Made in India: The Indian Artisans Taking Traditional Craft Global

For generations, India’s crafts have been shaped by hands, heritage and an intimate understanding of material. Today, that knowledge is finding new audiences far beyond its traditional homes, from Athangudi tiles travelling to international interiors and Kannauj perfumery reaching the world’s cultural capitals, to shola and tangaliya finding a place in contemporary fashion. On Robb Report India’s first anniversary, we meet the artisans keeping these traditions alive while giving them a distinctly modern relevance.

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Love per Square Foot

Ahangudi tiles from Chettinad are having a renaissance, thanks to clientele from around the world, looking to bring a distinctive look to their residences.

Chettinad in Tamil Nadu is known for its opulent designs in architecture. The Chettiyars, a rich community of merchants from the region, had expensive taste. They lived in grand mansions, replete with Burma teak, stucco work, ornate lights and pillars, but what set these sprawling residences apart from other lavish properties around the world are the colourful Athangudi tiles. Many of these mansions (some over 100 years old) have been converted into luxury homestays and heritage hotels like The Bangala, Chidambara Vilas, Visalam by CGH Earth, and The Lotus Palace among others. The properties have been given a makeover for the modern discerning traveller, but the tiles continue to be a core element— still very much part of the design aesthetic, rendering a vintage vibe.

“Athangudi tiles are intrinsic to the region; almost the very soul of Chettinad,” says Arumugam C, who has 40 years of experience and currently works with Chettinad Tiles, a company that was set up in 2019. Interestingly, Chettinad Tiles is in talks with the Google office in Gachibowli (Hyderabad) for a 2,000 square feet wall installation, and two five star hotels in Singapore. 

Arumugam’s workspace, however, is a far cry from the tech-enabled, plush habitats that house his handmade work. He is bent over a square frame, hands smeared with sand and a blizzard of colours, as he mixes paint. A radio plays in the background, and one doesn’t see any other modern equipment. The setting is steeped in nostalgia. It’s the village that time has perhaps forgotten about. Despite that, this village is ticking ahead, its eponymous tiles making a mark across the world, its existence validated through representation in luxury hotels, palatial abodes, and demand abroad from countries including Singapore, the U.S., and Australia. 

Arumugam is pleased that his beloved art form is gaining recognition. He says, “If you order these tiles, there is a waiting period of three months.” As we speak, he places a metal stencil on a square sheet of glass and ladles out paint into each design. What follows is almost like a shimmy, as he tilts the frame side to side. The stencil is removed and sand is poured over the work. This is to prevent the paint from bleeding. I continue to watch in rapt fascination as Arumugam mixes cement, with the flair of a baker mixing ingredients, and then slathers the cement over the sand. The tiles are left to dry for 24 hours, after which they are soaked in water for 14 days to cure and then dried in the sun. Unlike ceramic tiles, these are not baked in a kiln.

The Tile Files

The history of these colourful tiles dates back to the 19th century, when several merchants from Chettinad who travelled abroad on business were fascinated by the tiles they saw in Europe. They would bring these back for their homes. But when they broke, it was an expensive affair to get them replaced. So, at the behest of the merchants, the local artisans made their own version with locally available sand, cement, and mineral oxides. Ever since, most families in this village and those within a five-kilometre radius have practised this skill. “When I started out, there were five units making Athangudi tiles. Now there are approximately 70 to 75 in this area,” he says. 

Keeping with the times, the patterns on the tiles are changing. Earlier verbena, daffodil, and oleander were popular. “Now, we make custom designs for our clients. Until a few years ago, we used to work with five shades: red, yellow, black, white, and blue. The colour palette now includes subtler shades like olive green, teal, chestnut,” trails off Arumugam. It takes Arumugam four minutes to make a 10 by 10 inch tile that weighs roughly two-and-a-half kilogrammes. “I make 80 to 90 pieces in one day,” he says, showing me his hands and feet that are scarred from years of tile-making. “We often wear gloves, but the touch of hand makes all the difference,” he smiles, adding that the scars are a reminder of all the beautiful tiles he has made.

The Olfactory Wizard

Amidst India’s crafts lies the art of perfume-making. Though often overlooked in favour of other handcrafted forms, its fragrance lingers, refusing to wane. 

In Uttar Pradesh’s Kannauj, often dubbed the perfume capital of India, Amal Jain grew up watching his grandfather and father hand-blend individual notes into exquisite fragrances. “As a child, perfume was never explained to me,” says Jain. “Raw materials arrived in truckloads. My brother, cousins and I used to play hide and seek among mountains of flowers waiting to be distilled. Nagarmotha, rose, mogra, jasmine, marigold, sandalwood—they were just a part of my childhood.” Hence, when he entered the laboratory for the first time years later, nothing felt unfamiliar. Without consciously learning it, Jain’s nose had already devoted years building relationships with the materials. “Nagarmotha naturally connected with oud in my mind. Vetiver reminded me of particular roots. Certain florals instinctively belonged together.” 

