Tejsi Dhana does not hurry the dye pot. He stands in the sun, checks how the light falls, says "dim enough," and feeds the fire with babool wood. Pomegranate skins turn the yarn orange. Green doesn't come from anything in the desert, so the next day he boils the yarn with a little indigo, following recipes his grandfather gave his father. The Dhanas come from Kuran, a village on the Pakistan border, where they were known as the finest bag-weavers around: big, sturdy bags that went into Pakistan empty and came back on camels, full of grain. Camel hair went into the warp and goat hair into the weft, and the wool was spun on a charkha older than Gandhi. After the wars of 1965 and 1971 a road reached Kuran, cars replaced camels, and people forgot the weavers. In 1990 a craft researcher spotted Tejsi and put him in a museum in Ahmedabad, weaving a carpet. It was his first time outside Kuran. In January 2001 the earthquake found him at the loom, finishing an international order. His home and workshop were gone, and the loom was left standing. Today he weaves kharad with his sons and grandchildren, in a craft many families have given up.

In the summer of 1940, Haji Moinuddin Ansari, then a young weaver in Peeli Kothi, packed a suitcase of silk and took the train to Kalimpong. He wanted to sell to buyers himself and cut out the middlemen, and he kept going back every year for sixteen years. What he carried was gyasar, a silk brocade woven with gold and silver and patterned with dragons, clouds and lotuses. Marwari traders had asked the weavers of Banaras to copy it from China, and the Ansaris met the demand so well that their cloth reached monasteries from Leh to Lhasa. His son Haseen says Moinuddin called it the fabric of peace. When Tibet closed in 1959, the trade stopped and most weavers turned to saris. Moinuddin kept weaving and bought up gyasar wherever he could find it, against everyone's advice. When the first power loom arrived on the lane in the late seventies, he warned his sons it would ruin their hands and sent them back to kadhua, a technique no machine can copy. Haseen went on to study with Pupul Jayakar, and the family wove saris for Martand Singh's Vishwakarma exhibitions. Today the Ansaris still weave gyasar, with Haseen's son Nasim, while fakes from Surat fill the market.

Priti Gavit works in bamboo, a material her Kotwalia community has woven for generations, and she learnt it as a child at her parents’ home in Chhindia. In Chichinagavtha, in Gujarat’s Dang district, she and her husband cut bamboo themselves from the nearby forest every Thursday and Saturday. Her signature is the woven baby stool, along with serving trays, and her range runs from pen stands and cutlery holders to kitchen racks, shelving, wardrobe racks and beds. Twelve years at the Eklavya Foundation’s centre in Waghai taught her furniture-making alongside basketry, and she finishes each piece by drilling, grinding and sanding until the bamboo has no splinters or sharp edges. She uses no metal nails, only dowels she makes from bamboo and glues in place, so the furniture won’t rust or split. Her work has travelled well beyond the Dang, to Aadi Mahotsav at Dilli Haat in New Delhi and to Saras melas and tribal fairs in Surat, Vyara, Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad, where she sells directly to buyers.

Arun Khatua inherited his craft and then went to school for it. Mat weaving came down to him through three generations of his family in Maligram, in West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipur, and in the early nineties he added formal training in textile design at a government weaving centre. What he took from it was an eye for what people want in their homes. Having watched how richly Calcutta’s households were furnished, he became devoted to what he calls “home based products”, and his Society now turns out the whole domestic catalogue in madur kathi, the local grass. Its mats, cushion mats, folding mats and mattresses sit alongside pankhas, door curtains, sofa covers, laptop bags, mobile covers and beach bags, a range that runs from the floor to the laptop. He founded the Belun Hasta Shilpa Kuti Society in 2010 as an organisation open to any artisan who wanted to join. Seventy-five women now weave there under four supervisors, and they have found their voice in village matters. He sells through Kolkata’s exporters and takes his work to the city’s exhibitions, where he goes with his son to show it and to study what other artisans are making.

