Banjara Kasuti

To preserve and revive Lambani (Banjara) Kasuti embroidery and to empower the Lambani women who practise it through sustainable, dignified livelihoods.

Banjara Kasuti is a not-for-profit craft social enterprise based in Vijayapura, North Karnataka, founded in 2017 by Asha Patil and Seema Kishore. It works to preserve and revive Lambani (Banjara) Kasuti embroidery, the intricate mirror-work and thread embroidery of the Lambani tribal community, by employing rural Lambani women and adapting their traditional handwork into contemporary apparel, accessories and home decor. The organisation sources organic handloom cotton from North Karnataka weavers and channels the income back into the artisan community.

Banjara Kasuti grew out of a specific worry. Asha Patil, born in Vijayapura, home to a large Lambani community, noticed that the women of the community were abandoning their vivid traditional attire and hand-embroidery in favour of cheaper synthetic alternatives, and that a distinctive craft was quietly disappearing. In 2017 she and the fashion entrepreneur Seema Kishore founded Banjara Kasuti to ensure that Lambani embroidery would not go out of style.

The Lambani, also known as the Banjara or Lambadi, are a traditionally nomadic community with origins in the Rajputana and Mewar regions of present-day Rajasthan, who over centuries settled across Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. In the Vijayapura region of Karnataka their women are renowned for a hand-embroidery tradition that uses a minimum of fourteen types of stitch, a vivid colour palette and a lavish incorporation of mirrors and shells, worked in the settlements known as tandas.

Banjara Kasuti trains rural Lambani women to adapt this traditional handwork to new-age garments, and those women in turn pass the knowledge on to newer members, keeping the transmission of the craft alive. The organisation sources organic handloom cotton from weavers across North Karnataka, keeping the whole product hand-made both to preserve the heritage and to counter the environmental cost of mass production. It began with sixty-nine women across four villages and has grown to support well over a hundred artisans, many of whom now earn a stable monthly income that supports their families. Through the Covid-19 pandemic the organisation continued to pay its artisans without cuts.

Its reach has widened through partnerships. Banjara Kasuti has worked with Amazon India's Karigar programme to bring Lambani products to a global market, with the designer Preeti Jhawar to commission Lambani embroidery for womenswear, and has taken part in textile exhibitions organised by the craft non-profit Dastkar. What began as an effort to save a vanishing tribal craft has become a small but genuine movement linking heritage, sustainable livelihoods and contemporary fashion.