MUMBAI, Jan. 11 -- Rows of swatches line textile and crafts house Chanakya International's Byculla office. The four-decade old atelier has one lakh such swatches at their similar hubs in Mumbai and Bologna, Italy. From the almost extinct chaand jaal, to reticella, an early Italian lace technique, Karishma Swali, the managing and creative director of Chanakya, can recognise each piece. Swali reinvented reticella with Indian stitch techniques, while chaand jaal, a fine embroidery with real silver wire, which had become extinct, was revived with a contemporary spin after she found a rare swatch with the rafugars of Delhi. "We are no longer making it for the queens who sat in one place the whole day," says Swali. "We, of course, had to make it much lighter for Oscars and red carpet," she adds. Her atelier, founded by her father Vinod Shah, has supplied these exquisite embroideries and other hand embellishments to global couture houses such as Versace, Christian Dior, Prada and others, since its inception in 1984. Swali joined the business in 1996. She has since documented, researched, revived, reinterpreted, invented and modernised several textiles and crafts, especially across India and Italy, and presented them to the world. Her efforts bore fruit when she was conferred the Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia (Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy) last month. It's an honour awarded by the president of Italy to Italians and foreigners for promoting Italy's culture, fashion and the arts. The honour was, she says, a "humbling moment". Swali first went to Italy in 1995, at the age of 18, to explore the country's couture houses. A graduate from the National Institute of Fashion Technology, she also trained with renowned fashion designer Alberta Ferretti for a year. "I quickly understood how much India and Italy are alike," she adds. They are both ancient civilisations and hold great reverence for craftsmanship. "This honour is in so many ways the recognition of the co-existence between the two countries' cultures. It also comes with a greater sense of responsibility that one has to remain a custodian of crafts, to be able to find ways to preserve and perpetuate, to create platforms where artisans come together, and have both agency and voice." Swali opened Chanakya's atelier and culture centre in Bologna in 2001. For Cosmic Garden, the collateral event of the 60th Venice Biennale 2024, she presented the paintings and sculptures of artists Madhvi and Manu Parekh through hand embroidery. In 2025, Swali's project Enroute, at the Vatican Apostolic Library, honoured pioneering women explorers of the 17th Century. It featured translucent linen maps with kantha stitches, textile globes showcasing global textile traditions, and large torans (wall hangings) featuring musical notations from the Vatican library. The embroidery work for both projects was done by the women students of the Chanakya School of Craft. She established the school in 2016 to empower women from the underserved community in Mumbai through crafts. For 32 years until then, 1,500 male master karigars worked for Chanakya. Equity mattered, and hence, she dedicated the school to the women, spending 18 months to put together a robust curriculum. "I thought my work was done," she recalls. But to her surprise, no one enrolled. Swali went to homes in Dharavi, explaining the school's purpose, in vain. She then tied up with NGO Jan Shikshan Sansthan (JSS) and opened a centre with two rooms in Dharavi itself, which yielded only eight students. They too were chaperoned by their mothers-in-law or husbands who would sit through the classes. "I had never anticipated that," she says. Once they realised that it was a safe space, the women opened up, fostering a community and friendship. Eventually, they agreed to attend the school in Lower Parel. And as of this year, 1,400 students have graduated from the school. "Finally, women had a platform and opportunities to express themselves," she says. "We must institutionalise crafts for it to be understood as a language and a medium of expression and not just an act of labour." She recommends that crafts and textiles become a part of the school curriculum. "Among other things, it's also the best way to align yourself," she says, adding the "need to document and organise our crafts at the policy level, and get museums to have textile centres where anyone can learn about their own histories". The way to achieve that, she says, is through fair wages for the craftspeople, as "without that, the country with the largest number of handcraftsmanship in the world, may not be able to preserve it"....