Long before museums, archives or written histories documented women’s lives in Punjab, their stories were patiently stitched into cloth. Phulkari, literally ‘flower work’, emerged not as an ornament but as inheritance: a language of colour, repetition and labour through which women marked birth, marriage, belief, everyday life and loss. Made within homes, often over years, these embroideries were never meant for display. They were folded into trunks, wrapped around bodies, exchanged at thresholds of life, and carried across generations — and, eventually, across borders.
At LATITUDE 28 in Delhi’s Defence Colony, Sut te Saah: Stories Woven in Phulkari brings this intimate world into view without stripping it of its emotional density. Presented by founder-director, LATITUDE 28, Bhavna Kakar and curated by Shreya Sharma, the exhibition brings together over 40 rare pre-Partition phulkaris and baghs from Punjab, tracing how women stitched memory, ritual and lived experience into cloth at a time when their voices rarely entered formal histories.
Drawn from the private and family collections of Brigadier Surinder and Shyama Kakar and designer Amit Hansraj, the exhibition marks one of the first major presentations of phulkaris and baghs at a private gallery in India. “This exhibition allows us to shift the lens from craft as peripheral to craft as central, positioning phulkari as a complex form of knowledge produced by women,” says Bhavna. “These pieces, including those passed down from my great-great grandmother to my mother, are embedded in lived histories of kinship, migration and resilience.”
Marking thresholds of life
The exhibition unfolds across three interlinked sections: Sankraman (transition), Vishvaas ate Katha (belief and narrative) and Rihaish (dwelling and everyday life). “Certain forms marked thresholds within a life,” Shreya explains.
In Sankraman, phulkari emerges as a carrier of blessing, protection and continuity. Chope phulkaris, traditionally embroidered by maternal grandmothers and gifted to brides, hold the tenderness of beginnings. Vari-da-Bagh glows with auspicious motifs that bind families and communities. Dense, luminous baghs unfold like fields of colour, reflecting collective labour. Thirma, with its restrained white ground, carries associations of purity, and the quieter passages of life.
Vishvaas ate Katha brings together faith, folklore and oral memory. Sainchi phulkaris, rich with figurative scenes, capture village life in all its rhythm — agricultural labour, domestic routines, humour and moments of valour. The final section, Rihaish, turns inward, towards everyday life. Here, phulkari appears not as spectacle but as presence — folded into trunks, brought out at particular moments, quietly shaping women’s worlds across generations.
“For us at LATITUDE 28, material culture has always been a living archive,” says Bhavna. “As conversations around textile traditions increasingly risk being flattened into décor or nostalgia, it was important to reclaim phulkari as a rigorous visual and cultural language.”
Memory after Partition
Partition runs through the exhibition without spectacle. Many of the works were created before 1947 but lived with after — carried across borders, homes and identities. “Partition is not treated as a distant backdrop,” Shreya notes. “It reshaped the lives carried within these textiles. Rather than isolating it as a single moment of loss, the exhibition attends to how rupture settles into everyday life.”
That sense of continuity is embodied in the voice of Bhavna’s paternal grandmother, Ram Kumari Kakar, some of whose phulkaris were later inherited by her daughter-in-law, Shyama. “These phulkaris were not made by one pair of hands alone,” Ram Kumari recalls. “My sisters, bhabhis and I worked on them together under my mother’s watchful eye — she was the most talented among us. Each woman had her own skill, the cloth passing from hand to hand with no tracing, only exact calculation.”
She also remembers the material routes that fed this domestic practice: pat silk arriving from Peshawar with the Pathans, valued “as highly as its weight in silver”.
Collectors Rahul Sharma and Shreya , who are admirers of the exhibition, speak of encountering phulkari first as lived inheritance rather than collectible artefact. “We were drawn to them through an exhibition in Philadelphia, where we understood them as family-made objects created for personal use rather than commerce,” they say. One of the most meaningful pieces on view, Rahul recalls, is a simple antique phulkari his mother draped over his wife during their roka ceremony. “Its value lies not in design complexity, but in the emotional context in which it was used.”
Alongside the textiles, boliyan, oral fragments and personal references are woven through the space, recreating the social and emotional worlds in which phulkari was made and used. Rather than transforming domestic objects into spectacle, Sut te Saah extends memory and belonging from the home into the gallery.
The exhibition is on until Januray 26, from Monday to Sunday, 11am to 7pm at LATITUDE 28, B-74, Ground Floor, Block B, Defence Colony, New Delhi.
Published – January 27, 2026 02:06 pm IST
