About us
Two people who like slow things, and the walls that come from them.
Chinmay is from Udaipur, in Rajasthan. Ruchi is from Bihar, in Mithila. Indyra is what happened when those two places ended up in the same flat in London.
It began at home
We are slow people. Slow mornings, long walks, meals that take far longer than they need to. Nothing we enjoy is quick.
It took us a while to notice that the things we kept putting on our walls were made the same way. By hand. By someone who was not in a hurry either.
Living between two countries does something to how you see a room. We kept wondering why the craft we had both grown up around almost never turned up in a contemporary interior — and when it did, why it had to announce itself as Indian rather than simply being good.
With a wrong turn in Udaipur.
We were doing the touristy thing. Wandering a market in the old city with no particular plan, on an afternoon that belonged to nobody.
A panel of glass inlay stopped Ruchi. Hand-cut mirror set into a worked ground, throwing the afternoon back at us in pieces. She asked the shopkeeper where it had come from. He gestured somewhere down the road and named a workshop.
Down the road, in that part of Udaipur, means lanes that fold into each other and give you no help at all. We got lost. We stopped for a cutting chai. We kept going, mostly because turning back felt like the wrong end to the afternoon.
The workshop was worth the detour. We left with one piece and carried it home to England in a suitcase.
That could easily have been the end of it. One good souvenir, a nice story for a dinner party.
It became the dinner party. Friends came over and the conversation kept circling back to the thing on our wall. What is it. Who made it. How is that even done. We could answer almost none of it.
So we went and found out.
Ruchi grew up where Madhubani comes from. Chinmay grew up where thikri was developed. Two of our crafts come from the two places we come from. We only noticed later.
We went looking past the finished object
A piece on a shop wall tells you almost nothing. Not who made it, not how long it took, not whether the person who made it will still be doing this in ten years.
So we travelled. Workshops, villages, a great many conversations with people who had far more patience than we deserved.
What we found was how much extraordinary work never leaves the region it is made in. Not because it is not good enough, but because nobody has ever carried it any further.
The workshop changed how we saw it
Watching Zardozi worked is quieter than you expect. Gold thread pulled through velvet, one pass at a time, for days.
You stop seeing a decorative object and start seeing accumulated knowledge — a way of holding a needle that took someone's mother thirty years to work out, handed over without ceremony.
That is the thing worth paying for. Not the pattern. The hours and the lineage behind it.
We did not want to just buy things
It would have been easier to place orders and have boxes arrive. Plenty of people do exactly that.
We wanted to be closer than that — to understand what a technique can and cannot do, which materials misbehave at scale, where an artisan will push back and be right to.
Everything we sell now comes out of that back-and-forth. We buy directly from the workshops. Nobody resells between the maker and you.
The translation is the hard part
A technique developed for a palace ceiling does not simply drop onto a wall in a flat in Hackney. Proportion changes. Palette changes. Density that reads as rich in one room reads as busy in another.
Ruchi works through that piece by piece — what to open up, what to tighten, which ground, which frame.
The line we are walking is narrow. Change too little and it looks like something borrowed from somewhere else. Change too much and the craft stops being itself.
Every piece has to earn its place
Handmade means variation, and variation is the point. It does not mean anything goes.
So each piece gets looked at properly. Execution, finish, how the frame sits, whether the mirror catches light the way it should from across a room rather than from six inches away.
Some do not make it. That is a cost we would rather carry than pass on.
It is not finished until it reaches you
Glass, mirror and raised relief all travel badly if you are careless about it. So packing is not an afterthought here — it is the last part of making.
Framing, protection, the box itself. Opening an Indyra piece should feel like the same standard as the thing inside it.
We pack most of it ourselves. It takes longer. It is worth it.
Craft belongs in the conversation
These traditions usually get filed under heritage. Something to preserve, admire, put behind glass in a museum and feel slightly guilty about.
We think that is the wrong shelf. Thikri, Lippan and Zardozi are not relics. They are material techniques that do things paint and print cannot, and they belong in the same conversation as contemporary art and interiors — judged on what they do in a room, not on where they came from.
From India. Not limited by it.
What we are building is a contemporary wall-art house that happens to draw on Indian making — not an Indian gift shop that happens to sell art.
The difference matters. One asks you to buy something because of where it came from. The other asks you to buy it because it is the best thing for that wall, and tells you where it came from because the story is worth having.
We would like these traditions to have a permanent place in homes in Britain and beyond. Not as a nod to somewhere else. Just as good work.
Five crafts, five places, all still worked by hand.
Madhubani
Fine linework painting in natural pigment, used for generations to record folklore, nature and ceremony. Ruchi's part of the country.
Lippan
Raised mud-and-mirror relief, traditionally worked by women onto the interior walls of village homes.
Mother of Pearl
Hand-cut shell inlay, luminous and tonal.
Glass Inlay
Thikri work. Cut mirror and coloured glass set so light travels across a surface. Chinmay's.
Zardozi
Gold and silver thread stitched onto velvet, raised and dimensional.
The hardest thing about being a village artisan is not the work. It is the distance between the work and anyone willing to pay properly for it.
A panel that takes three weeks to make sells locally for what three weeks of labour is worth locally. The same panel on a wall in London or Dubai is worth considerably more, and almost none of that difference currently finds its way back.
We are a small business and we are not going to fix that. But we have something a workshop in Kutch does not: access to markets that will pay what this work is worth.
Beyond the five crafts we sell today, there is a great deal made in Indian villages that has never been offered to anyone outside them. Finding a way to carry that work further, honestly and at a fair price, is what we actually want to be doing in ten years.
We are at the beginning of that, not the end of it. But it is why the business exists.
Beyond the home
We also work with hotels, restaurants, interior designers and retailers — producing to repeat specification and at the volumes a property or a shop needs, which is something handmade work rarely allows.
Hotels · Restaurants · Interior designers · Trade · Wholesale
Ask us anything about the work, or where it comes from.
Indyra is operated by Progro Digital Ltd, registered in London.
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