Coonoor&Co

16/08/2026

Coonoor & Co in Delhi

A selection of Toda embroidered textiles from our continuing work with the Toda artisan collective will be at Handloom Haat, New Delhi, as part of Weave the Future 5.0.

Shawls, stoles, sarees, home textiles and a small selection of pieces from the Toda Project will be available to see and purchase in person.

13–23 August 2026
Handloom Haat, New Delhi

Presented in association with the Ministry of Textiles and the Development Commissioner (Handlooms).

For those of you in Delhi who have been wanting to see the work closely, we hope you will stop by.

16/08/2026

14/08/2026

“That we each have but a handful of chances to see it in our lifetimes is astonishing (and frightening) to me, and I am driven by a desire to know I have seen the flowers as much as a desire to actually sit among them for a minute.”

— 𝗨𝗿𝘃𝗮𝘀𝗵𝗶 𝗕𝗮𝗵𝘂𝗴𝘂𝗻𝗮

The kurinji, Strobilanthes kunthiana, flowers en masse roughly once every twelve years, covering parts of the Western Ghats in blue-violet.
In 𝙒𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝘼𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙀𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙡𝙙, 𝙊𝙣𝙚 𝙁𝙡𝙤𝙬𝙚𝙧 𝙖𝙩 𝙖 𝙏𝙞𝙢𝙚, Urvashi writes about encountering the kurinji in bloom, and the wonder and unease of witnessing something so beautiful whose measure of time is so different from our own.

Her essay is accompanied by this beautiful rendering by Valli Muthuraman, a watercolourist, gardener and nature photographer whose relationship with the Nilgiris goes back to childhood summers spent in these hills.

From our continuing series revisiting the illustrators and artists who have shaped the visual world of the Coonoor & Co Journal: Valli Muthuraman and the kurinji.

Illustration: Valli Muthuraman The Garden House
Words: Urvashi Bahuguna Urvashi
From the Coonoor & Co Journal, 2022

12/08/2026

The Kurinji (Strobilanthes kunthiana) belongs to the high grasslands of the Western Ghats, flowering only once in twelve years and, in season, washing entire slopes in blue-violet.

For this saree, we brought the flower onto linen through hand block printing, placing it alongside Toda embroidery worked by the women of our artisan collective in the Nilgiris.

What interested us was the meeting of two very different languages on cloth. The fluidity and delicacy of the botanical form, and the remarkable precision of Toda embroidery, counted directly onto the fabric without a drawn pattern or guide.

The embroidery appears sparingly across the saree and along its edge, leaving parts of the saree clear. We wanted to resist filling every surface. The linen, the flower and the embroidery each have room to hold their own.

From our Nilgiri Flora series, it is a textile that began with looking closely at what grows around us, and and at how a landscape finds its way into cloth.

11/08/2026

𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝗶𝗹𝗴𝗶𝗿𝗶𝘀 · 𝟬𝟭

On a recent visit to one of the older Toda hamlets near Ebbanad, Kerir, we found the women gathered beneath this magnificent grandfather tree, working together in the late afternoon light.

Cloth stretched between their hands, threads counted, patterns taking shape. Around them, conversation carries on in Toda. There is discussion, laughter, the occasional pause to look at someone else’s work. Dogs wander through. Life continues around the making.

This is one of the groups of women we work closely with through the Toda Project at Coonoor & Co. Visits such as these are an important part of our work, a chance to sit together, look at what is being made, exchange ideas, life notes, and understand how the work is progressing.

But I am always struck by something beyond the embroidery itself.

The textile is not separate from the landscape or from the rhythms of everyday life. The language being spoken, the buffalo, the old trees, the hills and the patterns held in memory all belong to the same world.

Much of what eventually reaches our studio begins quietly, in places such as this.
From the Nilgiris will be an occasional series of field notes, conversations and observations from the mountains we call home.

07/08/2026

On National Handloom Day, we think of restraint.

Of the extraordinary richness that can come from so little. Needle, thread, cloth, the eye and the hand.

Toda embroidery has always astonished us for this. Worked traditionally in red and black on an ivory ground, it is made entirely by hand, without guides, sketches or frames. The fabric is held between the fingers and the threads counted to build an intricate geometry, stitch by stitch. So precise is the work that, at first glance, it can appear woven. It is not.

For all its intricacy, there is an instinctive understanding of balance. Of what to fill and what to leave alone. A limited palette, a needle and thread, and within these constraints, an astonishing visual language.

The pieces Pudhumalli wears here grew from our continuing collaboration with the Toda artisan collective through the Toda Project: a shawl carrying honeycomb and botanical motifs, and a linen saree whose geometry draws from the mountains.

Pudhumalli, one of our senior Toda artisans, is photographed here in her own hamlet. The land she sits against is the same land the motifs are drawn from.

06/08/2026

“It is old. It is unwieldy. It is beautiful. Filled with books and knick-knacks, it takes up a whole wall. Familiar and comforting, it stands guard over my childhood.”

— Suvasini Sridharan
𝘼 𝙃𝙤𝙢𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙊𝙣𝙚’𝙨 𝙊𝙬𝙣

Words by Suvasini Sridharan Suvasini Sridharan

Suvasini Sridharan writes about the ways women make a home their own—through objects carried across cities, walls marked by hand, photographs, books, companionship, privacy and the feeling of being safe. Moving between women in Gurugram, Chennai, Muscat and Bangalore, the piece considers home not as something fixed, but as something made and remade through changing lives.

Swipe for excerpts and read the full piece in our Home issue through the link in bio.

Photos: 1 – Ramya Reddy, 2 – Sudarshana Srinivasan, 3 – Vasini Varadan, 4 – Kamalakshi Aggarwala
Suvasini Sridharan is a writer and journalist whose work centres on people, place, culture and everyday life.


[home, women, belonging, memory, personal space, sense of home, women’s stories]

05/08/2026

Coonoor & Co is part of Worlds Within Cloth: New Orders of Woven Making, curated by Sreyansi Singh (Sreyansi Singh) at the National Crafts Museum & Hastkala Academy, New Delhi, presented and supported by the Ministry of Textiles and the Office of the Development Commissioner, Handlooms (DC Handlooms).

The exhibition gathers artists, clothes-makers and craft collectives who resist textile as simply an object, and turn instead to its unseen entanglements: its socio-historical dimensions, its self-critique, its experimental and collaborative approaches. Through long-term research, artist-craftsperson associations, and large-scale installations, it rearranges the artist as researcher, the craftsperson as activist, the custodian as educator and archivist.

Our work with the Toda community and their pukhoor embroidery sits within that question.

Opening 6 August, 4 to 7 PM. On view until 19 August, 10 AM to 5 PM. National Crafts Museum, New Delhi.

National Crafts Museum & Hastkala Academy