market is important.

AS: And I think that’s where a lot of Western couture differs from its Indian counterparts. In the West, many designers have historically capitalised on a set silhouette and style of embroideries. When you think of Chanel, you think of feathers and tweed and bejewelled embroideries. Whereas in India, our base form of innovation is at the textile level. So then how do you hypothetically say “Okay, I own chikankari”? No one designer owns a particular kind of craft or style associated with it. How they play with it to create a sense of individualism is perhaps how they can move forward with it.

TA: It’s important that nobody ever tries to own a craft because it’s a generational practice. So you can use it in a new way, or in a way that’s very original to you, but at the very same time, the craft will exist on its own, and other people are always going to use it.

SL: In fact, Yash and I have found ourselves in this discussion so many times where we have concluded that we can never set a timeline or give ownership of a craft to anyone, because how do you track what the original craft was? And how it evolved from there.

AV: You can’t control the number of people who are practising these techniques.

SL: At any point in time, there are ten people saying, “I’m going to change this craft.” Take a technique like chikankari. There’s someone who may come and say that they will do something new with it, and the 300-rupee chikankari piece is now valued at 600 rupees. Then someone else adds something new to it and so on. And then comes a stage where you can’t correlate that piece to the original work. And then someone says, “Okay, let me take you back to where it was”, and suddenly the original form of the craft is selling for, say, 3,000 rupees. It’s a cycle, which will keep running on and on.

TA: I find rebooting to be a recurring theme in Indian couture and fashion. I think we have a trend cycle where we tend to go back to the original work, which makes me hopeful.

Anamika Khanna

AV: That’s very true, but it’s still relegated to specific crafts. In India, some craft sectors are very organised — I’ve worked with quite a few of them — and there are others that are completely unorganised. So, when it comes to the Indian couture scene, we do repeatedly work with set crafts. And when we are talking about crafts surviving in this ecosystem, we are very specifically talking about these particular crafts that already have a kind of star power. It’s also important to recognise that Indian couture’s obsession with royal worldbuilding is very intertwined with the crafts that they choose to work with. I think, in that regard, we have to also look at the idea of just what Indian couture in itself is and who fits into it.

SL: India has never been about silhouette-driven design. We are very good with textiles, and that is how it has always been. If you go to the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad, you will see how silhouettes were introduced into the market. The boxy silhouettes that we see and appreciate so much, those are basically the result of errors. Textiles and couture cannot be separated in India. Secondly, artisans and couture, again, work in sync — design houses need artisans, artisans need design houses.

AS: If I may introduce a point here — Indian couture, and the designers working within that framework, are working to sell the garment they’re showing. It has to reach a customer, while in the Western sense of approaching couture, the garment may or may not necessarily reach a customer because the cost of designing could be underwritten by the licensing the brand might do via, say, a perfume line.

TA: It’s really important to note how many Western luxury fashion brands have been able to make themselves financially accessible to some degree. For instance, Chanel No. 5 made the brand accessible to a wider audience who cannot afford to purchase the garments that Chanel sells. No major Indian brand has done that yet by capitalising on their regional status as a couture house. Even though we’ve historically been such an important part of the spice trade and fragrances have been so essential to the Indian wardrobe for generations. We’ve been manufacturing attar in Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh for centuries. But fragrances have not been introduced by any major Indian couture house. And I do think that it’s a very interesting space that they could explore, to make themselves accessible to the general Indian audience.

Amit Aggarwal

YP: What you mean is that Indian couture has to be a lot more exploratory in terms of not just design and inspiration but also a broader commercial strategy, right?

TA: That would give designers some degree of creative freedom as well. If Sabyasachi, whose bridal wear is so well known, were to come out with a perfume tomorrow, that could definitely bolster the brand, and it might create a template for others to follow. It could help designers make the more experimental or untested designs that they want to because the cost of producing a couture piece in India is very high in local currency. Ultimately, the aim is to manufacture and sell it here.

SL: We cannot ignore the fact that India is a developing country with a capitalist economy, which is still growing. So introducing experimentation or creating fantasies for that matter is a complete challenge here.

AS: Design and market elements of couture aside, I think one important point that we haven’t covered yet is how it is like working with the artisans after the pandemic.