“Today, almost every industry is trying to optimise speed. But fragrance doesn’t always reward that,” Jain continues. “Sometimes the most important thing you can do is wait.” The incredibly slow deg and bhapka technique, which Jain believes teaches you all about the rhythm of nature, is therefore not built around production deadlines. “A flower cannot release its complete character because a deadline demands it. Sandalwood cannot mature because the market wants faster inventory,” he adds. In the face of fast, efficient modern laboratories, which Jain admits are extraordinary at precision, traditional distillation processes prioritise intuition. “You learn to observe temperature through smell, moisture through texture, and the behaviour of ingredients through experience rather than only instruments.” That knowledge, he maintains, is difficult to document but is passed down from one generation to another.

Art in a bottle

“I treat perfume the same way museums treat paintings or galleries treat sculpture,” he explains. It is this conviction that eventually carried his work to the Louvre this April, where the House of Amal Jain unveiled itself as an art-first fragrance house seeking a seat at the table of timeless culture. ‘Venus,’ one of the fragrances presented there, drew its inspiration from classical art, yet its bones carried a reminder of home. “The stories can come from anywhere,” Jain says, “but my techniques remain deeply Indian.” 

That same inclination finds its fullest expression in how Jain thinks about the wearer. Because his fragrances lean on natural rather than heavy industrial stabilisers, they shift and unfurl differently across individual skin chemistries—an unpredictability that might unsettle a perfumer bound to consistency. Jain, instead, welcomes that dance. “No artist completely controls how their work is experienced,” he reasons. “A painting changes depending on the light. Music changes depending on the room. Perfume changes depending on the person wearing it.” Once a fragrance leaves the bottle, he says, it stops belonging entirely to him— skin, climate, memory and mood all become discrete collaborators in the work. 

Jain focusses his exactitude on sourcing his materials instead. Sandalwood distilled entirely in-house is one example among many, chosen because it allows the house to account for every stage of its journey, from harvest to bottle. Small variances—in harvesting, in storage, in the timing of distillation—rarely show up on a specification sheet, he notes, but they disclose themselves the moment blending begins. It is a gruelling, non-scalable way to build a fragrance house, and Jain makes no attempt to disguise that fact. That instinct for protecting provenance runs parallel to a larger reckoning Jain is trying to stage on behalf of Indian perfumery itself. For decades, Indian soil supplied the raw materials that fed Europe’s great fragrance houses, while the creative authorship and the credit were rarely traced back to the origin. “We became known for producing. We did not become known as authors. And I don’t think claiming authorship means rejecting the world. It means contributing confidently to it.” 

As for what comes next, Jain seems less interested in discovering new raw materials than in seeing India’s existing olfactory library through fresh eyes. Rose that changes character from region to region or jasmine that behaves differently depending on the soil it grows in. His ambitions for these stories, however, are not entirely sentimental. “Not nostalgia alone. Not royalty alone,” he says of the emotional territory he wants Indian perfumery to inhabit. “But modern India. The contradiction between tradition and innovation. The optimism of the youth. And the beauty of craftsmanship.” 

Pith Perfect

Popularised by Bengal, shola lends itself to stunning shapes handmade by master artisans. Even The MET Gala got a sneak peek of it. 

In Murshidabad’s Berhampore, where the Nawabi courts of yore once dazzled with ivory, Samir Kumar Saha chose his craft in a moment of crisis and turned it into his life’s work. It began, as it often does in many families, not with ambition but with necessity. “Growing up, we had a restaurant business at a cinema hall,” Saha recalls. “Around the early ’70s, the cinema hall had closed because of a strike. Our family consisted of 25 to 30 members that were to be taken care of.” The household was conservative; its children kept close, and its women and men were expected to find work without stepping too far from home. “We had to figure out ways to make a living indoors.” What the Sahas found indoors, was art that had been running through the family for generations—an uncle who built award-winning installations from cigarette packets at the restaurant business, a father who was gifted a Japanese fountain pen under British rule for his contribution to the arts, and sisters and grandmothers who embroidered with precision.

Saha’s elder siblings, one festival season, fashioned an idol of goddess Saraswati and dressed her in shola—the pale, cork-like pith of an aquatic reed that grows wild in Bengal’s marshlands. The brothers, watching, began making shola jewellery for gods and goddesses. “That’s where it all began. And slowly and steadily we perfected our craft, and it became our profession.” That profession sits within a much older lineage than Saha’s own boyhood experiments suggest. After the Nawab of Bengal’s court at Murshidabad lost power following the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the ivory carvers who had served the court lost their patronage, and artisans subsequently turned to shola as a substitute material, drawn to its resemblance to the craft they had spent generations mastering. The delicacy Murshidabad’s shola work is known for today—its impossibly fine latticework, its carved boats and ornamental figures—is, in effect, an ivory carving technique. Saha has spent over half a century turning that unglamorous marsh reed into objects worthy of a court that no longer exists. 

The recognition came in 2006, when Saha received the National Award for his craft—an honour that now sits above a workshop and two showrooms employing 35 to 40 artisans. It is persistence that has since carried him well beyond Murshidabad. “Across the world people are curious, and what I take along with me often sells out,” Saha says of his travels, which have taken shola from Brazil to China and Japan, often at the invitation of governments eager to showcase Indian craftsmanship abroad. 

