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...
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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.