SL: It’s two-sided. On the one hand, places like Rajasthan and Gujarat have boomed, with everyone going to Rajasthan and wanting to get their things made in Kutch and Ahmedabad. On the other hand, I come from Ranchi, Jharkhand, and I see how the artisans are struggling; they are changing professions and abandoning looms. Villages with looms are now filled with vacant houses.

TA: I worked with the craft clusters in Bhagalpur in Bihar during the pandemic and it was a similar story to what is happening in Jharkhand. They were not able to manufacture anything. Gujarat has been doing a lot of manufacturing for a while, so they have a network built in to get them back up — the pandemic has had a very diverse impact on different parts.

AV: Recently, I spent time at a few sari-weaving clusters in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and I found that the artisans have had to make a living through other means because their looms were simply not running. But I noticed that specifically with embroidery artisans, it works on two levels. Either you’re part of a couture house or you’re under an independent contractor who supplies employers and you work piece by piece.

YP: Outsourcing it. Yeah.

Anamika Khanna

AV: And it was a massive hit for the artisans working under contractors when the market shut down because they didn’t have an employer who was answerable to them.

SL: Yash, we recently discussed how the middleman culture has come back.

YP: Yeah…it definitely has.

AS: Could you elaborate on that because my understanding was that the middleman culture is shifting and becoming less prominent?

SL: So many of us were working consciously towards getting artisans back into the business. Yash and I have discussed creating a directory to contact artisans directly. Suddenly, there’s a boom for middlemen because people can’t travel but they need their textiles. One person leads to another and then another and so on, and that’s how you can order a textile. But the artisan gets very little, and there is no way to track it. It’s so difficult to reach the artisans directly now, and it’s been a big setback in the textile industry.

YP: The same situation is prevalent within the sector that does embroidery for brands outside of India as well. A lot of brands in Europe, for instance, outsource all of their embroidery work to vendors who are in India. I was in touch with a few of these spaces, and even here, it was very lacking. When artisans had to go back home to their villages, they didn’t return, so a lot of the time, the vendors also suffered.

AS: Design houses must have faced disruptions while working with the artisans, especially when it came to maintaining their pre-pandemic standard. The entire network has shifted.

SL: As a woman working on side projects where I was required to actually be part of the clusters in villages with no washrooms, I found it difficult. This might come off as my little sob story, but working for days on end in a remote location that’s replete with patriarchy is not easy. The men there are not accustomed to listening to a woman. The closest store is four or five kilometres away. These kinds of challenges make you reconsider an easier solution. I could get someone in Delhi to do it. Maybe it’s going to be a machine-made piece but then again, people go by the aesthetic and visual value, and are ready to consume it.I think Tanay would completely understand where I am coming from.

TA: Very few people would want to do that.

SL: And in the end, it’s all about the fact that your audience is okay with what’s being provided to them. We are not ready to accept and acknowledge good fashion.

TA: Plus, we’re living in a very visual world right now, where you’re constantly bombarded with visual communication thanks to social media. If you see the same silhouettes and textiles repeatedly, you start to associate them with high fashion appeal.

Anju Modi

AV: But then again, when we talk about how so many designers show the same silhouettes, we have to understand the people buying these clothes are not just the brides or the younger, more “experimental” woman, so to speak. These decisions are influenced by other family members, like their mothers, in-laws, grandparents and so on. The individual is not in complete control over their purchase. Because in India, we do keep external factors like society and family in mind when we make these massive purchases, especially clothes catering to social events. And the designers have to work and run their businesses within this framework.

AS: On a concluding note, where do you see Indian fashion and couture heading? I think our fashion scene really kicked off in the 1990s. So we are much younger as an industry that designs and sells.

YP: I think we are still at a place where we are finding and exploring a language. Couture Week has only been around for 15 years.

TA: I hope that the field — by which I mean the organised structure of a professional fashion house, a concept that is still new to the Indian landscape — develops and comes to co-exist with the age-old crafts in the Indian landscape, without having to pigeonhole itself. I hope to see a broader clientele emerge in the future, one that buys garments that are manufactured in India for an Indian audience. And that these garments are not just bridal. It’s more than that.

AV: Perhaps I come from a bubble where people are more aware about fashion, but I’m optimistic about the kind of demands that consumers will eventually put forward as their base grows.

SV: There are young designers cropping up everywhere, and they are readily experimenting. And there are established ones who are opening up their horizons to newer things too. And this process is going to come together to generate multiple diverse languages.

