Chanakya marks 40 years with three Mumbai exhibitions on craft and the city

At the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Byculla, seven layers of thread-drawn maps trace Mumbai from its former seven islands to its reclaimed shoreline, cotton mills and Art Deco seafront.

The installation, part of *En Route*, is one of three Mumbai exhibitions marking 40 years of Chanakya International and a decade of the Chanakya Foundation and School of Craft. *En Route* runs from September 8 to October 20; *Garden of Gestures* is on view at the Chanakya ateliers until September 30; and *Belong* opens at Experimenter, Colaba, from September 10 to October 17.

Creative director Karishma Swali and the Chanakya Collective developed *En Route* from encounters with accounts of six 19th-century women travellers in Rome’s Vatican Apostolic Library. Works first made for the Vatican in 2025 are being shown in India for the first time.

For the Mumbai installation, cotton is both medium and local history. “We worked on it in cotton because of the cotton mills,” Swali said. Founded in Mumbai in 1986, Chanakya now works with more than 50 international fashion houses while running craft, research and artistic programmes from its Byculla-based practice.