Chanakya: Collection to Collaboration

The first comprehensive book about Chanakya and its journey through art, couture and cultural innovation

This book is the first comprehensive publication on Chanakya, tracing its four-decade legacy of craftsmanship and its enduring collaborations across art and couture. Growing from its own collections, this book situates Chanakya’s pivotal role of how Indian heritage skills have elevated the value of embroidery-based collaborations, prising open critical discourses of textiles, fashion and art. It highlights Chanakya’s role which isn’t limited to just preservation of traditional embroidery, instead engages a critical inquiry into material and methodology, intuitively charting a cross-cultural global discourse. Under the direction of Karishma Swali, Creative Director of Chanakya, the artistic practice is conceived as an archive of cultural ethos, where materials and motifs are reimagined as metaphors, shaping a contemporary and discursive visual language. Not just a cultural preservation and revival but a cultural expansion and evolution into newer collaborative forms of artistic expression, has been the effort of Chanakya which the book will accentuate.