The World Beckons

Today, shola has proved itself on the global stage with great prowess—most recently through Mayyur Girotra’s take on the craft on Diya Mehta Jatia at the Met Gala 2026, where guests were invited to dress for the theme ‘Fashion is Art.’ Saha and his son, Sanjeevan Kumar Saha— the family’s second-generation artisan—use no machines, a discipline that is as much philosophical as practical. Shola is astonishingly light; “delicate nakshas can fly away easily,” which means the craftsmen often work without the relief of fans or cooling equipment, hunched for hours over material fine enough to strain the eyes and unforgiving enough to punish age. Even the market’s small indignities—buyers who haggle over prices, unaware of the hours folded into a single ornament—are offset, for Saha, by the moments someone finally understands. “A lot of people often also tell me how affordable my work is when the labour is taken into account,” he says. 

52 years into the craft, Saha has largely moved past the ritual objects like the Bengali wedding headdresses and the daaker shaaj built for worship that once defined shola’s purpose. What interests the President’s Awardee (National Award for Craftsmen) instead is where the material can still go. “Working with shola for decades has encouraged me to look beyond,” he says, “and interpret the craft in innovative ways through contemporary artefacts built for the new Indian and global collector who wants to hold it with care for years to come.” 

A Loom of Legacy

In Gujarat’s Surendranagar, Baldevbhai Mohanbhai Rathod is keeping the 700-year old craft of tangaliya alive and word has reached Hollywood. 

Tangaliya is in our blood,” says Baldevbhai Mohanbhai Rathod. The 44-year old tangaliya weaver, from Gujarat’s Surendranagar district, lives in his ancestral village of Dedadra and belongs to the Dangasiya community. Here, in the rural interiors of India’s westernmost state, lies centuries worth of history and tradition, passed down through generations. “I have been weaving tangaliya for 27 years now,” he notes, “I learnt how to weave at the age of 17 from my father, the same way he had been taught by his father.” Threaded through this loom of family lineage is a tradition straddling two communities that has been sustained and nurtured across time—a heritage that has been upheld by its rightful custodians and duly recognised by a GI tag in 2009. Additionally, to honour his relentless contribution, Rathod was awarded the National Merit Certificate for Weaving in 2016 and 2024. 

On cue, I am treated to a brief lesson in history, which slowly bleeds into mythology. Traditionally, tangaliya was woven by the Dangasiya community exclusively for the women of the Bharwad community, who engaged in livestock herding and supplied wool for weaving. There are varying origin fables preserved in collective memory: most popularly, it is believed that once upon a time, when a Bharwad shepherd boy married a weaver girl from the Vankar community, the newly-weds were disowned by their families. In order to make a living, the couple began weaving woollen shawls, giving birth to the Dangasiya community. 

The indigenous weaving craft is instantly recognised by its daanas (beaded dots). To achieve this, tiny dots of extra weft in contrasting colours are twisted around warped threads to create an embossed bead-like pattern on the fabric. Each daana comes together to create a motif, most often inspired by nature. Ranging from mangoes and trees to peacocks and the Naughara—which translates to “nine houses”, formed by placing raised daanas into nine three by three square grid-based patterns symbolising home and shelter. “Our production is a slow process, and the making of the daana needs to be executed as we weave the fabric, so once it’s done there’s little room for rectification,” the weaver reflects. 

Contemporary Touch

Armed with such precision, Rathod and his community of weavers handcraft kurtis, dupattas, and saris. On being asked if the weaving process has changed over time, I’m met with a sharp aphorism: ‘Kaam wahi hai, soch nayi hai’. (‘Our work is the same, the mindset is new’). We share an amused laughter at his spontaneous rhyme before he proceeds to share the new developments in his practice. For the longest time, tangaliya was only done on wool, but now fabrics have been diversified for all seasons, including cotton sourced from Ahmedabad and silk from Bengaluru. This has steered a larger socio-cultural shift across the rural landscape. With the incorporation of new fabrics, Rathod makes note of democratisation in terms of both production and consumption across more villages and communities. And word has spread far beyond. Last summer, American actor Brad Pitt shared a behind-the-scenes look while filming for F1: The Movie, sporting a blue tangaliya shirt by New Delhi-based fashion label 11.11/eleven eleven, handcrafted by Rathod himself. “I’ve been working with 11.11 for six years now,” he shares, adding how the label encouraged him to create the now viral tangaliya khadi shirts. “The first shirt took me 15 days to make,” he says, qualifying that he had hitherto neither worked with khadi nor made a shirt. 

“I had no idea who Brad Pitt was,” he confesses, simultaneously expressing great pride that his work has received international recognition. Things have changed rapidly over the past year, with an overwhelming number of orders coming in, with direct WhatsApp orders accounting for 60 per cent of the business. Inheriting Rathod’s family legacy are his three children, Manisha, Ashish, and Lata. “I have taught them to weave, but also ensured that they receive an education,” he says. As their market expands to major urban and even international centres, English, he emphasises, becomes important for business. 

“As weavers, we no longer focus on just our craft,” he continues, “we are now connected to a wider world and we must be able to sustain our craft into the future.”