Karishma Swali and Monica Shah, Founders, Chanakya School of Craft
KARISHMA
The Rotary Club of Bombay, with its core values of fellowship, diversity, and integrity, is such an incredible platform for inspiration. We are so happy to share our story with you all today. If I may, I would like to give some insight of our parent company Chanakya, that laid the foundation of Chanakya school of Craft. The house of Chanakya is a luxury craft-making firm, our core is design excellence in exclusive hand craftsmanship. Our journey to showcase the age-old heritage of hand embroidery began when our father Vinod Shah founded Chanakya almost four decades ago in 1996. Not many people were not aware then and I am not sure how many are aware now, but our country holds the deepest, widest and the most skilled artisan base in hand-craftsmanship in the world. A skill that our country has earned in many centuries and is nothing short than a national treasure.
Our vision at Chanakya is to share India’s finest craftsmanship with the rest of the world while maintaining our cultural sustainability and lending to the preservation of our precious craft legacy. This is my 24th year at Chanakya and I continue to learn from craft every single day. We have been fortunate to collaborate and partner with some of the finest design and couture houses across Europe and the USA and we are proud to represent our country’s cultural and craft landscape globally.
At Chanakya, generations of master craft people, preservers and advocates of hand craftsmanship have worked towards a singular aim to ensure that the magic of our wonderful artisans lives on forever. Witnessing the fast and rather alarming pace at which the world is changing, we realised that there is an acute need to preserve our heritage, special to this country alone, and time to give back and pay it forward. This laid the foundation for the Chanakya School of Craft. Our foundation was born from a compelling need to implement holistic suggestions for economic, social and environmental issues. The vision of the Chanakya School focuses on all-round development through excellence in education, skill-development and women’s empowerment while investing in the preservation of our heritage and promotion of the arts.
Our school is India’s first not-for-profit school teaching master craft techniques to women. The foundation believes in transforming societies by instilling a vision, making role-models and promoting a sense of community. Through our certificate craft programme, we have taught over 400 women since our inception in 2017 and hope to touch many more lives meaningfully.
MONICA
Hand-craftsmanship in India is traditionally taught from father to son; we thought it would be wonderful to open up this skill to women – the backbone of our communities – allowing them equal opportunities, and independence. The goal for the Chanakya School of Crafts is to create a platform of multi-dimensional learning, focus on arts and crafts by providing equal opportunities to often ignored backbone of our community – women. Our mission is to provide women from low-income communities, the high-quality education in hand embroidery enabling them to maximise their potential and enhance their lives. Our students study modules dealing with the use of technology, business acumen and starting new ventures. The benefit is two-fold – ancient techniques and skills are now revived and rejuvenated by the joy and ambition of those who are finally been empowered. The curriculum is both robust and holistic.
Over the course of one year, we cover over 300 craft techniques with modules on pattern making, design and colour. Colour theory as well as documentation, visits to the museums and industry visits. At CSC, traditional craftmanship techniques is interpreted in contemporary ways to acknowledge, respect and protect the social environmental sustainability of our traditional, cultural expressions.
The curriculum is divided into two semesters that culminates with an internship that offers experience in global luxury craft making. Upon completion of the certificate one-year embroidery programme and internship, successful students have the opportunity to join our women’s-only artisans’ atelier with flexible timings where they earn a good income, respect, and become part of our ever-evolving creativity community. Our empowered leaders continue to be torch-bearers of the community long after their education is completed, thus making our impact sustainable for tomorrow. As modern custodians of craftsmanship, we are privileged to preserve and promote these crafts, and reinvent and contemporise them, thus keeping them relevant for future generations.
You have empowered about 400 women as you said, how many of those have joined your business?
Karishma: So, when the school was incepted, the vision to empower women and give back, so, at that point we didn’t have the women’s atelier in place. We taught about 250 women and once they graduated, we helped them in their own entrepreneurship avenues like some wanted a tailor shop and some their own atelier. In 2019, we opened our women’s-only atelier with flexible timings, and we have about 80 women there.
Who does the designing at the school? Is it always with you two or is it from the customers?
