Amruta Manodhiya is the only female mashru weaver in Kutch

The corporate world loves a ‘bring your child to work’ day. But on Day 3 of Lakmé Fashion Week x FDCI, Babubhai Vankar didn’t just bring his daughter Amruta Manodhiya to her work, he also watched her show the world what living out your legacy looks like.

Manodhiya, 23, formally studied Home Science only till 12th grade, but she has the rare title of being the only female mashru weaver from Kutch. She debuted her label, Alaicha, on the runway alongside fellow graduates of the Somaiya Kala Vidya design institute.

The eldest among five siblings, Manodhiya grew up in Bhujodi, a village renowned for producing several award-winning handloom artisans. Her father created clothes for the pastoral Rabari community. Noticing a lack of progress and development in the mashru weave, he taught himself how to weave the textile and learnt a subset wherein it was combined with ikat. Watching him at work, Manodhiya was inspired.

At 14, she began training under her father’s guidance, eventually refining her design vocabulary at Somaiya Kala Vidya, where she studied for a year, before graduating in 2023. Now she has her own loom, built by her father, and a space where she sits to weave in a thatched hut near the family’s fields.

“Mashru is usually woven on a 22-inch loom. I was the first one in Kutch to expand it to 50 inches so mashru saris could be made,” Manodhiya says with quiet pride. Sanjay Garg of Raw Mango has been developing mashru saris since 2010, but his are woven in Varanasi, making Manodhiya the first weaver in Kutch to create a mashru sari. “When I decided to focus on mashru, my dad supported me fully. He gave wings to my dreams,” says Manodhiya.

Mashru stands for ‘permitted’ or ‘allowed’ in Arabic, and ‘mixed’ in Sanskrit. Many Muslim families were barred from wearing silk on their bodies, so a weave that used a mix of cotton and silk was developed; only cotton would touch the skin while the silk added sheen on the outside, allowing the religious to keep their promise. Traditionally, it was largely used to make jackets, blouses, and borders; various panels were stitched together to make kediyu.

It’s worth saying plainly: most weaving in India is still done by men. Women? They prep, bobbin, spin, untangle, clean looms—and are often left uncredited. While husband-wife duos are common in Kanjeevaram weaving in Tamil Nadu, and the north-east boasts strong female-led weaving traditions, much of the rest of the country has a lot of catching up to do. Which is why Manodhiya’s presence on the ramp wasn’t just emotional, it was political.

Meet the star cast

The show in which Manodhiya participated, which brought the audience to its feet, included four other new-gen artisans, all of whom are part of Design Craft, the retail arm of Somaiya Kala Vidya, envisioned by founder Amrita Somaiya. The crew was mentored and styled by Daniel Franklin, with support from Aradhana Nagpal, a craft consultant who works closely with the students of the school.

For Somaiya, the school’s aim is to teach the artisans of today how to upskill their familial craft, as well as how to lean into marketing and gain business acumen. Their work is not ‘inspired by craft’, it is craft, interpreted in their own voice, style, and soul. An artisan-designer is someone who has craft lineage, practises it themselves, and has then taken formal training in design.

Along with Manodhiya and her work with mashru, there was Zaid Khatri of Ajrakh Gharana, an artisan giving ajrakh a new lexicon. “I met Zaid right after his US visa appointment in Mumbai, which got approved instantly because the agent loved his ajrakh jacket,” Franklin shares, speaking of his collaboration with Khatri. It inspired them to include several outerwear pieces in his edit.

Mubassirah Khalid Khatri, 25, of the label Elysian, is one of the few female ajrakh-focussed artisans from Ajrakhpur. A true artist, she sketches her ideas directly onto fabric before beginning the block-printing process. Her deliberate placement of patterns—subversive lines between the legs and across the chakras of the body—was delightfully shocking.

Meanwhile Muskan Khatri, 25, with her label Musk, brought unexpected shades of lavender and neon blue to the traditional bandhani palette. Her collection, inspired by the colours of the galaxy, was created along with her mum, grandmothers and sisters of grandmothers, all who contributed to the knotting of the bandhani.

The oldest practitioner of the lot, Shakil Ahmed, 43, with his label Neel Batik, showcased his painterly experiments with batik on resort-wear silhouettes that pushed the form beyond its Javanese roots into something distinctly of 2025, of India.

When you’re a child of a master artisan, “working from home” takes on a different meaning. The house is the studio. The family is the team. And design is not a profession—it’s a mother tongue. When these young designer-artisans stood on that runway, they weren’t just presenting a collection; they were familiarising the audience at large of their dialect, their words.