Tripti Mukherjee: Keeper of the Old Bengal Craft

Tripti Mukherjee was six years old when she first picked up a needle, sitting beside her mother in their home in West Bengal. She is sixty now. 

This year, the President of India is giving her the Padma Shri, one of the country's highest civilian honours, for the 37 years she has spent turning that early habit into a livelihood for hundreds of women in her district.

A Stitch With No Classroom

What she learned from her mother was kantha, a stitch that started out of necessity rather than art. 

Bengali women used it to turn old, worn-out cotton saris into something usable again, layering a few together and stitching them shut with thread pulled from the same fabric. The result was a soft, sturdy quilt, warm enough for a Bengal winter. 

Somewhere along the way, women started adding pictures into the stitching too. Birds, fish, flowers, scenes from daily life. A baby's quilt got its own name, lep-kantha. So did a bedspread, sujni-kantha, and a cover, baytan-kantha. None of it was taught in a classroom. Daughters watched their mothers and picked it up, the same way Mukherjee did.

No Stencils, Just a Steady Hand

There is no printed pattern to follow in kantha work, and most artisans skip a stencil altogether. A design gets planned in the head, sometimes sketched faintly in pencil first, then built stitch by stitch in tight, close rows. 

The finished surface is a little uneven, almost rippled. That is not a flaw. It comes from how a particular hand pulls the thread, and it is one of the few reliable ways to tell a real kantha piece from a printed copy of one.

Where the Training Happens

Mukherjee now runs a training centre in Suri, teaching the same stitch to local women, many of whom had no paid work before they walked in. 

She teaches them to work it into sarees, dupattas, stoles, bed sheets and wall hangings. What they make gets sold at government-run exhibitions and melas, and for many of the women, it is the first income they have earned on their own.

Where the Stitch Has Travelled

That work has carried her further than Suri. In 2017, she travelled to Birmingham to represent West Bengal on a government-backed trip, and later to Tokyo for the India Trend Fair, where the Indian embassy gave her a certificate for her craft. 

In 2025, she demonstrated the stitch at Bharat TEX in Delhi, in front of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A National Award came in 2010, the Shilp Guru Award in 2016, and West Bengal's own Bangashree Award in 2017. None of it changed what she does most days, which is teach the stitch to whoever walks into her centre next.

When a Machine Copies It

The same popularity that brought kantha this kind of attention has also made it easy to fake. Machine-printed fabric designed to look hand-stitched now sells as kantha, usually at a fraction of the price, and in a photograph the two can be hard to tell apart. 

A real kantha dupatta takes an artisan days of steady, careful stitching to finish. A printed copy takes minutes on a machine. 

When buyers cannot tell the difference, they stop paying for the real one, and the women training under artisans like Mukherjee end up competing against a version of their own work that no one actually stitched.

What the Award Is Really For

Mukherjee still spends most days at the centre, showing someone new how to hold the needle. The Padma Shri is really about that: forty years of choosing, again and again, to teach this stitch to someone new.

We carry work from artisans like her because the hands behind it are real, and so is the time it took to learn the craft.