A Walk With The Chitari

I often drive down to Sawantwadi for Ayurvedic treatments. It’s about an hour’s drive through the Western Ghats, across vast tracts of green fields and rivers. Over the last few years, I must have been there ten times, perhaps more. Each time, I told myself that I would visit Chitari Aali. And each time, I didn’t.

This week, I finally did.

I left early. I had time. I stopped at the Sawantwadi Palace, asked for directions while having a cold coffee, then followed the route I was given. I parked the car just below the aali and walked up. The market rose on a hill, a fairly steep climb, lined with all kinds of wares being sold along the way. At the top, I turned right and found a couple of small shops selling wooden toys, painted objects, and familiar Chitari forms.

I entered the first shop and said, quite simply, that I wanted to see where the work was made.

A young man named Prabhakar came out. He told me that his elder brother was the designer and that he could take me to their factory. It was in Kolgaon, about four kilometres from there. I said yes.

He sat in the car and I drove to Kolgaon.

The workshop was registered as Kamalanayan Handicraft Centre in the name of Pratibha G. Chitari, Amit’s wife. We climbed the stairs to the first floor, took off our chappals, and entered the space. The building was semi-constructed. There were no windows, only openings for them. No doors, only door frames. The staircase had no banister. The floor was bare cement. As I walked around, I noticed cobwebs everywhere. The machines were carefully covered, I imagine because they are expensive, costing a few lakhs each.

It was only after arriving that I learnt it was a Monday, when the region does not get electricity. So no production was happening. The machines were silent.

And yet, work was still going on.

Bhargav, the youngest brother, brought Amit to meet me. As we talked, Amit sat down to paint a large Ganjifa wall piece depicting the Dashavatara of Vishnu—a commissioned work. There were only three workers present that day. One was packing wooden fruits made from moulds. Two others were preparing wooden panels for painting, applying Fevicol, sanding, polishing.

Before Amit arrived, I spoke briefly to a couple of them. Sonali Chauhan had grown up in this village, married here, and has been working in the workshop for about five years. She handles most of the preparatory processes. I asked her what the work felt like to her, how she thought about it, how she experienced it.

All she said was,  “achcha lagta hai.”

I asked why, what she liked about it. She paused, as if to think, but merely reiterated, “achcha lagta hai.”

There were no words for it, perhaps no need to think. Perhaps the language lay in the doing itself. Sustained, skilled making is known to generate a particular bodily chemistry: endorphins that soften effort, dopamine that registers quiet satisfaction when action meets intention, and oxytocin associated with calm, trust, and nervous-system ease. These states do not arrive as thoughts or explanations. They register as sensation, steadiness, absorption, a sense that the body is at home in what it is doing. Articulated simply as “achcha lagta hai”, this is not a lack of language, but a bodily coherence that does not ask to be translated.

What I am trying to name here is not what she lacks, but what I am attempting to do. Her “achcha lagta hai” is a complete articulation within the conditions of her work. My search for language belongs to a different practice, one that asks what happens when attention, reflection, and articulation are allowed to accompany making, not to replace embodied satisfaction, but to create another kind of value around working with the hand.

It was only after this exchange that I began speaking more fully with Amit. One of the biggest surprises was learning that he had studied at the JJ School of Art and later worked in the film industry, before choosing to return to the family profession. He is a fourth-generation Chitari artisan and introduced himself quite simply as Amit Chitari.

His father worked without machines. Amit works with them. The machines do not replace the hand, they assist it. He explained that earlier, the left hand would turn the wood and the right hand would shape it. Now, the machine does the work of the left hand, while the right hand continues to shape. The intelligence of the hand remains.

They use woods like shivan, jamun, mango, and sheesham

, woods often considered waste wood. Shivan, in fact, is a wood I know well; my own desk is made from it. Amit told me they use roughly a thousand gun-feet of wood, though whether that was per month or per year was not entirely clear. What was clear was that government support is minimal, permissions are complicated, and survival dictates scale and repetition.

