Keeping Kalamkari Alive: Nikita Shah on Craft, Culture, and Conscious Creation
After a brief pause, Chai Break returns with a conversation that feels like a deep exhale.
In this episode, Shwetha is joined by Nikita Shah — a multidisciplinary artist, textile designer, educator, and researcher whose work bridges the 3,000-year-old craft of Kalamkari with contemporary storytelling, community, education, and healing.
From living and learning alongside weavers in Maheshwar, to studying at NIFT Kannur and FIT, to founding Untitle by Nikita and hosting Fursat, a monthly workshop centered on rest and reflection through textile-making, Nikita’s journey is rooted in patience, presence, and purpose.
This episode is a powerful meditation on slow fashion, cultural memory, sustainability, and the quiet resistance of handmade work in a world addicted to speed, trends, and overconsumption.
What We Talk About in This Episode
Beginnings & Origins
- Nikita’s early relationship with textiles, craft, and sustainability
- Living within indigenous craft clusters across India
- Her formative six-month graduation project in Maheshwar, working directly with weavers
- How family memory, cotton saris, and lived experience shaped her artistic language
Discovering Kalamkari
- What Kalamkari is — and the pen-based, natural-dye, multi-step process she practices
- Learning Kalamkari by living with weavers and printers in Andhra Pradesh for several years
- Navigating language, trust, and lineage in a traditionally gatekept craft
- Why Kalamkari chose her — and the responsibility that comes with carrying it forward
Untitle by Nikita
- Why she founded Untitle by Nikita and what “Untitle” represents
- Working with deadstock textiles and memorial fabrics
- Creating garments in NYC’s garment district as an act of preservation and care
- How memory, craftsmanship, and sustainability are stitched into every piece
Fursat: Community, Rest & Reflection
- What Fursat means — and why the concept feels radical today
- Reclaiming the joy of waiting, tailoring, and intentional creation
- How Fursat creates space for personal storytelling, emotional healing, and collective creativity
- Craft as a practice of rest in a culture obsessed with productivity
Art, Healing & Sustainability
- The connection between textile-making and healing
- Teaching handloom language at FIT and independently at universities
- Why fashion should begin with textiles — not trends
- The missed opportunity in today’s over-the-top Diwali fashion culture
- Why handloom is still stigmatized as “not cool” — and how we shift that narrative
- Relearning how to shop, consume, and dress with intention
The Sari as Identity
- Nikita’s love for saris and whether it was a conscious choice
- Saris as conversation starters, grounding tools, and cultural anchors
- Her involvement in the New York Sari Exhibit at the New York Historical Society
- What it meant to see the sari honored in such an iconic space
☕ Rapid Fire (Chai Break Style)
- How Nikita practices sustainability in daily life
- What she’s currently reading
- Favorite season
- How she takes her chai
- Her go-to chai-time snack