Fashion

Text by Shirin Mehta. Interviews and styling by Akanksha Pandey. Photography by Carl Van Der Linde.

These creators of garments, textiles, weaves and embroideries, with strong ties to various parts of South India, have spent a significant part of their childhoods with nature, using their hands for farming or creating handicrafts while learning to connect with and protect the flora around them. A lifestyle that is emblematic of the region’s particular environmental consciousness has seeped into their work and designs; the local sustainable practices and ideas of community that were central to their upbringings or formative professional learnings are, today, intrinsic to the style philosophies and actual practices of their labels.

Highlighting ecologically sound creation while shooting against stark natural backdrops — simple, almost austere, in their aesthetic — Verve presents fashion imagery with a message that resonates in the face of the stripped-down future earth that we are confronting….

1 and 4: On Kirtana Vurgese, block dress made from a single block of fabric using zero-waste pattern-cutting technique and thread silk painting on handloom mulberry silk organza with eri silk lining hand-stitched and hand-hemmed (all covered in plastic), from P.E.L.L.A.; 2: Handwoven jacket using honeycomb technique finished with azo-free dyeing, by Naushad Ali; 3: On Tina Sweerin, double-sided jacquard knit scarf made from 100 per-cent organic and regular cotton, soft 100 per cent organic cotton jacquard knit sweater with neuron artwork, both from Biskit, tie-dye jackets (left and right, fastened at the waist), from Oshadi; hand-painted shirt, from Tobetwo.

Naushad Ali by Naushad Ali (Puducherry)
“Nature and the simple, traditional lifestyle of the people around us inspire us every day. We practise the most basic sustainable design processes at our studio here: we save, we choose and we curtail excess. We have a system of segregating cut-off fabric pieces, which are organised by colour and size, followed by patchworking and then cutting out designs from these patchworks. The cut-offs are further twisted into ropes to be woven into fabrics by local weavers on basic handlooms.”

Priyanka Ella Lorena Lama, P.E.L.L.A (Bengaluru, Karnataka)
“Growing up in Indian households, sustainable practices are seen all around us. I stumbled upon my own practice when I was developing my graduating collection in 2013 at NIFT Bangalore, where I was using pashmina and silks for the first time. These were too beautiful and expensive to be cut recklessly, and I pushed myself to explore designs that had only one seam in the whole garment. Ever since, I’ve been more aware of exploring within just the given limit of a rectangular piece of fabric. This block has been able to give me limitless outcomes.”

1: Vegan wool swatches, all from Faborg; 2: Handwoven, hand-embroidered with appliqué technique cotton shirt and textile art, both from Kalki; 3: Double-sided jacquard knit scarf made from 100 per-cent organic and regular cotton, soft 100 per-cent organic cotton jacquard knit sweater with neuron artwork, both from Biskit. 

Harsha Biswajit and Shruti Biswajit, Biskit (Chennai, Tamil Nadu)
“The ethos of Biskit is to break the psychological barrier of defining the gender of a piece of fabric, thereby encouraging people to buy one piece of clothing that can be worn and shared by everyone. Our unisex design philosophy and limited sizing are deliberate choices, and as part of this new initiative to limit our production levels, we have decided to make only single-edition pieces or a maximum of 21 editions of every style.”

Gowri Shankar, co-founder, Faborg (Auroville, Puducherry)
“Nature has provided us with all the resources for sustainable fabric manufacturing, and it is time to explore natural fibres without adulterating them. Weganool is a 100-per-cent plant-based fabric that is made with zero harm, zero chemicals and zero waste. The calotropis plant provides two very unique hollow fibres that give excellent insulative properties to the fabric, making it an excellent choice for warm wear. The potent residue from calotropis fibre extraction is concentrated and converted into insect repellent for the farmers.”

1: Hand-painted sari in natural dyes, from Tobetwo; 2: On Vandana Vinod, tissue sari, from Rouka by Sreejith Jeevan; 3: Naturally dyed organic cotton fabrics, by Naushad Ali. Tissue sari with hand-embroidered floral motif, from Rouka by Sreejith Jeevan; 4: Handwoven and hand-embroidered shirt, from Kalki; drape skirt, stylist’s own. 

