Chanakya School of Craft and the End of Anonymous Hands

Images are credited where they are not from the Rugberry house.

Pick up almost any piece of hand embroidery and turn it over. On the back is the honest version of the work: the knots, the carried threads, the places where a needle went in and out thousands of times. On the front is the version that gets photographed. For a long time, much of the finest embroidery on the world's runways had a third side as well, the one nobody saw at all, which was the name of the person who made it.

Chanakya International, a Mumbai embroidery house founded in 1984, spent decades on that hidden side. Its artisans worked in obscurity, producing hand embroidery for European luxury fashion that was shown, sold and credited elsewhere. The Chanakya School of Craft is, in large part, an answer to that history.

A school with a simple mission

The school was co-founded in 2016 by Karishma Swali and Monica Shah, and its stated mission is direct: to empower women from underserved communities through education in hand embroidery. The training is free. Students come in to learn a skill that, in most of the world, has been passed down within families or within workshops, rather than taught openly to anyone who wants to learn it.

The curriculum has widened over time. Alongside embroidery and weaving, the school has added woodwork and ceramics, and it is organised in semesters rather than as an informal apprenticeship. That structure matters. A semester has an end, an assessment, a certificate. It treats craft as a discipline that can be taught and examined, like any other professional skill, rather than as an inherited gift that either runs in your family or does not.

Among the techniques the Chanakya artisans practise are chaand jaal, a silver filigree work, and rafugari, the art of darning so fine that a repair disappears into the cloth. Both are slow. Both depend on years of practice before a hand is trusted with valuable fabric. And both are exactly the kind of knowledge that vanishes quietly when the people who hold it are never named, never credited and never given a reason to teach it to someone new.

Craft disappears quietly when the people who hold it are never named, and never given a reason to teach it.

The day the credits changed

The turning point, in most accounts, came in 2023, when Dior staged a show in Mumbai that publicly credited the Chanakya artisans for their work. It sounds like a small gesture, a name in a programme, a mention in the coverage. For the people concerned it was not small at all. It moved the work from the back of the fabric to the front.

Credit does several things at once. It tells the buyer where value really comes from. It gives the artisan a public record of what they have made, something to point to, something that travels with them if they move on. And it changes the conversation inside the industry, because once one house names its makers, it becomes harder for others to pretend that theirs do not exist.

The following year the work went further still. Cosmic Garden, a collateral exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale that ran from April to November 2024, showed paintings by Madhvi and Manu Parekh alongside embroidered translations made by the school's artisans. Embroidery here was not decoration on a garment but an art form in its own right, hung in conversation with painting and given its own wall at the Biennale.

Translation, not copy

The word translation is worth dwelling on. An embroidered version of a painting is not a copy, any more than a good translation of a poem is a copy. Every decision about thread, stitch, density and direction is a reading of the original. Where the painter used a brush, the embroiderer has to decide how to make a line from thousands of small stitches, how to build a field of colour, how to suggest light. Those are artistic decisions, and the person making them deserves to be recognised as someone making art.

This is perhaps the real lesson of the school. It is not only about training women in a marketable skill, important as that is. It is about changing how the skill is seen, from labour that serves someone else's idea to authorship of a kind. Once a maker's name appears beside a piece, the piece is understood differently, and so is the maker.

What naming the maker asks of a buyer

There is a wider debate about labour and conditions in luxury embroidery, and it is a serious one. A single school does not resolve it, and it would be unfair to ask it to. What the Chanakya School of Craft does show is that the anonymity of the maker is a choice, not a law of nature. It can be undone, one credit at a time.

That has implications well beyond fashion. Anyone who buys handmade things, a cushion, a throw, a piece of furniture, a floor covering, is buying the time and judgement of people they will probably never meet. The real questions are who those people are, how they were trained and whether their names travel with the work. The answers will not always be satisfying. The asking still changes something, because it treats the maker as part of the object rather than as an invisible cost behind it.

It also asks something of designers and brands. Naming a maker is easy on a good day and uncomfortable on a bad one, because it invites questions about pay, hours and training that anonymity conveniently avoids. A house that credits its artisans is accepting that scrutiny. That willingness may be the clearest sign of all that the credit is meant.

The school's students arrive, in many cases, with no formal training at all. They leave with a skill, a structure and, increasingly, a public record of their work. That last part may prove the most valuable. Skills can be learned anywhere. A name, once it is attached to beautiful work and seen by the world, is much harder to take away.

Turn the embroidery over again. The knots and carried threads on the back are still there, still honest. What has changed is that the front now tells the same truth as the back: that a particular person, with a particular hand, made this.

Follow @chanakya.school on Instagram for their own work, in their own words.

Rugberry notes

From the Rugberry house

The question of who gets credit for craft is one every maker of handmade things has to answer, Rugberry included. Each of our rugs passes through many hands, from yarn to loom to finishing, and the art of making sets out how that work happens. The Hem Rug, hand tufted in New Zealand wool and edged with a quiet border, is one of the designs that can be recoloured in the Rugberry Design Lab.

In the Rugberry house

• The art of makingThe hands and steps behind a Rugberry rug.
• Rugberry Design LabRecolour a Rugberry design in your own colours.
• Customisable rugsAny size and colour, made to order.

Rugberry has no affiliation with the studios featured. Images are from the Rugberry house unless credited.