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Aangan

@houseof.aangan

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I talk about craft and the people behind it, memory, culture, and the questions that keep coming back to me.
NIFT New Delhi’26🎓
I’m @nishthaa.ah 🧚

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Apparently, if women care about it, it can’t be that serious.

I’ve often wondered why fashion is so easily dismissed as frivolous, even when the knowledge behind it is anything but.
Maybe we’re so accustomed to seeing the finished garment that we forget to question everything it takes to bring it into existence. Or perhaps we’ve learnt to take certain kinds of knowledge less seriously because of the things they’re associated with.
I studied Fashion Technology, and I think that changed the way I look at clothes. More importantly, it changed the questions I ask about them.

This is one of the perspectives I hope to bring to Aangan: looking beyond the obvious, questioning what we take for granted, and making room for conversations that deserve more attention.

Because who gets to decide what counts as serious knowledge, anyway?

— Nishtha
#fashiontechnology
#fashionstudents
#textilescience
#nift by @houseof.aangan

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6 days ago

What if your zodiac sign had a textile?🪷
Not a lucky colour. Not a horoscope. Not a personality test disguised as a saree recommendation.☀️
We went looking through Indian textile traditions and started asking a slightly more interesting question: if personality had a material language, what might it look like?
Some pairings came from technique. Some from history. Some from temperament. Some from the sheer pleasure of a textile that felt unmistakably that sign.
Aries found Patola. Taurus found Banarasi. Gemini found Bandhani. Cancer found Chamba Rumal. Leo found Paithani. And the rest are waiting.

12 signs. 12 textiles. One very subjective investigation.

Which one do you think your sign would choose?🧚👀 by @houseof.aangan

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8 days ago

Lal / लाल

रंगनामा / Rangnama
An account of colour.

Not a catalogue of colours, but an attempt to look at them differently through material, memory, place and feeling.

We begin with लाल.
A colour, and everything it carries.

Red has never belonged to just one thing.

It can begin as a root, emerge through resin, bloom from a flower, settle into cloth, mark a ritual, or become a language of desire.

Different materials. Different histories. Different meanings.

Some reds begin underground.

Madder : Rubia cordifolia, known in India as manjistha, is a natural dye plant whose roots have long been used to produce red on textiles.

The colour is not visible when the root is pulled from the earth. It emerges through extraction, preparation and dyeing.

A root becomes pigment.
Pigment becomes cloth.

Somewhere beneath the red is where it began.

Some reds are made from what a tree gives us.

Lac is a natural resin produced by the lac insect, harvested from trees and worked into objects ranging from bangles to jewellery. In traditional bangle-making, the resin is heated, coloured and shaped by hand, building colour into the material itself.

Across India, different regions developed their own lac traditions , from the Manihar craft of Rajasthan to lac-bangle traditions in Bihar and Jharkhand.

A red that begins not as a pigment, but as a material.

Some reds begin in a flower.

Safflower — Carthamus tinctorius — has been used as a source of natural colour for centuries. Its petals contain carthamin, the red colourant that can be extracted and used to dye textiles.

The flower carries both yellow and red colourants, and the red emerges through a careful process of extraction.

A fragile thing becomes colour.

A flower, remembered in cloth.

There are colours we see.
And colours we inherit.

Across different Indian communities and traditions, red has gathered associations with marriage, ritual, auspiciousness, celebration and adornment.

In sindoor, chooda, bridal textiles and ceremonial objects, red becomes more than pigment or material. It becomes part of how certain moments are marked and remembered.

These meanings are neither singular nor universal. They have cha by @houseof.aangan

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9 days ago

Some histories are written in books. Some are printed in the pages of a local magazine.

This one began with my grandfather, Naresh Chandra Sathi.

In 1964, he received a quotation to set up a printing press. It was two decades later, in 1984, that he began publishing the magazine, manually printed, one issue at a time.

After his passing in 1990, the publication went quiet for a while.
In 1996, Papa brought it back as a weekly. It ran for several years and was inaugurated by the then Chief Minister, Virbhadra Singh.
He revived it again in 2017, and in 2023, it moved into a new chapter, becoming a digital news portal.
But somewhere along the way, it became more than a publication. It became something that brought our family together, generation after generation.

What started as a printing press has travelled through three generations, from printed pages to a screen.
And these old issues? They aren’t just family archives.
They’re little pieces of our town’s history, and a little piece of ours, too.🩷 by @houseof.aangan

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11 days ago

What if three of Assam’s silks began with a story of three children?
An Assamese folktale about Eri, Paat and Muga, and a rather extraordinary tale of transformation. Aangan me baat chit ep-3. Source: Census of India, 1961, Selected Handicrafts of Assam, Part VI-A, Vol. III, p. 24.
#Aangan #AssamSilk #TextileFolklore #IndianTextiles by @houseof.aangan

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12 days ago

A woman’s wardrobe has never been just about what she wears.

