Coonoor&Co, Theni (2026)

18/10/2026

Our Panelled Shawls are an ongoing exploration in our studio, bringing together different fabrics, textures and the distinctive embroidery of the Toda women of the Nilgiris.

We begin with Alizarin, a rich red, hand-spun and handwoven khadi cotton from north Gujarat. Soft, breathable and beautifully textured, the cloth travels from the looms of western India to the Nilgiri mountains, where it finds a new expression alongside the intricate counted-thread embroidery of the Toda women.

The collection draws on our continuing work with Toda artisans, allowing us to experiment with different materials while keeping their remarkable embroidery at its heart.

The first few Alizarin shawls are now available on our website, with more being added through the week. Other fabrics and variations will follow as the collection grows.

Link in the bio to shop.

[Toda embroidery, khadi, hand-spun cotton, alizarin red, Indian textiles, indigenous embroidery, contemporary Indian textiles, slow fashion, artisan-made]

16/10/2026

𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝙄𝙣𝙙𝙞𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙤𝙪𝙨, 𝗜𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲 𝟭𝟭 𝗼𝗳 𝗖𝗼𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗼𝗿 & 𝗖𝗼 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹.

The word Indigenous often arrives already burdened with definition: as identity, ancestry, territory, inheritance. But what if indigeneity is also lived and remade in the present? What happens as practices, languages and forms change while remaining bound to particular communities and places? In this issue, indigeneity is not an artefact preserved behind glass, but a living relationship: the wisdom gathered when we listen to a place long enough to be shaped by it.

Moving between the Siang Valley, the Nilgiris, the Palani Hills, Negamam, and Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, the issue asks what we carry forward, what we alter, and what happens when knowledge and cultural forms move into new languages, markets, books, galleries, and institutions.

With contributions from 𝗠𝗮𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗴 𝗗𝗮𝗶, 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗵𝗮 𝗥𝗮𝗺𝗮𝗻, 𝗦𝗵𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗶 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗹, 𝗟𝘂𝘃𝗶𝗮 𝗟𝗮𝘇𝗼, 𝗖𝗮𝗿𝗼𝗹 𝗕𝗹𝗮𝗶𝘇𝘆 𝗗’𝗦𝗼𝘂𝘇𝗮, 𝗗𝗶𝘃𝘆𝗮 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗮𝗻, 𝗥𝘂𝗽𝗮𝗹𝗶 𝗚𝗼𝗲𝗹, 𝗠𝘂𝗿𝘂𝗴𝗲𝘀𝗵𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗶 𝗕𝗮𝗹𝗮𝗻, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗝𝘆𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗮 𝗝𝗮𝗶𝗻; 𝗚𝗶𝘁𝗮 𝗪𝗼𝗹𝗳 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗶𝘁 𝗥𝗼𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗵𝘂 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝘄𝗮𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻; 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗺 𝗥𝗼𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗥𝗮𝗺𝘆𝗮 𝗥𝗲𝗱𝗱𝘆.

𝗦𝘄𝗶𝗽𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝘁.

Stories from Indigenous will be published on our website over the coming months, with each new piece shared through our monthly newsletter.

[Indigenous knowledge, orature, Adi culture, Badaga culture, Gond art, vernacular knowledge, plant names, language, translation, conservation, handloom, weaving, visual culture, ecology, conservation, land, ritual, inheritance, Nilgiris, Siang Valley, Palani Hills, Negamam, Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca]

13/10/2026

A little alizarin red against the moss and weathered rock of the Nilgiris.

From the looms of north Gujarat to the embroidery traditions of the Nilgiris, our panelled shawls bring together the textile knowledge of two very different regions.

Hand-spun and handwoven khadi cotton, with its beautiful texture and breathable quality, meets the distinctive embroidery of Toda women, whose counted-thread technique has been passed down through generations.

Designed and made in our studio, the shawls play with colour, proportion and pattern, allowing these different traditions to find a place alongside one another. Each piece is fully reversible, with colour and pattern finding expression on both sides.

A small batch will be available on our website later this week.

Lovely model Rachana Reddy

04/10/2026

𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝗶𝗹𝗴𝗶𝗿𝗶𝘀 𝟬𝟯

A little over a month ago, we went looking for Magnolia nilagirica in bloom.

We were visiting some of our Toda artisans in a remote hamlet in the southwestern Nilgiris, and the magnolias were flowering across this part of the mountains. I had wanted for some time to encounter the tree like this, in its own landscape, to see the flowers up close, touch them, take photographs, and experience their extraordinary scent.

