At some point in the late 1980s, when she was 30 years old, Darshan Mekani Shah quit her job in the legal department at Hindustan Unilever. Restless, the graduate of IIM Ahmedabad and Government Law College, Mumbai, worked briefly with her brother, selling desktop computers, before leaving that too to tutor children. Still dissatisfied, she finally deposited her daughter Radhika with her parents, sold all her jewellery, and bought a ticket to travel the world. Over the course of a year, she visited south-east Asia and Japan, and multiple cities across the United States. She journeyed across Europe, to countries like Portugal, Belgium, France, and Switzerland, and eventually went to London.
“Wherever I went, I found that I was constantly bumping into textiles or jewellery that were connected to India. Places like the Tower of London and the British Museum had so many strangely fantastic pieces that reflected ties to the history of our country, its trade and commerce,” says the 62-year-old over a Zoom call.
It was not just any part of India that Shah was being pulled back to. After her travels, Shah returned to her hometown, Kolkata, and began immersing herself in the textiles of the region. “On a weekend, I would just wrap my daughter up, tie her to my back, and go and see Santiniketan, or go to art shows and melas and things like that. Sometimes we would spend the night in crafts people’s homes. It was wonderful because it was so organic,” she reminisces.
Now, almost 30 years later, Shah is the driving force behind a seminal exhibition, titled Textiles of Bengal: A Shared Legacy, that’s on at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity. The exhibition is hosted by Weavers Studio Resource Centre, a not-for-profit founded by Shah in 2007 as an extension to her retail brand, Weavers Studio Kolkata. Curated by Mayank Mansingh Kaul, it has been five years in the making, and spotlights the dynamic, shared textile history of West Bengal and Bangladesh over a period spanning the 1600s to now.
A juggernaut of a personality who is usually referred to as simply Darshan, even by her daughter, Shah has also put together a mammoth publication, edited by design historian Sonia Ashmore and alongside, also organised a two-day seminar that brought together experts from around the world.
But back to the ’90s, when Shah was still travelling and building her network, teaching herself the techniques of textile making. Along the way, she learnt block printing, batik, kalamkari, and natural dyeing from figures like Ruby Ghaznavi, known as the ‘Indigo Lady of Bangladesh’, and scientist KV Chandramouli in Andhra Pradesh. There were visits to the manufacturing units of Ritu Kumar, treks to grassroots co-operatives to meet artisans, and workshops to attend across south-east Asia. “I built an expertise in natural dyes because I understood from very early on that they [chemical dyes] were harmful for groundwater and the long-term impacts they would have as pollutants,” says Shah, speaking quickly as she races through names, dates, and places, forcing you to keep pace with her thoughts.
In Japan she stayed in a village called Arimatsu, where she learnt shibori dyeing from a family who have been practising and perfecting its techniques for over 400 years. All of this fed back into Weavers Studio, a small shop she started in 1993, to sell textiles, clothing and accessories, and which eventually grew into a full-fledged export business. “I would add kantha embroidery to a Maheshwar dupatta or do a block print pattern from Bengal on a kota Chanderi, so you would get a completely new product,” explains Shah.
The Studio has worked with designers such as Rohit Bal, who used their natural dyed mul-mul (“he was fascinated with the shibori I did”), Sabyasachi, and Anamika Khanna, who also helped design their first Lakmé Fashion Week collection in 2016. Hyderabad-based designer Gaurang Shah recalls meeting Shah in 2001. “I was told she did very good block printing and then I got to see how she actually works at the grassroot level to create new things, working with different sets of weavers, with printers, constantly exchanging ideas. She’s created some of the finest Dhakai jamdani woven in 300-count khadi, which I haven’t seen anywhere else.”
Shah was also simultaneously building her own collection of historic textiles. “My first big purchase was a big, beautiful folk kantha, which I got through a dealer in Delhi. I had to pay him in instalments, it was so expensive. Eventually, after months, the piece was mine.” These became the foundation of the Weavers Studio Resource Centre, a textile archive and library that houses over 3,500 books, 20,000 wooden blocks, and over 1,500 textiles from India and abroad. On display during the exhibition that’s on in Kolkata right now are many pieces from their own collection. Like a gossamer white men’s angrakha woven with the motif of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh. Or a nakshi kantha that has an array of motifs including snakes, lions, fishes, and in the middle of them all, the insignia of the Dutch flag, capturing the intersecting influences of the period.
But the exhibition is designed to showcase pieces from various collections in India and abroad in order to highlight the lesser-known aspects of Bengal’s rich textile history—such as the region’s expertise in silk embroideries, exemplified by a rare Portuguese colcha, or coverlet, from the Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru, which depicts a combination of European and Indian motifs. There is a section devoted to embroidered fabrics known as Haji rumals, which were designed to be exported to Indonesia and the Arab world for men who had completed the holy pilgrimage of Haj. You’ll also walk past a set of woven, 19th-century Baluchari saris that depict European gents sipping wine and women smoking hookahs on a train.
The historical pieces are juxtaposed with more contemporary textile explorations from studios like Injiri and the Chanakya School of Craft. The former created a woven panel of non-repeating jamdani motifs, while the latter experimented with silk embroideries on indigo-dyed khadi with a work that depicts a fantastical landscape inspired by the Sundarbans.
