How textile trails across India hold potential to boost tourism if done right

The growing popularity of textile tourism in the country can only be sustained if it goes beyond merely displaying the handiwork of these indigenous cultures

Last week, Shilpa Sharma, founder of the bespoke travel agency Breakway, received an email from a “20-something girl from the UK”. “‘My mother is an event florist,’ she wrote,” recounts Sharma, “‘and I see a huge amount of flowers being wasted on a daily basis. I want to come to India and see what I can do around floral waste, and if I can put it to good use perhaps in printing textiles; maybe launch my own line at home. Who can I meet?’”

To Sharma, whose Gurgaon-based company specialises in textile and craft tourism, this was not “a classic travel brief, but a consulting mandate.” Sharma replied, asking for her wish list of places to visit and the number of days she was willing to put aside for a more extensive trip across India. Based on this, Sharma built an itinerary: A few days of sightseeing in Jaipur and Pondicherry, along with visits and meetings with studios dedicated to handloom weavers and Siddi quilts, textile museums, artists who work with waste, artists who fossilise seashells and, naturally, flowers. “This is the beginning of the conversation,” she says.  

A gradual, meaningful engagement

Sharma is a pioneer in the niche yet growing space of textile tourism—a type of highly-curated travel built around showcasing India’s diverse and colossal textile and craft industries. Like food, architecture, and art, textile’s place in the heritage of a region is now being increasingly acknowledged. And a few experienced, knowledgeable individuals are building trails deep into the Indian hinterland to present a tapestry with little parallel anywhere in the world. 

“Craft and textile tourism is only about 30 per cent of our work,” says Sharma. “In terms of absolute numbers, we must be running about 25 to 30 trips a year, between October and March. But 10 years ago, when we started, that number was maybe 5-7 trips annually.” Breakaway’s textile itineraries–10-day tours to half-day trails– cover the length and breadth of the country, from Srinagar to Pondicherry.

Back in 2010, she recalls, there were perhaps a handful of expatriates, mostly women, who led international clients on these trails. It was, for her, an idea based in her engagement with the textile sector, which began in the late 1990s, when she was working with FabIndia.

As part of her job, she travelled and met with artisans across the length and breadth of the country, and realised that there was a need to create the knowledge, conversation, and appreciation for handmade, handcrafted goods—something that existed abroad, but was next to non-existent here. 

In 2010, she began to “work for herself,” consulting with retail brands, and eventually co-founding Jaypore.com, while also continuing to travel and engage deeper with local artisan communities, especially women. “It’s known in the craft sector that you pay per-day charges for weaving a saree on the loom, but all the pre-loom work is largely done by women,” she says. “Most craftspersons are not acknowledged for their work.”

Customisation is key

“Breakaway is really an outcome of my love for travel, and within that, a desire to do something that no one else was doing,” she says. “It’s the result of long-standing interest and the professional relationships I built that have now become personal friendships, all of which has translated into deep experiences.” Those experiences are curated and customised according to the type of traveller—Sharma sorts them as general enthusiast, deep immersive experience-seeker, or academic / professional—and could include anything from a little shopping spree to a woodblock printing workshop to a private tour of a museum or factory by a leading expert. “What’s important is authenticity, uniqueness, and exceptional delivery and experience,” Sharma observes. 

“A textile trail cannot just be moving from one textile interaction to another,” she says. If, for instance, you’re fascinated by the geometric patterns of Ajrakh, you could visit the Calico Museum in Ahmedabad with a professor, while also taking a trip to Patan for a whole other kind of textile, and stopping to see the Sun Temple and the wild ass at Little Rann on the way.

If you’re in Madhya Pradesh, you might want to pick up some iconic red-white-black print Maheshwari sarees—and if you’re doing that, you might as well stay at the Ahilya Fort for a couple of days, meet the women weavers of Rehwa Society, and also take a trip to Mandu to witness some glorious pre-Mughal temple architecture. 

“I haven’t been to Bihar and Samastipur, so I wouldn’t pretend I have that knowledge,” says Sharma. “Odisha is difficult because the infrastructure is skeletal—these are, of course, people who are used to their creature comforts. And Maharashtra is fragmented because there aren’t too many textiles here. But other than that, we have experiences across the country; we don’t believe in the cookie-cutter approach to itineraries.” 

Going the extra mile

Want to know where Pashmina—that rare fibre used to make those very expensive shawls—comes from? Shoba George, founder of the Pune-based luxury travel company Extra Mile, will take you on the journey of a lifetime in Ladakh. “I used to organise tailor-made luxury tours to Ladakh, but I was beginning to get bored with the itinerary there—it was always the same three places,” says George. “During the Coronavirus pandemic, I began to research Tso Kar and Tso Moriri, two lakes besides Pangong Lake. I was told this was where the nomadic community that raised Pashmina goats lived. I found that fascinating.” 