Karunya Rajan, Kalki (Mettupalayam, Tamil Nadu)
“Hailing from a small town with agriculture at its heart, I have grown up seeing hands being an integral part of creation — from holding the seed between your fingers, sowing it in the soil, to nurturing and harvesting. This inherent creation by hand is the very fabric of Kalki. Everything we make comes from a tangible, sensory process. And everything we make is a community effort, much like a close-knit farming community. We source our fabric directly from local weavers: we indulge in everyday conversations with them, we share our profits and become a part of their lives. Nothing comes close to this sense of belonging, which seamlessly translates into our art as well.”

Sreejith Jeevan, Rouka (Kochi, Kerala)
“In Kerala handloom, nature forms a part of the process — all the processes are carried out in the open and have relationships with certain times of the day. For instance, the warp is usually made in the early morning sun. Being a fabric culture from a place that lives very closely with nature, these relationships are beautiful.”

Anna Palashevskaya, Tobetwo (Auroville, Puducherry)
“Our hand-painted technique was brought to us by a French designer in the early ’80s. Today, we have many local artisans who are experts in this form of textile design. Nature is our inspiration, from both an ecological and aesthetic perspective. We have adopted hand painting not only for its craft and design value, but also because it requires very little water in processing; we do not pollute the groundwater, as the residue of hand-painted textiles is very low.”

1: Azo-free pigmented swimwear with block printing with plastic waste, from Lal Design Studio, and Vegan wool fabrics, all from Faborg; 2 and 6: Handwoven, hand-embroidered with appliqué technique cotton shirt and textile art, both from Kalki; 3: Eco-printed sari with locally found leaves dyed with Indian madder, from Aeka by Anupriya; 4: Block dress made from a single block of fabric using zero-waste pattern-cutting technique and thread silk painting on handloom mulberry silk organza with eri silk lining hand-stitched and hand-hemmed, from P.E.L.L.A; 5: On Urmila Krishnan, textured jersey jacket with special cord-edged finishing brushed in-print paste, from Ravage by Raj Shroff. 

Raj Shroff, Ravage by Raj Shroff (Bengaluru, Karnataka)
“The process of creating textiles through manipulations helps to save a lot of exquisite textiles, especially when you use them to create patterned styles. For example, when you create a jacket using ikat or jamdani, there is a whole lot that’s left over after you have achieved your pattern. The leftovers excite me. So, our wastage as a production unit has always been moderate.”

Bidisha Samantaray, Lal Design Studio (Auroville, Puducherry)
“My inspiration has always been the environment I have grown up in and where I am still growing as a person and as a designer. Pondicherry, to me, is a culture. It’s an aesthetic. It’s a vibe. It’s authentic. The kind of prints we develop and the fabrics we choose bring us to that effortless, breezy and sensuous feel that Pondicherry is.”

Anupriya Biyani Dalmiya, Aeka (Bengaluru, Karnataka)
“When we talk about eco-printing, the results vary according to many conditions — plant season, plant part used, water quality, type of fabric etc. Eco-dyeing, also referred to as eco-printing or eco-bundling, is a method of imprinting leaves, flowers, and other organic materials onto fabric. Hues vary by season and climate. This is a slow process since it’s all hand done, right from picking leaves to placing them and bundle dyeing.”

1: On Reema Rao, Stem fibres of vegan wool, from Faborg. Handwoven and hand-embroidered shirt, from Kalki, and patchwork jacket, by Naushad Ali; 2: Hand-blocked textile art, from Eachaneri; 3: Cotton sari with floral appliquéd details, from Rouka by Sreejith Jeevan; 4: Handwoven, hand-embroidered with appliqué technique cotton shirt and textile art, both from Kalki; 5: Textured jersey jacket with special cord-edged finishing, brushed in print paste, from Ravage by Raj Shroff. 

Rakshit Reddy, Eachaneri (Eachaneri, Andhra Pradesh. Now based in Delhi)
“I grew up seeing sustainable practices at my nani’s house in Eachaneri village in Andhra Pradesh — making leaf plates, coco leaf shades, spraying cow dung water paste on the floor before painting muggu [rangoli]. And there was a massive forest which had mango trees, coconut trees and many more. All this has influenced me.”

Elen, co-founder, Faborg (Auroville, Puducherry)
“There are records of about 67 indigenous fibres that were used in India for fabric manufacturing but were lost during the industrial revolution. Calotropis was one of them. Manufacturing fabric from calotropis fibres started as Gowri’s expensive hobby, but it grew into a life-long passion in a very short period of time.”

Special thanks to Meenal Somvanshi and Nachiket Mohanta.