Across rain-soaked villages and abandoned factories, a country’s fabric is coming undone—but not without resistance.
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Dear Reader,
This issue began at the tail end of the monsoon in 2024, in the seaside villages of South Karnataka. We were tracing the Halakki drape—the tribe’s women chose to wear their soft cotton saris without a blouse—elegant, unadorned, exercising an agency that the market often overlooks. It was raining relentlessly, and we waited for one clear day to photograph the elders who kept this traditional practice alive. The younger generation, meanwhile, was trying on new fast-fashion identities through Meesho’s algorithm. That tension—between the inherited and the immediate, between memory and marketplace—became the pulse of this issue.
From Ankola on the Uttara Karnataka coast—home to the Halakki tribe—we followed the trail to Haliyal, a small town where a collective of women from the Siddi tribe pieced together scraps of fabric into quilts, just as their elders had taught them to, working in colourful, dimly lit rooms. One reporter returned with stories; another with a quilt that now retails on the Journey of Objects (JoB) Shop—but more on that later. In those rooms, we spoke with Husenabi, a Siddi woman who quilts in the tradition of Kavandi. Her ancestors had come from East Africa at least five centuries ago, when the Portuguese enslaved them. "I'm Indian," she said. Around her, the village whispered stories, passed down across generations, of Portuguese ships, and of an identity never fully accepted, always explained. That sentence—“I’m Indian”—stayed with us. So did the silences that followed.
We began to ask harder questions. What does it mean to belong in a country where the past is edited, and where the future arrives even before we can reckon with the erasures of the present? Why are so many weavers, dyers, and artisans being forced to abandon generational skills to become daily-wage workers? How did we get to a point where a loom is less valued than an app notification? Our reporters chased the myth of calico cloth—once synonymous with India, but nowhere to be found now. The fabric that European traders crossed oceans to obtain seems to have vanished from the very country that created it. We followed the ghost of calico in Calicut—where Vasco da Gama had anchored in search of the elusive peppercorn—and visited the historic Commonwealth Handloom Factory, once a thriving centre, now a shadow of its former self. From there, we went to Phulia, Maheshwar, and Varanasi, encountering more weavers, more stories of craft that had been overwhelmed by mechanisation. What we found was devastating. Many weavers we met had left the loom. Some for a hundred rupees more as auto drivers. Others because weaving simply stopped being viable, killed not by disinterest but by poor state support, unpaid dues, and a system rigged for scale, not skill. Textiles are on the verge of disappearing, from the loom and from our lexicon. Government schemes made promises on paper; on the ground, their effect seemed to have done little to halt this descent. The All India Handloom Board disappeared overnight. Meanwhile, Meesho—propped up by investment from Meta—has achieved volumes that are next to impossible for individual artisans. And why wouldn’t companies like Meesho deploy their considerable resources to expand their reach? And why shouldn’t they?
And yet, something has held.
Resistance was visible everywhere: in the dye baths, the forgotten weaves, the stylists in studios from Bombay to Arambol who challenged the dominant strain of Indian fashion catering to the white gaze. In the photographers who captured beauty as quiet revolt. In the people who shared their work and lives with us, as they continued to pursue their craft, slowly, patiently. In the garments conceptualised by designers in India, made using handloom weaves. At Object, we’ve tried to bridge what often feels like two distant worlds: artisanship and fashion. We’ve expanded the JoB database, added new designers,
and co-created pieces with makers you’ll meet across this issue. We moved into our new Colaba studio, The Apartment, and in true Object fashion, marked the occasion with two events. The first was an exultant, chaotic night—our inaugural book club, a supper club, and a qawwali, all at once. It was hot, delayed, and brimming with life. The second was the launch of our panel series, Object Speak. Both carried the same sense of energy and community. So yes, fights broke out. Pages were written, torn apart, remade. Deadlines failed. Some stories slipped through. But what remains is a hard-earned mosaic of Issue III. A portrait of what persists. A celebration and an enquiry. A reckoning of what’s left of the hand—the loom, the voice—and what’s already gone. I hope you enjoy reading it.
Love,
