Bridge Bharat: Lineage, Authorship and the Future of Indian Textile Art
Pichwai painting was made for temple walls. Chamba Rumal embroidery was made for the folds of a bride's trousseau. Gond art carried myth around a village, told and retold on mud walls and paper alike. Move any of these into a white-walled apartment or a hotel lobby, and something genuinely difficult happens: the art doesn't shrink to fit, but the room around it was never built to hold it either.
Aakanksha Singh, Founder, Bridge Bharat. Photo: Bridge Bharat.
That mismatch is the starting point for Bridge Bharat, a Gurugram-based venture that works with artist families across more than fifteen craft clusters in India. Its founder, Aakanksha Singh, arrived at the problem sideways rather than head-on. Trained in economics and investment banking, and a graduate of IIM Ahmedabad's programme in creative and cultural businesses, she spent years before this analysing MSME growth and digital behaviour across rural India, then assessing early-stage luxury and lifestyle businesses as an investment analyst. It's a background better suited to reading balance sheets than brushwork, and that's rather the point: Bridge Bharat treats craft preservation as an economic problem as much as a cultural one, asking not just how a Pichwai painting might survive but how the family painting it might actually be paid for their years of training.
Turning that analysis into practice is an unglamorous problem, and a slower one than it sounds: less about styling a piece for a shoot, more about understanding why a Pichwai composition holds its symmetry, or why Bhil dot-work reads the way it does at a distance, before anyone decides how it might sit in a contemporary space at all.
Fields of Chamba. Chamba Rumal embroidery. Artist: Lalita Vakil. Photo: Bridge Bharat.
The artists behind the work carry their own long histories. Dinesh Soni paints Pichwai in Bhilwara, Rajasthan, the third generation of his family to do so, following his grandfather Badrilal Chitrakar and father Prabhulal in devotion to Lord Shrinathji. Venkat Raman Singh Shyam has pushed the Pradhan Gond tradition of his uncle, Jangarh Singh Shyam, into new and often unsettling territory, with pieces now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Lalita Vakil, awarded the Padma Shri in 2022, took Chamba Rumal embroidery from a craft on the edge of disappearing back into something women in Himachal Pradesh can actually earn a living from.
Fields of Chamba. Chamba Rumal embroidery. Artist: Lalita Vakil. Photo: Bridge Bharat.
What makes Bridge Bharat worth watching is the argument underneath the design work: that Indian textile and painting traditions have spent decades circulating the world as pattern and motif, stripped of the names attached to them. Naming the maker, the family, the lineage behind a piece is a small act with real consequences for how these communities are seen and paid.
Krishna and His Gopis, Dorukha Embroidery on Cotton Cloth. Artist: Padma Shri Lalita Vakil.
Detail view of traditional artworks integrated into contemporary interiors.
Photo: Bridge Bharat
None of this fixes the deeper tension of moving devotional or ritual art into commercial interiors, and Bridge Bharat doesn't pretend it does. But as a working attempt to keep the makers visible while the context around their art keeps changing, it's a project worth following closely.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Detail of Chamba Rumal embroidery showcasing the intricate double-sided stitch technique. Photo: Bridge Bharat.
All further images as credited in captions.