India’s Living Weaves
Textiles made by hand are so much more than fashion. A handwoven cloth is a chronicle of human life; someone’s deliberate choices drawn from their imagination. These fabrics carry stories of villages that survived by tending looms, families who passed skills across time between generations, and communities that defined identity through motif. The beauty of textiles is in the centuries of continuity, resilience, and aspiration. They delight the mind as much as the eye. Our Textile Tales talk series celebrates handmade cloth as muse.
Paromita Banerjee, the award-winning textile designer whose work incorporates India’s extensive heritage of handmade cloth, is our next speaker.
For those who love cloth more than fashion, who see in a weave not just pattern but lineage, we are excited to host Paromita Banerjee. Paromita’s life is a conversation with India’s living textile traditions. Rithihi invites you to witness that dialogue and listen to how heritage weaves endure, transform, and continue to delight today.
A Pilgrim of Thread, Motif and Human Stories
Paromita Banerjee’s journey, since founding her label in 2009, is a pilgrimage through weaving hearts across India. She will share her journey through the Mangalgiri looms of Andhra Pradesh to the intricate ikats of Odisha, the subtle glory of Kala cottons from Kachchh.
Paromita works with weaver clusters to evolve fabric at the loom stage, blending traditional motifs with visual subtlety that fits contemporary forms. No two handwoven textiles can ever be identical; the imperfection is part of the voice. The human hand introduces variation, not flaws, but signatures, evidence that the cloth is alive with the pulse of its creator.
Paromita’s silhouettes stay true to texture, yarn, and hand. During the talk, she will touch on how traditional craft can shape a global wardrobe without compromising.
On Jamdhani: The Jewel of Bengal
The handmade textile is a pursuit of perfection that paradoxically draws value from human imperfection. The beauty here touches something universal: our respect for time, labour, and the pursuit of something greater.
Perhaps there is no better example of this than Jamdhani, one of Paromita’s focus crafts. Its finesse, the playful folly of how motifs seem to float on fabric…there’s nothing quite like it. In Bengal, Jamdhani is more than a textile; it’s identity, dignity, and continuity. After the Partition in 1947, many Jamdhani weavers migrated to West Bengal from Bangladesh, carrying the tradition forward in new soil. Recognized by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage of South Asia, Jamdhani motifs aren’t sketched on; they are conceived on graph paper beneath the warp, then interpreted live by the weaver.
During the talk, we’ll glimpse how Paromita experiments with Jamdhani in cotton, silk, or other yarns.
The Practice Behind Living Textile Traditions
Art cannot exist without the hands that sustain it. Paromita’s brand creates its pieces in collaboration with weaving communities. The talk will feature video clips of weaver clusters at work, warping, dyeing, weaving, and finishing. It is these moments of transmission that are the heart of the Paromita Benarjee brand.
Paromita will share their working motif banks: archives of stylized forms revealing how texture, negative space and scale shift in constant dialogue with tradition and its reinterpretation. These visual vocabularies guide how a motif born in one region becomes a design echo at Paromita Benarjee. Studying their work, you will notice how traditional motifs are modernized to suit global aesthetics, yet without erasing their origin. This is the proof that heritage is not static; it dances, negotiates, and evolves.
The evening also includes time for the audience to ask questions and explore.
An Invitation to All Rithihi Women
In a world trained to consume speed and sameness, handwoven textiles stand for value. They slow us down. They remind us that patience is still possible, that beauty need not be instant, that perfection is not mass-produced but lovingly coaxed into existence.
For textile lovers in Colombo and beyond, this is more than a talk. It is a rare meeting with someone who has chosen the path of exploration over ease, and legacy over trend. At Rithihi, we believe stories in cloth deserve to be voiced, seen, and experienced. This is one such important conversation.
Join us. Let’s explore the living weaves of India and their ethical, cultural, and existential beauty. It reflects our human need for meaning, our desire for continuity, our instinct to treasure what endures.
Rithihi Textile Tales Series III
October 30th 2025
6pm at Rithihi,
19 Alfred House Gardens, Colombo 3
(Free) Limited Seats
Contact us on +94 76 280 0220 to register