Karishma: At the CSC it is always a collaboration of creative energies, so we are both very involved. But say if we have a collaboration with Eva Joseph, she is a French artist, there was input at her end as well as ours to make something beautiful together.
Do the ladies have their creative input?
Karishma: Absolutely, a large part of our focus is on design thinking and design excellence. So, one aspect is about learning the technical aspect of craft and we do about 300 genres at the school but beyond that, how to manage colour, how to marry different techniques, is all taught at the school. Advanced students spend most of their semesters doing their own experiments to explore and think with craft. So, that is something we are very proud of at the school.
You talked about sustainability. I wanted to know: do you recycle the clothes you are make?
Karishma: Craft is inherently so wise. It is naturally sustainable and has zero carbon footprint. Naturally, crafts people across generation are almost zero waste and that is something we have learnt from the artisans. We have been doing this for several decades and a large part of it is an inclusion movement. We work strictly with recycled and upcycled fabrics. There is a huge part of our organisation that works with the ecosystem, there is a green movement. We do it with Gucci, Marcella and others, we do green, sustainable, grassroot research every season and we work not just at the fabric level but at raw material level, making sure that we keep it as sustainable as possible. Of course, it is impossible to be completely sustainable, it is an ever-evolving world and we are learning but it is certainly one of our pillars of change. We would love to invite you at our vintage collection. Most of the women are slum-dwelling women who haven’t had any exposure to design, they are curious, intelligent. So, we need to build a foundation and make them see beautiful objects and why they are beautiful. So, we do that, and they also have access to our library of 8000-odd textile books. We do our part and we are really passionate about it.
Monica: We are also adding a huge aspect of cultural sustainability which plays a very important role in the Indian economy because every state has an art, a new way of weaving, or wearing the saree, but they are not institutionalised. They are only passed on from father to son. And that needs support and a school like this will definitely sustain that craft. So, cultural sustainability is a huge arm, all of us need to become ambassadors and support the craft.
There are inputs of the artisans, as you said, why don’t their names come on the label?
Karishma: We have often thought about this but if you look at our collaboration with Dior, we had 350 artisans working on it. It was like an orchestra, working on their specific techniques. So, as much as we would like to, we have not found the right way to put everyone’s name our there, it is not that easy.
Monica: We have some master craftsman in Chanakya who are creating some techniques which we have revived like the Ekta technique, so, every jacket, every lehenga that is created by the master craftsman has their name on it.
I want to know why is the foundation called Chanakya?
Karishma: It is a parent company, when we looked at Chanakya as a philosopher, there was one value system that resonated with us which was his win-win strategy for everything and he really believed that unless every stakeholder is a winner, there is no winner at all and that is something that resonates with us at the school of crafts and at Chanakya. It is a historical name and is something we want to keep alive.
Is CSC fee-based, self-sustaining or sponsored or a combination?
Karishma: So, the foundation is completely supported inhouse by us, there are collaborations but we are looking to open it up and build a corpus because we would like to scale it and take it to different states.
Where is it located? Why only women? Since now you have achieved so much and have a background, have you all
considered delving into furniture design?
Karishma: The school is at Byculla. As you see, in India, craft has been a male-dominated industry. So, it was necessary for bring women to the fore-front. We wanted to empower them. We are always looking at different aspects, we started with fashion. We see it coming sometime soon.
What were the challenges in getting the school started?
Karishma: Oddly enough our largest challenge was really not the curriculum; it is something we worked on for year and a half. It is very robust and holistic, but it came to us naturally. In the beginning it was challenging to get women. Our first centre had to be in the Dharavi slums because it was so hard to explain to the women that it can be a safe haven, or a hobby. It is somewhere you can be safe and bring children if you want to. Inspite of all that, in the beginning, we had only eight women and within the first week, it was down to three. We realised that there is an incredible amount of resistance women face domestically. They have responsibility, they are not given equal opportunities. So, in the initial days, we collaborated with an NGO, Jan Shikshan, they helped us to get the batch of women and once we had them, very soon it became word of mouth, and we were able to get the women to join us.