Noor, Issue 01, The wedding issue. Web edition.

The workshop is up three flights of stairs in Shahpur Jat, the old village in south Delhi that now holds more boutiques than houses. Ishita Chandel started Tara Bagh in 2016 with two karigars and a borrowed room. There are twenty-two now, most of them from families that have done zardozi for generations, and they now fill the whole floor.

Zardozi is embroidery in metal thread. The karigars sit at a wooden frame, the adda, with the cloth stretched tight, and work with a hooked needle called an aari, laying down coiled wire, sequins, beads and dabka, the fine springy coil that gives the work its shine. A heavy bridal lehenga at Tara Bagh takes ten to fourteen weeks.

Made to order

Nothing is cut until a client has sat with Chandel twice. The first meeting is about the wedding: the venue, the time of day, how far the bride will walk. The second is about colour, with swatches dyed in the workshop. Only then is the pattern traced on paper, pricked with holes along its lines and pounced onto the cloth with chalk, so the karigars have a map to follow.

Fewer, heavier

Chandel would rather make fewer pieces with more work in them than follow a season. Her maroon velvet, embroidered edge to edge in antique gold, has been in the collection for six years. What changes is the weight: this December the lehengas are lighter, with more open ground between the motifs, because her clients want to dance in them.

What it costs

A Tara Bagh lehenga is priced by the hours of embroidery in it, which Chandel will show a client on the work sheet. She also takes back pieces she has made for re-work, so that a mother’s lehenga can be re-cut for a daughter, a service she says now keeps two karigars busy all year.