Picture a needle moving without a frame, without a marked guide, without anything but a woman's fingers counting threads one by one. Pukhoor is the geometric, red-and-black embroidery of the Toda community, worked entirely by touch on ivory cotton. It looks like a weave. It isn't. It's memory, translated into stitch, and work that now continues through Coonoor & Co, a design studio and journal built from collaboration.
The Toda number around 1,500 to 1,700 people in the Nilgiri plateau of southern India. Fewer than 400 women still practise pukhoor. Each motif, drawn from the natural world, is built by counting threads across warp and weft, reversible and precise enough to resemble machine-made work.
Its journey to a new audience began with a book. In 2016, writer and photographer Ramya Reddy was documenting the Nilgiris when she began working with Toda elder Mutsin and London-based design collaborator Cleber on an unusual idea: binding the spine of her book, Soul of the Nilgiris, in hand-stitched pukhoor. All 2,000 copies were embroidered individually by Toda women in Hyderabad. It was the first time it had been used beyond ritual textiles and everyday garments.
Mutsin died in October 2019, before she saw where the work would go next. Her belief that the craft needed “to be seen differently, and seen again” shaped what followed. Her daughter-in-law Seeta now leads the collective, which has grown from seven women to nearly seventy.
Traditionally, pukhoor was stitched on coarse cotton with acrylic thread. Reddy and Seeta wanted to move the practice forward without losing what made it distinct, so during the second wave of Covid they tested new cloths. With no frame or printed guide, the weave had to hold up to fingers working blind. Eventually, they found a finer, sustainably sourced fabric that preserves the stitch's old logic while giving it new weight and texture.
What makes pukhoor remarkable is that it continues to move. From ceremonial dress to the spine of a book, its language has changed without losing its grammar.
At a time when so much is made to be reproduced exactly, pukhoor insists that value can lie in the hand that made it, the time it took, and the knowledge carried by the maker. Every stitch is counted, but none can be entirely replicated. Pukhoor does not need to be preserved in place to remain itself. It needs to be practised, adapted and kept in the hands of those who know how to read it by touch.
Coonoor & Co are running two online events this September as part of London Textile Month. On Friday 4 September, 5–6pm BST, The Art of the Toda: Origins and Practice traces the embroidery's history and the studio's relationship with the community. On Sunday 20 September, 10.30am–12pm BST, The Art of the Toda: Thread and Touch brings two senior Toda artisans to a live demonstration. Together, the events offer a rare chance to encounter pukhoor as a living practice still held, counted and passed on by hand.
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Further Information:
Join Coonoor & Co. at the following events, as part of Selvedge London Textile Month
Friday 4 September, 5–6pm BST, The Art of the Toda: Origins and Practice
Sunday 20 September, 10.30am–12pm BST, The Art of the Toda: Thread and Touch
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Image Credits:
Lead: Traditional Toda embroidered panel from the Nilgiri
All further images courtesy of Coonoor & Co.