What struck me was not the absence of skill or intelligence, but the absence of time. No time to finish the building. No time to install windows or doors. No time to clean the space. No time to pause and articulate what the work means, how it feels, or where it might go next.

When I spoke to Amit about my own practice, about how sometimes the needle seems to take over, to hold sway, he understood immediately. But he didn’t have a language for it.

And that stayed with me.

Chitari art is not native to Sawantwadi, though it is now closely associated with it. The craft has its roots in Cuncolim in South Goa, where the Chitari community practised wood carving, painting, and lacquer work. Historical accounts suggest that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, members of the Bhonsle royal family encountered Chitari artisans while in Goa. When the Bhonsles later established themselves in Sawantwadi, these artisans are believed to have travelled with them.

Over time, Sawantwadi became a centre for Chitari work, particularly wooden toys, lacquered objects, and later Ganjifa playing cards, shaped by royal patronage and market demand. The craft adapted in order to survive.

Today, the Geographical Indication tag for Chitari art is held by the Sawantwadi Palace, not by individual artisans or the town at large. While this offers visibility and institutional recognition, it also fixes the craft within a controlled framework. Artisans continue to carry the skill, labour, and continuity of the tradition, but authorship, naming, and the right to define what counts as Chitari largely sit outside their individual control.

Knowing this history made my visit to the workshop feel differently weighted. What I was seeing was not simply a family business struggling with time and resources, but a lineage shaped by migration, patronage, and survival, a craft that has learned to endure by staying close to what is sanctioned and saleable. As Amit put it, “hum apna kuch nahin daal sakte”, we cannot add anything of our own.

It surprised me that, despite having studied Fine Arts at a prestigious institution, Amit did not feel drawn towards creating even small departures from the Chitari script, forms that might retain technical and material continuity while allowing some personal inflection.

In other craft sectors, particularly textiles, one has seen innovation emerge through exposure to new markets, foreign buyers, and collaborations with designers and artists. The infrastructure often remains the same, the looms, the courtyards, the animals nearby, but the product is reimagined to meet new contexts.

Perhaps this is what is missing in Chitari practice, not ability, but exposure. There is enough business within the known script that there is no necessity to devise new forms or colours.

Craft and hand-making are among the oldest human inclinations. I remember reading, long ago, that it took five thousand years for sculptors to perfect the meditative repose of the Buddha, generations refining an eye, a fold, a posture, inching towards stillness. Today, we are no longer perfecting skill in that way. We are inventing beyond it. Variety and novelty define the predilections of the marketplace.

At the level of Chitari practice, the work is not oriented towards representational improvement or personal meaning-making in the way contemporary practitioners like myself might frame it. It is oriented towards subsistence, carrying forward a cultural and family lineage through repetition, skill, and continuity.

Amit barely has time to meet market demand, to keep the workshop running, to generate income. Sitting with this, I found myself turning inward, asking questions about my own practice.

As I write this, I am aware that these questions have been arising alongside my own stitching practice. In recent weeks, sitting with cloth and thread, I have been paying attention to posture, to the way the needle sometimes seems to take over, to how memory does not return as narrative but as structure. Unlike the Chitari workshop, I have the scope to notice this, to dwell, to articulate it. That difference is not one of imagination, but of conditions. What I am able to reflect on in stitching is not separate from what I witnessed in Kolgaon; it is shaped by a different ecology of time, language, and permission.

But this also raised its own set of questions. What am I doing. Why am I doing it. Does paying attention to process, going deeper into it, create a different kind of value. Does it deepen understanding. Does it change how craft is seen or valued. And can that kind of attention ever be of relevance to craftsmen like Amit.

I don’t have answers yet. What I have is an encounter, a space, a set of hands at work, and a growing awareness of how differently thinking and making are allowed to unfold.

