2 Design Students Spent 4 Years Mapping a Punjabi Weave That India Lost in 1947

In July 2018, textile design students Arjunvir Singh and Rashi Sharma wanted to spend their college fieldwork documenting Suzani embroidery in Kashmir. Their faculty at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, rejected the proposal.  The brief required a craft from their home states, so the two settled on Khes, a Punjabi textile they considered too ordinary to count as a craft worth studying. That reluctant choice became the most significant work of their academic lives. A textile too common to be noticed Khes is a handwoven cotton fabric from undivided Punjab, used as a bedcover,...