We walked together, stopping wherever we found a tree in bloom. Seeta, our senior lead artisan, spoke about her memories of growing up with the magnolia and what its flowering has long signalled here. Known as mawsshh or morshhpuf in Toda, its ivory flowers appear for only a short time each year. Their arrival has traditionally been read as a remarkably accurate seasonal marker, a sign that the southwest monsoon is beginning to draw to a close.

By a lovely coincidence, some of the women were working on one of our botanical saris drawn from Magnolia nilagirica, even as the trees were flowering around us.

The rest of the day unfolded around us. We walked through the forest as the women identified some native species, made notes and photographs, talked, listened, and somewhere along the way the women began to sing.

There are plants one comes to know first through books, photographs and stories, and then there is the experience of standing beneath the living tree, breathing in its scent, with people who have known it all their lives.

A few fragments from a beautiful day in the mountains.

— Ramya

[Magnolia nilagirica, Nilgiris, Toda embroidery, southwest monsoon, shola forests, botanical textiles, field notes, mountain ecology]

24/09/2026

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗮 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲?

To know the names given to its plants and grasses. To recognize a shift in the wind that signals rain. What grows in a particular season, what can be gathered and eaten, what must be left alone. The stories attached to a hill, a river, a tree. The forms and images through which a world is remembered and imagined. Words whose meanings have been shaped by a particular landscape, and memories that cannot quite be separated from it.

Much of this is learnt slowly, through observation, language, memory, making and lived experience. It changes as it passes between generations; sometimes it survives in unexpected forms, and sometimes it is lost.

These threads take us across different geographies and through very different voices.

𝙄𝙉𝘿𝙄𝙂𝙀𝙉𝙊𝙐𝙎

The next issue of the Coonoor & Co journal.
Coming soon.

[place, indigenous, ways of knowing, landscape, language, memory, ecology, more-than-human world, cultural knowledge, oral traditions, belonging, Coonoor & Co journal]

16/09/2026

On 20 September, we join Selvedge for a special online session on pukhoor, the distinctive counted-thread embroidery of the Toda community of the Nilgiris.

Worked entirely by hand, without a drawn pattern, frame or guide, Toda embroidery takes shape by counting the threads of the cloth itself. Red and black yarn moves across an ivory ground to form intricate geometries, with a reverse face as distinctive as the front.

We will also trace the arc of this practice through our own work, beginning with the nine-year making of Soul of the Nilgiris, Ramya Reddy’s documentation of the Nilgiris and its indigenous communities. Each of its 2000 copies was bound with a hand-embroidered Toda spine, and the relationships that grew through that process developed over the years into the textile practice and artisan collective at Coonoor & Co today.

For this session, we wanted to bring people closer not only to the finished textile, but to the knowledge held within its making.

Two of our senior Toda artisans Seetha and Anbulakshmi will join us live from the Nilgiris, working as we talk. Through photographs, textiles, film and conversation, we’ll look at how a motif takes shape, the language and geometry of pukhoor, its remarkable reversibility, and the knowledge carried in the hands of the women who practise it.

There is something quite magical about seeing pukhoor being made. The counting, the rhythm, the extraordinary precision, and the relationship between hand, eye and cloth.

We would love to have you with us.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮: 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗧𝗼𝘂𝗰𝗵 Sunday, 20 September 2026 10.30 am–12 pm BST Online via Zoom £25

Register through Selvedge. Link in bio Polly Leonard  
The session will be recorded and sent to everyone who registers.

[The Art of the Toda, Toda embroidery, pukhoor, Toda artisans, Nilgiris, indigenous textiles, counted-thread embroidery, Soul of the Nilgiris, Selvedge, London Textile Month, Coonoor & Co]

16/09/2026

On 20 September, we join Selvedge for a special online session on pukhoor, the distinctive counted-thread embroidery of the Toda community of the Nilgiris.

Worked entirely by hand, without a drawn pattern, frame or guide, Toda embroidery takes shape by counting the threads of the cloth itself. Red and black yarn moves across an ivory ground to form intricate geometries, with a reverse face as distinctive as the front.

We will also trace the arc of this practice through our own work, beginning with the nine-year making of Soul of the Nilgiris, Ramya Reddy’s documentation of the Nilgiris and its indigenous communities. Each of its 2,000 copies was bound with a hand-embroidered Toda spine, and the relationships that grew through that process developed over the years into the textile practice and artisan collective at Coonoor & Co today.

For this session, we wanted to bring people closer not only to the finished textile, but to the knowledge held within its making.