Three decades ago, when I first began working as an artist-craftsperson, my impulse was to bring that work into an art gallery space, to see whether visibility and context might generate value. Over time, I realised that the gallery was not enough. It could show the work, but not the thinking, the negotiations with material, the discipline of repetition, or the quiet intelligence of the hand. This stitch journal emerged from that recognition. It is an attempt to invite the reader inside practice, to attend to how history shapes and material behaves, how posture shapes attention, how the hand learns, insists, adapts. In setting my own practice alongside encounters such as this one with the Chitaris, I am not proposing improvement or intervention. I am asking whether language, attention, and reflection might create a different kind of value for working with the hand, one that I can articulate from where I stand, and that I hope may, in time, also speak back to traditions that have rarely been asked to speak for themselves.

For now, that is enough to sit with.

 

Material Memory

The work on my third co-creation piece continues. I have been doing a great deal of couching with 6ply gold thread or Zari. As I was couching around a particularly unregulated space, the process became uncomfortable. Moving along the uneven threads of a knitted piece that I had cut and placed into the work— threads I had earlier couched, or tacked— the surface was uneven. The lines moved up and down, curved inward, then rose again, at one point I was couching a strand of 6ply zari around a single strand of 2/30’s cotton. Needless to say, it was a taxing stitching experience

The intense presence required of me to focus so completely on the thread I was couching with and the six-ply Zari itself—brought several thoughts to mind.

One was how much we take for granted the work we see around us. Zardozi work does not refer to couching at all. It is simply called sui ka kaam. The work is intricate, often impossibly complex, and yet one cannot truly understand what it entails unless engaged in doing it oneself. Even when I am couching the 6ply gold thread in straight lines, a seemingly simple task, I find that my couching stitches are not at regular intervals.

Part of the difficulty is visual. I work with a lot of electric light focussed on the work. The gold of the sari shines back at me. The couching thread itself is dyed yellow. Between the two, visibility is compromised. I am also not bent over an adda like the craftsmen are. I sit back on my sofa, sometimes working at a table, and at this point with the fabric resting on my lap, supported by a cutting mat underneath for stability.

I am acutely aware that I do not work the way traditional craftsmen do. They sit on the floor, cross-legged, bent forward over an adda, the body trained into a posture that brings eye, hand, and cloth into a fixed and intimate relationship. I cannot sit like that. My body does not allow it. I work seated on a couch or a chair, adapting the surface to my lap or a table, stabilising the fabric as best I can. This difference in posture is not incidental. It affects visibility, control, rhythm, and endurance. What the craftsman achieves through a lifelong bodily discipline, I mediate through adjustment and compensation.

What is at work here is physical negotiation. The hand is constantly adjusting to uneven tension, to the glare of gold against yellow thread, to limited visibility. It compensates for posture, and it stabilises the work with whatever is at hand. These are not conceptual decisions. They are moment-to-moment bodily responses. The intelligence involved is motor, accumulated through doing, refined through repetition and resistance.

Much of what happens in this work is decided before it can be named. The hand adjusts, compensates, responds. Thought follows action, not the other way around. The hand carries its own intelligence, shaped by repetition, resistance, and material encounter.

All of this made me acutely aware of the importance of skill, and of how skill is acquired across generations. The level of perfection achieved by traditional craftsmen comes from beginning very young, often at the age of fourteen or even earlier, with nimble fingers trained through repetition. This led me to think about the histories that precede and influence us. How did this gold thread come into being? Who invented it? Who first thought of turning metal into thread?

Historically, gold thread is believed to have originated in China, where thin sheets of gold were beaten into leaf, cut into fine strips, and wrapped around a core of silk. In Chinese practice, paper too was transformed into textile material. What was known as zhi bu—literally paper cloth—referred to paper that was strengthened, coated, sometimes laminated with metal leaf, and then cut into narrow strips to function like thread.

I remember visiting the artisanal district of Nishijin in Kyoto, where I saw this process continued in Japan as Shifu, which uses the same characters and means the same thing: paper cloth. Gold leaf was meticulously laid onto paper, then hung vertically beneath the boards of the atelier to dry so that no dust could settle on it. Once dry, it was cut into extremely fine strips. By the 1980’s, Japan had computerized looms producing elaborate designs for obis and kimonos, yet the gold thread itself—the Shifu—was still inserted by hand. As techniques travelled from China to Japan, pronunciation may have shifted, but the material logic endured: paper becoming textile, metal becoming thread.