Across centuries and cultures, clothing has carried ideas of modesty, caste, respectability, identity and power. From restrictions on what women could cover in nineteenth-century Travancore to state-imposed dress codes in Iran and a village panchayat’s restrictions in Haryana, the question of who gets to decide what a woman wears has taken many forms.
The garments have changed. The rules have changed. But the scrutiny has endured.
This is a history of clothing, but also a history of the people who have tried to control it—and those who have challenged them.
So, who gets to decide? by @houseof.aangan

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15 days ago

a fairly accurate representation of what’s going on in my head at all times.It usually starts with “wait, why is that like that?” and somehow ends with 14 tabs open.
This is what I talk about here.
Just because this is my page and I get to decide what goes on here.
xoxo, Aangan😋 by @houseof.aangan

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16 days ago

AANGAN CASE FILE 02: CHINTZ.

Chintz was never just a pretty printed cotton.
For centuries, Indian textile makers were producing fabrics for markets across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, adapting colours, patterns and designs to local tastes. European buyers especially prized Indian chintz for its vivid colours, intricate designs and practicality.
By the 1750s, Indian textiles accounted for 60% of the total value of East India Company sales in London. Their popularity became such a threat to European textile industries that Britain and France introduced restrictions on Indian cottons while European manufacturers began producing their own imitations.

Then the balance shifted.
Industrialisation allowed British manufacturers to produce textiles at increasing scale. From the 1780s, Britain exported machine-made yarn and cloth to India, while tariffs and trade policies favoured British goods and hampered Indian textile production. Lancashire mill cloth increasingly displaced Indian production, contributing to severe hardship among Indian spinners and weavers.
By the 1890s, cloth had become political. Swadeshi called for the boycott of foreign goods and the purchase of Indian products; Gandhi later made spinning, weaving and wearing Khadi part of the struggle for self-rule.
So this case isn’t simply about a textile Europe loved.
It’s about how demand became competition, competition became industrialisation, and industrialisation became a question of power.

Aangan Case File 02.

Sources: The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Victoria and Albert Museum. #foryoupage #likecommentshare by @houseof.aangan

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17 days ago

I grew up seeing Kullu patterns everywhere, so naturally I thought I knew what a Kullu shawl was.

Turns out… not really.
The story goes much further back than the colourful shawls we recognise today — from patti, to Kinnauri influences, to Bushehar weavers arriving in Kullu in the 1940s, and the development of the patterned shawl we know today.

And yes, those patterns have names too.

Kanghi. Kanchi Tara. Dhoop Chaon. Patta Bel.
Basically, I went looking for the story behind a shawl and found out there was considerably more story than I expected. by @houseof.aangan

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18 days ago

Maybe this is the conversation I wish we had growing up.
We’re often told that wearing Indian clothes, knowing our traditions, and “carrying our culture forward” are responsibilities.

But what if connection works differently when it’s chosen?

I can wear jeans and still know where I come from.
I can wear a saree because I genuinely want to.
I can question a tradition and still respect it.
I can discover my culture at 22, instead of being expected to have it all figured out at 12.
I can choose what I wear and respect where I came from at the same time.
Maybe that choice is what makes the connection mine.
Aangan Baat-Chit. Episode 2.🪷#IndianCulture #IndianFashion #IndianTextiles #culturalidentity by @houseof.aangan

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19 days ago

I didn’t initially think of this as an India Does Design post.
I was just thinking about the idea of design, and somewhere along the way, I started noticing how many things around me were being reused, repurposed, repaired and given another life.
We don’t necessarily think of these things as sustainability. They’re often just practical decisions: use what you have, make it last, find another use for it.
But today, these same ideas sit at the centre of conversations around reuse, repair, repurposing, waste reduction and circularity.
And I think that’s worth noticing.
Not because everything traditionally done in Indian households was automatically sustainable, it wasn’t. But because many of these everyday practices show that resourcefulness and making things last have long been part of how people live.

Maybe the vocabulary around sustainability is newer than the habits themselves.

India Does Design.
What else have we been doing without giving it a name? by @houseof.aangan

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21 days ago

We spend so much time looking for good design that we forget to look around.

India Does Design is a new Aangan series about the everyday objects, systems and ideas that have quietly shaped the way we live often without ever being called “design.”

Sometimes, the most interesting design stories begin at home. by @houseof.aangan

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22 days ago