One can dig for hours or days and weeks in search of that one revelation into a person’s matter and meaning. How else will you write about them; a mere list of life and work facts can sketch the skeleton, but for the spirit, you must stand by. Sometimes, it is an exercise in vain. At other times, the Ah-ha moment opens like a parachute. 

With Lavina Baldota, founder and curator of Santati, that moment ballooned on a coracle boat this June, going from the fortress village of Anegundi to Hampi on the Tungabhadra river in Karnataka. She had taken me to visit conservationist and painter Shama Pawar’s Kishkinda Trust, an NGO in Anegundi, that builds self-sustaining communities.  

Anegundi is older than the ancient town of Hampi, then the seat of the famed Vijayanagara empire. The coracle boat spun on its axis, while haltingly inching up between the bewilderingly balanced and geologically stunning boulders and rocks of the region recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. A rock-hewn temple goes by. A colourful, hand-painted scene from the Ramayana suddenly forms into sight in a bend between river and rock. An overwhelming piece of rounded granite assumes a mystical shape elsewhere, as the clouds speak in light and white. I noticed, then, in Lavina, dressed in a hand-seamed, handloom dress by Injiri, comfortable slippers, and round shaped metallic spectacles, what can be best described as “ruhaniyat”. An inwardness, a gentle awareness of what she might be doing on the coracle boat of life. 

Spirited now, the skeleton begins to fill up. A day earlier, we were on a speedy, luxury car ride from Hubli airport to Hospet, where she lives in an aesthetically designed home called ‘Chinar’, filled with art, textiles and pets. We had flown in on the same flight from Delhi. I prompted her to choose a word or phrase that best described her work. Her long and continuing associations with weavers, spinners, dyers, textile and fashion designers, architects and students, for the Santati exhibitions she has curated. 

She chooses “connector”. 

The Connector 

Not a patron of crafts nor an activist. But a community worker. Not a funder or sponsor, but an enabler. Her vocabulary is a tapestry of disparate ideas—you must interlink them yourself. “Ilkal” (the local North Karnataka weave), “Bapu” (Gandhi) and the village economy, Mapu (late textile guru Martand Singh’s sustaining, liberal approach to textiles). Trees, schools, weaving ecology, weaver dignity, sun worship, karma, meditation, introspection, trusteeship, culture…

Sutr Santati at NGMA Mumbai in 2023.

In January 2023, ‘Sutr Santati: Then, Now, Next’, the exhibition was preparing to wind up at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai where it had been on display since November 2022. The show had previously been mounted in Delhi, and after Mumbai, would show in Melbourne. There was much talk in the crafts-handloom-textiles circle at the time, on how this iteration had been considerably elevated as a view into the present moment of Indian design and cultural exchange.

Santati, which means “continuity”, is a series of exhibitions presented by the Abheraj Baldota Foundation, Lavina’s family-run trust established in 1976, in Hospet. ‘Santati: Mahatma Gandhi’ (2019) shown in Mumbai and Delhi, to mark 150 Years of the Mahatma’s birth anniversary; ‘Swar Santati’ (2020) in Delhi; ‘Khadi: A Canvas’ that travelled between 2019 and 2023, from Ahmedabad to Kumarakom as well as Hyderabad, Vadodara and New York, were followed by Sutr Santati (continuity of yarn). 

The Vast Collaborative Canvas

Sutr Santati’s first iteration in Delhi at the National Museum marked 75 Years of Independent India. There were more than 125 handwoven, hand-printed, painted, reimagined, sculpted textiles with unique renditions of fabric manipulation, many brimming with innovative, non-conformist design through the work of 200 practitioners. Poets, painters, students, fashion designers, dyers, narrators, interventionists. From the Hyderabad-based devoted master of textile experiments (and weaver welfare) Gaurang Shah to Mumbai’s celebrity architect Ashiesh Shah. From milestone gathering design interventionist of Odisha ikat Gunjan Jain, to artisans Imran Ahmed Quereshi and Shaikh Yaseen of Aurangabad who had created a cotton and silk wall panel titled “Tota Maina Ki Kahani-Himroo ki Zubani”. 

Himroo is a brocaded fabric with Persian origins, once worn—according to textiles literature—by the Deccan aristocracy. From couturier Manish Malhotra to architect and designer Rooshad Shroff, from Kutch artisan Abdul Jabbar Khatri to ilkal weaver Iravea Yadingree, from Kashmir to Kashi, the mapping and melding was incredulous. Especially as several student projects had been fused into the exhibit. 