Although gold thread is used extensively in India today, it did not originate here. The word Zari itself is Persian, derived from zar, meaning gold. From China, this material knowledge travelled westward along trade routes into Central Asia and Persia, carried not only as finished textiles but as technique. In these regions, where metalworking traditions were already highly developed, gold thread gained technical refinement and symbolic importance, becoming integral to court dress, ceremonial garments, and religious textiles. 

India has always worn gold—often heavily, abundantly, and with deep ritual meaning. Gold jewellery has been central to bodily adornment, temple wealth, marriage, fertility, and lineage. Necklaces, bangles, anklets, waist belts, nose rings—gold sits directly on the body in Indian culture, in intimate contact with skin. In ancient times, there was no cultural hesitation about wearing gold as metal.

What did not emerge in India, however, was the widespread transformation of gold into thread as a dominant textile material. This distinction has less to do with aesthetic preference and more to do with climate, clothing structure, and where status was displayed.

In the Indian subcontinent, the hot and humid climate favoured minimal, draped, breathable garments—saris, dhotis, and uncut lengths of cloth. The body remained the primary site of ornamentation. Gold worn as metal remained visible and effective. Heavy surface embroidery with metal thread would have weighed cloth down and interfered with fluidity and drape. Decoration therefore emerged through weaving, borders, pallavs, dye, and pattern rather than through dense metal-thread embroidery. Today, these factors are overridden by things like air-conditioning and heating of our lived spaces. 

In contrast, in West and Central Asia and the Middle East, layered garments evolved out of environmental and social necessity. Desert regions are marked by extremes of heat and cold, abrasive winds, and dust, and many societies were nomadic or semi-nomadic, constantly moving across terrain. Clothing functioned as protection and portable shelter. Over time, layered robes, coats, and structured garments also became associated with dignity, authority, and public modesty. As the body became increasingly covered, jewellery worn directly on the skin lost its visibility and practical relevance. Status therefore migrated onto the garment itself. For wealth and power to remain legible, gold had to enter cloth. It is in this context that gold thread gained both technical importance and symbolic force, becoming integral to courtly, ceremonial, and religious textiles.

These regions also possessed long-standing metalworking traditions—wire drawing, filigree, armour making—which made the transition from metal to wire to wrapped thread technically continuous. Through trade, migration, and court patronage, this material intelligence travelled into the Indian subcontinent, where gold thread was absorbed, adapted, and eventually refined within local practices, gaining extraordinary prominence in ceremonial embroidery.

What is interesting is that contemporary Zari behaves very differently from older forms. Today, Zari can pierce fabric, allowing it to be used for stitches such as stem stitch or satin stitch, not only for couching. This is not a very recent development. I have seen ecclesiastical embroideries in the Museum of Christian Art in Goa where Zari is used in satin stitch rather than laid on the surface.

We also have Dabka, the purled gold wire, which is a different material altogether. Today, Dabka is made from copper or aluminium wire coated with a gold-coloured finish. Modern Zari itself is produced through a fascinating industrial process, where a microscopically thin layer of metal is vacuum-deposited onto a polyester film called Mylar. This metallised film is then cut into fine strips and wrapped around a core thread, creating the illusion of metal while remaining light enough to pass through fabric—an extraordinary convergence of ancient visual language and modern material science.

The other moment that struck me came when I turned the fabric over to secure the thread at the back. Looking at the reverse—the unregulated, overlapping stitches in dyed yellow thread that allows me to couch the zari onto the surface without being overtly visible,  something shifted. What surfaced in that moment was the memory of my wedding lehenga—the weight of it, the labour embedded in it, the unseen back of the work. I cannot fathom why the back and not the zari itself brought to mind the peach-saffron lehenga—perhaps the underside was evocative of traditional Zardozi work more than my contemporary rendition. 

It made me think about how history and memory move together, how they converge into what we are doing today, who we are today. And it brought me back, very clearly, to the essence of this piece—what I call co-creation.

Nothing arises in us without history, conditioning, precedent and our own sense of being human.