Interviews
Interview
Radhi Parekh In Conversation with Art Beyond Contemporary
Interviewed by Shambhavi Pathak for Art Beyond Contemporary
Radhi Parekh
Radhi Parekh is the founder of Artisans, a space that has quietly but decisively shaped how contemporary Indian art is seen, collected, and lived with. Based in the heart of Kala Ghoda, Mumbai, Artisans is building meaningful, long-term relationships between artists, collectors, and ideas.
At a moment when craft is alternately romanticised or reduced to a sustainability slogan, Radhi’s journey sits at a fascinating intersection of instinct and intent, where artistic sensibility meets a deep understanding of the evolving art ecosystem.
In this conversation, we talk about vision, legacy, sustainability, labour, and what it truly means to sustain an art practice beyond trends, beyond markets, and into something much more enduring.
1. You’ve spoken about how younger generations are returning to Indian textiles and handmade traditions. What changes have you observed over the years?
Radhi Parekh:
We’re now 15 years away from when Artisans started. Today, your generation and even younger generations are embracing Indian identity again. They care deeply about what we are doing. I feel this has to do with increased exposure and awareness. Today, India is seen with a renewed sense of not just identity, but also, I think, responsibility.
When we started in 2011, I remember young women saying, ‘Oh, I’ve got to tell my mother about Artisans.’ I haven’t heard that for a very long time now.
It’s wonderful to see this change. Young people are starting saree groups online, experimenting with drapes, wearing sarees with tennis shoes or platform shoes. There’s a whole redefinition happening.
For me, it feels like a full circle coming back from the 70s when we first started embracing our own identity. I remember choosing to wear a salwar kameez to a disco party after Saturday Night Fever had come out instead of wearing Levi’s, which was so coveted at the time.
But now we’re also seeing the market flooded with lookalikes; things that look handmade because digital printing and technology make imitation very easy. So for us, the important thing is to remain true to the mission of representing what’s authentic.
2. Your formative years at NID involved deep engagement with rural craft communities, alongside mentorship from Ashoke Chatterjee and Jasleen Dhamija. How did these encounters influence your perspective on the strengths and limitations of institutional approaches?
Radhi:
I was very, very touched when both Ashok Chatterjee and Jasleen Dhamija accepted the invitation to come onto our advisory board when Artisans was just a twinkle in my eye. And, you know, it was Ashok Chatterjee whom I have to thank for saying, ‘Please don’t go through the NGO route. Please find your own feet in terms of social enterprise being your model.’ So I do have them to thank very much for those initial days and for what they said when we opened the two lectures that they gave here.
In 1980, I was at NID, and it was a very special time for me. I had always been artistic, but I was also idealistic very early on. I was looking for a purpose. When I discovered design at NID, I realised it was about creating a generation of people who could grapple with the problems of our country and the world through creative approaches to problem-solving. So I trained as a visual communications designer. Later, I did a year of commercial art in Bombay, but I wanted to go beyond skill. I wanted to use my artistic sensibility in a way that addressed real problems.
One of the foundational courses was rural exposure. We spent two weeks in villages near Surat. Each of us was, anyway, really small – 25 people in a class. And we were split between three fairly self-sufficient villages. We lived among self-sustaining communities with blacksmiths, weavers, and carpenters, and it completely changed the way I saw the world. I am told that they continue this exercise even today. I also remember witnessing severe malnutrition among tribal children in an otherwise fertile agricultural landscape. That was one of the most challenging moments for me because I realised how large and complex these problems really were. These experiences sensitised me to different ways of life. How could I put myself in someone else’s shoes? How could I really understand the context?
3. In your own view, how do principles like moral responsibility and social dignity redefine the traditional “bottom line” for a business? What do you believe a brand’s true obligation to its community should be?
Radhi:
When I started Artisans in 2011, it was very clear to me, and I was advised along these lines as well, to look at the social enterprise model because it was really the alternative at that time. It was somewhere between the for-profit and the not-for-profit models. It talked about not just profit.
For me, taking on a gallery and conceiving of a space like Artisans was not really a business-alone decision. I’d had my professional career, and I really wanted to give back. I felt very much, as someone who had lived away from India for about two and a half decades, that it was more important than ever for all of us to get back in touch with our roots.
The idea and thought were inherited in a sense. My mother had started a company called Artisans of India in the mid-70s. She revived not just block printing in Bombay, but also reintroduced the salwar kameez as a fashion statement with entirely new colours.
For me, what was important was reintroducing artisans, designers who worked with artisans, indigenous artists, basically those who’d been overlooked and marginalised.
Our slogan is that we are at the intersection of art, craft, and design, where it meets cultural context. So many indigenous arts and crafts are connected to music, dance, theatre, and local belief systems. The idea was really for us to tell those stories and, as a visual communications person, to rebrand not just the work but the maker, not by elevating them artificially in price or status but truly elevating the work and creating conversations around it.
The bottom line has not really been the motivator for me. Of course, it’s important to be self-sustaining because I believe in self-sustaining models of development. But the other values came before the profit motive.
4. You’ve spoken about the need for a new kind of curatorial gatekeeping. What, in your view, has gone wrong within the craft and design ecosystem?
Radhi:
I don’t think it has entirely gone wrong. But I do think we’ve focused so much on craft as livelihood and craft as empowerment that monetary gain has become the primary value.
In places like Kutch, I now see younger generations moving toward government jobs because those jobs provide security. Traditional embroidery and textile work are no longer always seen as aspirational. So I think we have another job to do, which is to restore value for their own culture within these communities themselves.
Scale also creates problems. Once you move toward economies of scale, craft starts adopting industrial models. Standardisation increases, repetition increases, and slowly, highly skilled craftsmanship becomes reduced to labour. And that affects self-worth. A lot of people who are innately creative lose their sense of creativity when they’re made to repeat the same design over and over again.
5. For decades, artisans have been confined to repetitive production, leading to a loss of creative agency and, over time, self-worth. In practical terms, what does it mean to restore dignity to the maker through structural change?
Radhi:
I think returning to small-scale work is very important. Celebrating imperfection is important. Appreciating handmade-ness is important. We need to value the liberty of expression that an artisan puts into a piece rather than censoring it. I also think dignity comes from slower living and slower making. The market is constantly pushing production into deadlines and seasonal cycles. But handmade work requires time.
One beautiful example came after the earthquake in Kutch when artisans were encouraged to narrate their own stories through textiles. Women who worked in patchwork and appliqué began telling stories about surviving the earthquake, about migration and displacement. A whole new narrative art form was born. That movement went from majuri to kalakari, from labour to artistry.
6. Pricing handmade objects often involves balancing multiple stakeholders with unequal exposure to risk. From your perspective, how can fairness be meaningfully structured across artisans, designers, galleries, and consumers?
Radhi:
We were always very clear that what the artisan got would be fair and whatever they asked for. Wherever possible, we’re trying to meet minimum wages that are set by MGNREGA.
How do we keep pricing as honest as possible, where the artisans get their fair share, consumers get a fair price, and then we also get a fair share?
Very often, it may be tempting to match designer-level pricing to what we have, especially in Bombay, where higher prices often create the perception of higher value. But I don’t want to inflate the profit margin to that point. Instagram has become such a leveller now. Artisans themselves have access to Instagram, so maintaining price parity becomes very important.
