At the India International Centre in Delhi, a new exhibition is asking visitors to look at phulkari differently — quite literally from the other side. The first work in textile designer and revivalist Sunaina Suneja's Phulkari: A Lingering Presence is displayed in reverse, exposing the stitches and loose threads that are usually hidden from view. It is a deliberate choice, and one that sets the tone for an exhibition that treats embroidery not as ornament alone, but as a record of labour, memory and identity.
"There is a reason for it," Suneja says. "Traditionally, phulkari was worked on like this. All the emotions were being poured on this side."
That idea — that the reverse side carries the emotional truth of the work — runs through the exhibition, which brings together vintage textiles from Suneja's collection with contemporary pieces and traces her long engagement with the craft. The show is not simply a display of beautiful cloth. It is also a study in how a tradition survives, changes and is rediscovered through close looking.
Suneja's relationship with phulkari began in 2008, when she started a project in villages around Nabha aimed at generating income for women. She entered the work assuming that the women already knew how to embroider. Instead, she found that much of what was being made relied on traced or printed designs rather than the older method of counting threads directly on the fabric. That discovery changed the direction of the project and, in many ways, her own understanding of the craft.
It took two and a half years to get the project off the ground. Thread-counting, she learned, was not a matter of following a pattern. The embroiderer had to develop an eye for the weave, knowing instinctively where the needle should enter and how many threads to pick up. The skill was as much about seeing as it was about stitching.
An elderly woman who wandered into one of the early training sessions offered an unexpected breakthrough. She said she had embroidered in her youth and demonstrated a few stitches from the reverse side. That moment became a clue to a technique that had been slipping from living memory. Later, during a project in Tarn Taran in Punjab, Suneja found herself learning the craft all over again, this time while also trying to teach it. "My mind was also working. What are the words i was going to use? How was I going to deliver that training?" she recalls.
The exhibition reflects that process of learning through looking. Suneja's vintage pieces became study material. She examined borders, central panels and individual motifs, comparing them across textiles in search of what she calls the pehchaan, or identity motif, of phulkari — the visual vocabulary that allows one to recognise the craft beyond a generic floral embroidery. In the absence of documentation, she says, the work becomes an exercise in close observation and research. "When there is no documentation, you have got an open canvas," she adds.
That open canvas has allowed her to question the idea that phulkari has a single fixed appearance. Chand bagh, pachranga, darshan dwāra and sona chandni all reveal different arrangements of colour, geometry and motif. "Phulkari could have been any flower," Suneja says. "On this one, you see flowers. On another one, you see geometry."
One sainchi in her collection led her to a book featuring a strikingly similar piece, with the central panel, figures, placement and even animals corresponding closely. For Suneja, that suggested not a one-off design but a repertoire of forms that could be repeated and adapted across time and place. An unfinished piece in the exhibition is equally revealing, showing where the embroiderer began, how far she worked before moving on to the filling and then stopped. It becomes evidence of process, not just product.
Elsewhere, Suneja had women test how the thread sat on the fabric, interested in what she calls the "symbiotic relationship between the thread and the fabric." That relationship, and the knowledge embedded in it, is central to the exhibition's argument: that phulkari is not only a decorative tradition, but a living archive of women's work, skill and social history.
The textiles also carry stories of marriage and departure. One vari da bagh on loan was given to a friend's grandmother when she married at 13, a reminder that these cloths often travelled with women through major life transitions, carrying both personal and communal meaning. In that sense, the exhibition does more than preserve old textiles. It restores attention to the people who made them, used them and passed them on.
By foregrounding the reverse side, the unfinished edges and the variations in motif, Phulkari: A Lingering Presence invites viewers to move beyond the polished surface of heritage and into the texture of its making. In Suneja's hands, phulkari emerges not as a static emblem of tradition but as a craft shaped by memory, adaptation and the quiet persistence of women's hands.