“The series is conceived to celebrate Indian design and hand craftsmanship, representing the work of a range of Indian practitioners…” writes Baldota, in her curator’s note in the finely published catalogue edited by textile scholar and curator Mayank Mansingh Kaul. “They offer an insight into the materials, processes and aesthetic strands which inform a significant aspect of the country’s present ecology. They show the continuities…with artistic traditions of the past, and how they can be reimagined for the future.”Previous

Gaurang Shah’s ‘Khadi: A Canvas’ exhibition in association with Baldota Foundation.

‘Khadi: A Canvas’, ‘Sutr Santati: Then, Now, Next’ and ‘Mahatma Gandhi: Then, Now and Next’.Next

At ‘Sutr Santati’ in 2022, besides the much-known splendour and engineering complexity of Indian handlooms, it was the length, breadth and scale of collaborations that gave the exhibition its heft. As with other Santati exhibitions. Take for instance ‘Khadi: A Canvas’ that drew a thread between Mahatma Gandhi and artist Raja Ravi Varma. The show and the catalogue had been co-created with Gaurang Shah, who recreated Raja Ravi Varma paintings in thirty seven handspun, handwoven khadi saris in the jamdani weave. 

Now here is the back story. The yarn for the saris was procured from the Ganjam Zilla Khadi Gramodyog Sangh in Odisha. It was dyed in six hundred colours by Junaid Khatri, an Ajrakh artisan from Kutch. Under Gaurang’s direction, the saris were woven by forty women weavers in Visakhapatnam and Srikakulam districts. That’s just one example of the collaborative scale and depth that Baldota works towards.

Home, Hospet, Hampi… 

“I cannot live anywhere else,” says Lavina, as we drive through the ruins of the ancient bazaar of the then Vijayanagara empire, towards the 7th Century Virupaksha Temple in Hampi. She came to live in Hospet, the twin town, more than thirty years back, when she was married at the age of nineteen to Rahul Baldota, now the joint managing director at the Baldota Group. The young couple would move to the US for a few years, where Lavina studied fashion design as part of an arts course. Now 53, mother of three grown-up children—two daughters and a son—she explains why there has never been a day in her life without fashion, style or crafts and handlooms. Her mother Kanchan Daga had presented her a wedding trousseau with saris curated from different states of India. While Lavina speaks of ensembles by Rohit Khosla, India’s first blazing fashion designer, or Sabyasachi kurtas before they reached any store, she is also the holder of the largest personal collection of Gaurav Gupta ensembles in India. Admirer and close friend to the couturier, Lavina and Gupta are also co-disciples in their spiritual practice. 

My jaw drops when Lavina opens her textiles closet in her personal space on the first floor of the family home in Hospet. Her room is designed in shades of olive, mustard, with wallpapers, silk carpets and dark wood in whispering contact. Her wardrobe is filled with Machilipatnam chintz, Assamese textiles, Kotpad weaves, kanthas, ajrakh, ilkal, Kutchi mirrorwork… in jackets, ensembles, dresses and saris. She dresses with the same intuitive mix visible in her curatorial work for handlooms—a lime and maroon handwoven ilkal with a hand embroidered jacket from Tilla by Aratrik Dev Varman. Everything that she wears is then accessorised with one of her quirky spectacles. There is no urge to “match”, the keenness instead is to “mix”. 

As the CSR head of the Abheraj Baldota Foundation, which has been actively involved in what she calls “giving back” and “serving the community,” from planting two million trees over the decades to founding schools, working towards ecological balance, wind, energy, education and welfare of more than 30 surrounding villages in the Hospet-Hampi area, Lavina’s pursuits remain open and forever unfinished. “Impact should be for people we will never meet, those we never know,” she says. 

Baldota with Ashiesh Shah at ‘Stambh’, Bhubaneswar.

Her “connector” avatar prompted her towards Stambh in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha in 2023. Part of ‘Sustain 2023’, curated by the G20 Second Culture Working Group, the exhibition was co-presented with Ashiesh Shah atelier. It drew inspiration from the Atharva Veda, where stambh (pillar) is described as a cosmic column connecting heaven and earth. It explored the significance of pillars in Indian history and myth symbolising light, glory, victory and humanity, by invoking many crafts traditions from blue pottery to Dhokra and Channapatna in a variety of complex materials. 

The coracle inches towards the north bank of Hampi, where we must alight, dwarfed by precariously balanced gigantic boulders, metamorphosed versions of granite mountains. Stories of Hanuman, Sugriva, the king of monkeys, Sita’s rescue from Lanka and Lord Ram’s battle for good versus evil live here in stones and stories. 

I ask Lavina what it is that she holds most important. “To be understood,” she says. That will be her quest as she works towards the next exhibition on textiles of Karnataka.