Darshan Mekani Shah traces Bengal’s textile memory through shibori and kantha for an upcoming Chennai exhibition

In Chennai, a quiet conversation unfolds between cloth and memory. Textile entrepreneur Darshan Mekani Shah’s upcoming exhibition with Silkworm Boutique brings together shibori and kantha — two techniques shaped by time and touch. Featuring silhouettes such as kurtas, kaftans, open jackets, co-ord sets, the collection has a muted palette of beige, brow, rust, grey, maroon and indigo. For Darshan, founder, Weavers Studio, this exhibition reflects a lifelong belief: that textiles carry history within its fold.

When Darshan speaks about textiles, she does not speak about the fabric alone. She talks about migration, memory, loss, recovery, and joy. For over three decades, Weavers Studio has worked insistently to build an ecosystem where craft from the past is not just nostalgia, but living, breathing knowledge. 

“I didn’t come from a background in textiles,” says Darshan. Her family’s story, like many in Bengal, is one rooted in displacement. “We came to India from Rangoon in 1948,” she recalls. Her father was a professional in the jute industry. “Business was never on my mind.” 

Born and raised in Kolkata, Darshan later moved to Mumbai after marriage, where she completed her Law degree and a Management programme. Divorce brought her back to Kolkata, where she started exploring different fields such as management, finance or academics. “I started doing small entrepreneurial projects — organising exhibitions, taking tuitions, doing consultancies.”

Textile travels

It was during these exhibitions that she noticed a gap. “At that time, when I had started working with exhibitions, nothing was happening in terms of textile preservation in Kolkata,” she says. Drawn instinctively to natural dyes and encouraged by her friends from NIFT in Ahmedabad, Darshan began working with textiles on consignment. 

Darshan Shah
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SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

“ If I had leftover dupattas from work I would blockprint them from a tiny workshop on Park Street. Or I would go to Santiniketan and do kantha embroidery on fabrics.” What started as a 200 square feet space later grew into Weavers Studio, guided by her motto — to use as many hands as possible. 

With curiosity in mind, Darshan travelled across the world, learning from the great masters in the textile world. From Toofan Rafai, Sheela Balaji, and KV Chandramouli in India, to Ruby Ghaznavi in Bangladesh and Professor Hiroyuki Shindo in Japan, Darshan immersed herself in block printing, embroidery, indigo, shibori, and natural dyes. “It helped me build my sense and sensibilities,” says Darshan, who also educated herself through books, objects, and travels. “Whenever I travelled, I kept collecting fragments, swatches and samples.” That instinct led her to build an archive of over 1,500 textiles and a library of 3,500 books — all of which can be found in Weavers Studio Resource Centre, founded by her in 2007 as an extension to her retail brand Weavers Studio Kolkata. 

A deeply personal turning point came when her daughter was getting married. “I realised Bengal doesn’t have a wedding sari,” says Darshan. “People wore Benarasis. Elders wore jamdanis. But where was our wedding textile?”

That question led her to Baluchari — Bengal’s narrative silk, originally woven with Malda silk in the Murshidabad district of West Bengal. “We went back to the roots,” she says, “The silk, the iconography, the technique.” Her research expanded Baluchari beyond the mythological scenes from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Shakuntala. She showcased colonial era Baluchari motives — trains, carriages, peacocks, and hookah, all documented through exhibitions and publications such as Baluchari: Bengal and Beyond. 

Post-2015, Darshan’s work increasingly shifted towards research, documentation, oral histories and not-for-profit initiatives. That scholarship culminated in Textiles from Bengal: A Shared Legacy, Darshan’s landmark exhibition last year in Kolkata, which mapped textile traditions across undivided Bengal. The exhibition stemmed from the simple question, “Once upon a time Bengal clothed the world, so what really happened?,” she says.

From Weavers Studio X Silkworm Boutique exhibition
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SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

For her upcoming exhibition, she draws inspiration from her earlier learnings in Japan and her engagement with Bengal’s embroidery traditions. “I learned shibori first in Japan, and it continues to inspire me,” says Darshan. The exhibit ranges from traditional kantha to experimental interpretations through batik, block print and shibori. “In Bengal, 90% of hand embroidery is kantha — it’s social and fits into women’s lives,” Darshan explains. 

As fashion accelerates and crafts are at risk of dying, Darshan’s work reminds us that knowledge survives only when it is practised, shared and re-imagined. 

The Silkworm Boutique exhibition in collaboration with Weavers Studio will be from February 6 to 8 at Silkworm Boutique, Nungambakkam, Chennai.

Published – February 05, 2026 03:55 pm IST