Two of our senior Toda artisans Seetha and Anbulakshmi will join us live from the Nilgiris, working as we talk. Through photographs, textiles, film and conversation, we’ll look at how a motif takes shape, the language and geometry of pukhoor, its remarkable reversibility, and the knowledge carried in the hands of the women who practise it.

There is something quite magical about seeing pukhoor being made. The counting, the rhythm, the extraordinary precision, and the relationship between hand, eye and cloth.

We would love to have you with us.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮: 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗧𝗼𝘂𝗰𝗵 Sunday, 20 September 2026 10.30 am–12 pm BST Online via Zoom £25

Register through Selvedge. Link in bio Polly Leonard  
The session will be recorded and sent to everyone who registers.

[The Art of the Toda, Toda embroidery, pukhoor, Toda artisans, Nilgiris, indigenous textiles, counted-thread embroidery, Soul of the Nilgiris, Selvedge, London Textile Month, Coonoor & Co]

09/09/2026

We spotted the first Magnolia nilagirica in bloom recently.

Known as mawsshh or morshhpuf in Toda, its fragrant ivory flowers appear in profusion for only a few weeks each year. Toda elders have long known its flowering as a seasonal marker, signalling that the southwest monsoon is drawing to a close.

The magnolia is one of the many elements of the Nilgiris that inspired Sentient Mountain, our perfume created with Jahnvi Lakhota Nandan of The Perfume Library.

The fragrance draws richly from many layers of these mountains: plants and forests, rain and earth, memory and lived knowledge, and the ways in which a landscape reveals itself through scent.

The magnolia has found its way into our textile practice too, its ivory bloom taking another form in line, pattern, wood blocks and cloth. Different expressions, returning to the same landscape.

Link in the bio to explore/purchase.
Also available with our partner stores One Zero Eight by Save The Loom 47-A

[Sentient Mountain, Magnolia nilagirica, Nilgiris, indigenous knowledge, Indian botanicals, fragrance, scent and landscape, Indian perfumery, Coonoor & Co]

02/09/2026

𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝗶𝗹𝗴𝗶𝗿𝗶𝘀 𝟬𝟮

A recent conversation with a friend about what it means to be in the field sent me back through years of photographs, notes and fragments from the Nilgiris.

There is something about returning to the same landscape over time. Looking becomes listening; observation becomes familiarity; and the things gathered along the way begin to speak to one another. Old books and records, conversations, objects kept in homes, walks through the landscape, photographs made along the way. Much of this found its way into Soul of the Nilgiris, after many years of research and fieldwork.

But an inquiry rarely ends where you think it will. Over time, some of these ways of seeing have travelled into other parts of our work at Coonoor & Co, including the textiles we make today.

A few fragments from across those years, and from a relationship with these mountains that continues to unfold.

— Ramya

[Nilgiris, Coonoor, field research, photography, textile practice, indigenous knowledge, mountain landscapes, Soul of the Nilgiris]

29/08/2026

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮 | 𝗟𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗲𝘅𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵

The Toda are a small indigenous community of the Nilgiris in southern India, numbering fewer than 1,500 people. Among the cultural practices carried by Toda women is pukhoor, their distinctive counted-thread embroidery.

Worked entirely by hand, the embroidery is made by counting the threads of the cloth itself, without a drawn pattern or frame. Its geometry is precise, its structure reversible, and its knowledge has traditionally passed from one generation of women to another through practice, memory and touch.

Our own relationship with the Toda community began more than a decade ago through photography and long-form documentation for Soul of the Nilgiris. Over time, that work grew into Coonoor & Co and into a sustained collaboration with Toda embroiderers, rooted in the Nilgiris and in the wider cultural world from which this textile tradition comes.

This September, as part of Selvedge’s London Textile Month, we will be sharing more of this work through two online sessions with .

𝟰 𝗦𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮: 𝗢𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗲

A talk tracing the cultural context and visual language of pukhoor, and the story of our engagement with the Toda community, beginning with Soul of the Nilgiris and growing over more than a decade into the work of Coonoor & Co today. Through photographs, archival material and a short film, we will move between landscape, motifs, the women who practise this embroidery, and the relationships that have shaped our work together.

𝟮𝟬 𝗦𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮: 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗧𝗼𝘂𝗰𝗵

A live session with senior Toda embroiderers, bringing the making of pukhoor into view through demonstration, conversation and close observation.

Both events are online.
Registration and further details via .

Coonoor&Co

18/10/2026

16/10/2026

13/10/2026

04/10/2026

24/09/2026

16/09/2026

16/09/2026

09/09/2026

02/09/2026

29/08/2026

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