In February 2021, after stopping by the tourism conclave in Ladakh, George decided to make the trip to Chantang to visit the nomads. “Chantang is actually an extension of the Tibetan plateau. And that is the region of the nomads,” she explains. “For centuries, these nomads have lived an extremely difficult life. They migrate about 11 times a year. When I visited, it was freezing—the temperature was minus 20 degrees Celsius. And they thought winter was almost over,” she laughs, “because it’s at minus 40 degrees that the Pashmina goat grows an inner fibre, which is what they comb out during the summer. And that is what Pash is once it is cleaned out.”      

That visit formed the crux of George’s wildly popular Pashmina trail, which has been running fully booked, twice a year, ever since she began in 2021. She shepherds a group of curious travellers to see the unseen Ladakh—to meet the nomadic community and their flock, the women weavers who are learning to spin this delicate yarn by hand, the entrepreneurs who want to reclaim the Pashmina economy, the local designers (Jigmat Couture) who are making an emblem out of it.

In George’s story, Pashmina is also a route to exploring the history, food, architecture, and monasteries of the region. And then there is the “doing”. With the artisans of the label Lena Ladakh, they experience the process of dyeing and weaving the three fibres of Ladakh: yak wool, sheep wool and Pashmina wool. “ We just sit in a poplar orchard for three hours, sometimes more, with a view of the mustard fields and the open sky above us, and everyone is just weaving. It’s one of the most mindful experiences,” says George. 

Understanding commercial viability 

While Sharma and George are “curators” of such experiences, a platform like Gurgaon-based Alphonso Stories acts as an aggregator. “We launched in 2021 after several years in the travel industry,” says its founder Priyanka Chabblani. “Because we realised that one size does not fit all anymore.” 

“We knew people who were interested in photography, others in arts and crafts, still others in social impact, and textile,” Chabblani continues. “We wanted to build a navigation-friendly site, where you can have experiences that fit into categories like these. We wanted to bring forth a platform that highlights curators who put these experiences together.”  

At present, Alphonso Stories’ platform offers day-long trips in textile, largely curated by Breakaway—a “Varanasi artisans and weavers walk” and “one-day textile trail in Kanchipuram” sit next to a “baithak in the hills” in Darjeeling, a “farm tour” in Jodhpur, and “bonding with horses” in Shekhawati. Block printing workshops in Jaipur are a huge hit, says Chhablani, as are walks in Srinagar to explore Kashida embroidery and saree-weaving in Kanchipuram.

“We are not competing with TripAdvisor or Viator,” Chabblani points out. “There, you’ll find thousands of these experiences and you don’t really know what’s more authentic.” Meanwhile, for Sharma and George, there’s an added factor: the possibility of building market linkages between the craftspeople and buyers, designers, stockists and, finally, the end consumer. 

While Sharma’s customers have largely been from the UK, the US and Europe, she can see things changing. It was after her trip to Kutch with Breakaway, says Sharma, Srila Chatterjee of Baro Market put together her first design exhibit at 47-A, a gallery in Mumbai. George, meanwhile, says she has had mostly Indians—perhaps aged 40 and above, of a certain class—visit Ladakh with her. Last season also saw more travellers from the fashion fraternity: “Deepshikha Khanna from Good Earth, Rajiv Purohit from Nicobar, Hema Shroff Patel from Amba Twenty-one Threads,” George rattles off the names. 

On a more institutional level, last year, the Ministry of Textiles announced a plan to create eight “craft villages” to link textile with tourism. Raghurajpur in Odisha to Vadaj in Gujarat, Anegudi in Karnataka to Taj Ganj in Uttar Pradesh—these islands are meant to “develop handicrafts as a sustainable and remunerative livelihood option for artisans in the clusters.” 

“The government spends lots of money on their approach to tourism, but there’s very little to show,” says Sharma. “Only Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Kerala have been able to crack it, and that too not in textile.” George, equally pessimistic, wonders if they could truly be effective. “It can come across as very contrived,” she says. “Look at the Rann Festival. It's a village-like setup, where you “get” craftsmen to come and sit and play. That is like creating a movie scene. But I think these are people you want to respect, you know—you don't want to just display them.” Likewise, she issues a word of advice to her clients on the Pashmina trail as well: To be careful with their cameras. “This is not a Nat Geo photo-op.” 

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