For an Indian Textiles Designer, It Takes Many Villages
Brinda Dudhat, the founder of Morii Design in India, creates modern motifs supported by age-old techniques.
As published in the Art and Design section of The New York TImes, March 7, 2025
Brinda Dudhat, the founder of Morii Design in the city of Gandhinagar, India. Her company collaborates with more than 160 textile workers across the country.
Photo Credit - Ezra Alcantra/IOTA, Perth
Chintz, khaki, calico, gingham and yes, pajamas: India’s role in the global textile trade has been so profound that its lexicon has shaped the way we describe fabrics, patterns and clothing. Similarly, Indian design motifs have remained durable worldwide symbols: If it’s eternally chic paisley you want, look no further than a silk scarf from Yves Saint Laurent.
One word not typically associated with Indian aesthetics, however, is “modernism.” The world’s appetite for color and exuberant detail has kept the country’s tiger, peacock and teardrop motifs in circulation.
Brinda Dudhat, a 29-year-old design entrepreneur in the Indian state of Gujarat, is determined to connect her country’s pattern-rich textile heritage with a modern, abstract sensibility. Founded in 2019 in the city of Gandhinagar, her firm, Morii Design, collaborates with more than 160 textile workers in 12 villages across India to produce vibrant wall hangings, room dividers and artworks using traditional techniques, some threatened with extinction.
Ms. Dudhat is equally committed to the artisans’ well-being, offering paid training and upfront compensation through a transparent fee system that takes into account the size, complexity and urgency of each project.
India has a complicated relationship with modern design. In the late 1950s, the government invited Charles and Ray Eames to meet designers, artisans and architects throughout the country, to propose ways to bolster its flagging craft industries and improve the quality of their production. Among the couple’s recommendations was the establishment of a design school modeled on modern European institutions like the Bauhaus.
A Morii Design piece featuring contemporary Rabari hand embroidery crafted over patchwork made from Bela block-printed fabric, combined with naturally dyed cotton and silk fabrics.
Photo Credit - Morii Design
That school, the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, is where Ms. Dudhat majored in textile design. She said the spirit of exploration that drove the Eameses to do fieldwork in the 1950s is very much alive and well there today.
“As part of our curriculum, we traveled to villages, studied their ecosystems and worked closely with artisans,” Ms. Dudhat said in a video interview. “This early exposure gave me a deep understanding of village life and traditional crafts.”
Her N.I.D. training was user-centric, she added. At every juncture, she was asked to consider for whom she was designing. Then, she spent a semester at Tama Art University in Tokyo, and her way of thinking shifted.
“It was like I got the best of both worlds,” she said, “the structured, problem-solving approach from India, and the free, expressive spirit of Japan.”
Ms. Dudhat named her studio after the Japanese “Mori Girl” style, a woodland aesthetic involving sweaters, woolens and a mossy color palette. (“Mori” is Japanese for “forest.”) Key to her appreciation was the role of forests as ecosystems — operations that require mutual support to thrive.
More contemporary Rabari hand embroidery over a base patchwork of naturally dyed cotton and mul fabrics. Rabari embroidery originated in Rajasthan and Gujarat in the 14th century.
Photo Credit - Morii Design
She said much of her desire to work locally came from seeing the toll mass production and globalization have taken on the craft traditions she learned as a student. “In India, traditional crafts have been largely taken over by traders and factory owners who prioritize mass production over authenticity,” she said. “They flood the market with machine-made imitations, capturing only the appearance of traditional art while stripping it of its essence.”
Morii Design (the spelling puts a creative spin on the Japanese) does the opposite, preserving the integrity of long-practiced techniques that support contemporary patterns: frequently, meadowlike expanses of stitches that give each surface a subtle, grasslike texture.
The company works with artisans skilled in Rabari embroidery, which originated in Rajasthan and Gujarat in the 14th century. (This is the kind of fabric that shimmers with tiny mirrors.) And it employs one of the last remaining masters of Bela hand-block printing, a once-robust industry practiced in an Indian village of that name, which has been crushed by more economical machine printing.
A powerful example of the merger of old and new could be seen last year in Ms. Dudhat’s contribution to the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial in Perth, Australia. Inspired by 70 years of temperature data collected by Ed Hawkins, a British climate scientist, she worked with a team of 65 Rabari artisans to create a seven-panel work titled “HOPE.”
The tapestry’s base layer featured Bela block printing, with Ms Dudhat’s design evoking the portion of the Saran River that once ran in that village but dried up amid warming temperatures. The second layer was stitched with Sujni embroidery from the state of Bihar, where the population faces an elevated risk of flooding. The third layer shimmered with tiny Rabari mirrors, reflecting the work’s viewers, all implicated in the crisis.
Priya Khanchandani, a curator who organized “The Offbeat Sari”, a 2023 exhibition at the Design Museum in London, noted that Morii Design’s modern motifs were an audience pleaser in India as well as abroad.
“There is a misconception that Indians have tastes that are rooted in a timeless ‘village’ craft aesthetic but this isn’t necessarily the case,” she said in an email. “A contemporary Indian design aesthetic is very much alive, helped by the fact India has a young population and is a fast-moving economy.”
Suchi Reddy, a New York City architect who was born and raised in Channai, India, said in a phone interview that Indian designers were craft driven by nature. Where she thinks Ms. Dudhat stands apart is in her working model.
“Reaching out to rural craftspeople and giving them a very viable way of earning a living that fits into their lifestyle,” she said, “that is really amazing, I think.”