Minaben didn’t set out to be a crocheter. She is a biochemist with an export license, and her practice began the way many good ideas do: with someone trying to solve a problem. In Minaben’s case, this was trying to fit the booties she crocheted for her toddler. What she built from the errand is a hook-and-yarn enterprise of 150 women around Rajkot, who make everything she has ever been asked for, often before she knew what it was. We’re talking dream catchers, beaded ornaments, macramé bags, bikinis, patchwork robes sewn from squares by half a dozen hands. The most famous of her pieces is a bucket hat, made with British designer Emily Levine during the COVID lockdown in her mother’s village. This hat ended up on Hailey Bieber on the cover of American Vogue. Her work has since made its journey to Milan’s L’Artigiano in Fiera, one of the world’s greatest craft fairs. Her very first time stepping out of India for L’Artigiano and she made history as Rajkot’s first ever participant.

Kullu Karishma started with rabbits. Dr. Kamal Kishore Chandel, a veterinarian, set up an Angora rabbit farm in the eighties, and when Europe began banning Angora imports in the nineties, he stopped selling the wool and founded a handcrafted clothing brand from it in 1991. His sons Kanishk and Kartik now run it from a three-storey workshop in Kullu, where everything happens under one roof: fleece is dyed, hand-spun, knitted, washed, set and tailored, and the dyes include local indigo, manjistha, walnut, pomegranate and eucalyptus. Men take the looms while women spin, knit and crochet, and a single artisan can spend a week hand-knitting one sweater. Alongside Angora, they now work with Australian merino and Mongolian cashmere, making cable-knit beanies, merino sweaters, scarves, throws and felt from the offcuts. The enterprise sells only to other labels, so its pieces usually reach the world under someone else’s name. They skip melas and exhibitions altogether, but they open the workshop to students for residencies.

Husnebi Sattar Jamadar is 40 and never went to school. Her mother and aunt made kawandi at home, and she learned by sitting with them. The family made them to sleep under, not to sell. Then a woman from Bengaluru came to the house and asked her to make one, with a good design. Husnebi said they would try. That was ten to twelve years ago. About thirteen women of her family now sew in the hall of her house, each on a different piece. Husnebi makes one double quilt a month, if she can give it her full attention. She says it hurts her back and her eyes. Each quilt is built in layers: a base, padding, and a top fabric in colours and shapes of her own design. Nothing is thrown away. Buyers hear of her from other buyers and call. She sends photos of designs, they choose one, they pay on PhonePe, and she sends the quilt by courier. She has sent quilts abroad. She knows the photos she sends could be passed on and copied. Her ancestors came from East Africa at least five centuries ago, when the Portuguese enslaved them. “I'm Indian,” she told Object's reporters.

Haji Mohammad Waseem is 48 and joined his family's horn and bone work after 10th standard. In Sambhal, which he calls the largest market for horn and bone in the world, he takes orders for carved boxes, frames and furniture and hands them to the artisans best suited to each job. His son handles exports.

In Basudebpur, Bidhan Chandra Mandal learnt to weave from his grandfather and then his father, on looms that made thick, hard-wearing cloth such as gamchas, towels and bedsheets. He still makes these, but over the years he has expanded his range to sarees, stoles, scarves, curtains and cushion covers, all in pure cotton, with geometric and tribal motifs of his own design that powerlooms cannot replicate. Of the seven looms he works with, two are in the shed attached to his house, where he and his wife work, and five are in a nearby village, run by weavers he hires for his orders. His village once had over 1,000 weavers; now there are around 700, as powerlooms make plain handloom cloth harder to sell and younger people leave for salaried jobs. Bidhan has stayed with the craft, earning a State Award and first prize in a Tantuja design competition, and he now trains other weavers as a Master Trainer at the Weavers’ Service Centre in Kolkata. He has taken his work to Bharat Tex at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi.

Vijendra Chhipa is the fifth generation of his family to print by hand in Bagru, a craft about 450 years old there. He started at thirteen, learning from his father by watching, and now runs Bagru Textiles from the workshop behind his house, printing custom orders for designers in India and abroad. He can't say exactly when he started. It is a family business, so he printed alongside school, and went on to a commerce degree. Three of his brothers took government jobs, and in Bagru it is often the children who do well at school who leave; Vijendra stayed in the printing, with one brother. The craft dates from the time a king settled printing families in the village. His son, who joined after his studies, is the sixth generation. In the workshop, one piece takes a week: printed one day, washed the next, boiled the day after. Blocks wear out in a few months, but he still has some made of Gurjan wood that are 150 years old, from his father, a wood you can't get any more. Natural dyes never come out exactly the same twice, and he is proud that no two pieces are alike. He calls machine printing mindless. Between October and March, groups of up to twenty-five come to learn to print.