From Chamba's Hills to Your Wall: The Rumal, Reimagined
In the hill town of Chamba, in Himachal Pradesh, women have for centuries embroidered small squares of cloth known as rumals — handkerchiefs stitched not for decoration alone, but to cover gifts, wrap offerings to the gods, and mark the exchange of goodwill between families at a wedding. Out of that quiet domestic tradition grew one of India's most distinctive embroidery styles: scenes from Krishna's life, from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and figures of gods and goddesses, rendered in silk thread with the fine, narrative detail of a miniature painting. House of Sissendi's new collection of framed wall tapestries takes its inspiration from this world.
A craft born of the Pahari hills
The Chamba rumal's roots run through the Pahari school of miniature painting that flourished in the Himalayan courts. Artists trained in that tradition would sketch the outline of a scene directly onto the cloth — often drawing on the frescoes of Chamba's own Rang Mahal palace — before the women of the household, including those of the royal family, embroidered it in untwisted silk thread. The technique, known as do-rukha or double satin stitch, produced a design identical on both faces of the cloth, so that the embroidery had, quite literally, no wrong side. The craft reached its height in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under the patronage of Chamba's rulers, and today carries both a Geographical Indication tag and UNESCO recognition as part of India's intangible cultural heritage.
It is this visual language — the scalloped borders, the deities placed at the centre of a composition, the small flourishes of flora and fauna worked into the edges — that informs the motifs in House of Sissendi's tapestries.
To be clear: these are not Chamba rumals. They do not claim the name, the format, or the precise lineage of that craft. What they carry forward is the visual world the rumal made famous — its gods, its compositions, its sense of a story held still in thread — translated onto a new surface, for a new use.
Where zardozi and dabka enter the frame
House of Sissendi's tapestries begin with motifs sketched and embroidered onto raw silk, in keeping with the spirit of the original rumal. But the embroidery does not stop where a traditional rumal would. Once the base figure is in place, artisans further adorn it with zardozi and dabka — metallic thread and coiled wire work, built up by hand with a fine hook, to add raised texture, gilded detail, and the kind of dimensional shine that pure silk thread cannot produce on its own.
Madhav, seated on a lotus, rendered in silhouette and encircled by a floral border worked in zardozi and resham.
To be clear: these are not Chamba rumals. They do not claim the name, the format, or the precise lineage of that craft. What they carry forward is the visual world the rumal made famous — its gods, its compositions, its sense of a story held still in thread — translated onto a new surface, for a new use.
This is a deliberate layering of two embroidery traditions — the narrative, pictorial silk work associated with the hills of Chamba, and the metal embroidery long practiced in the workshops of north India — onto a single piece. The intent is not to imitate the past exactly, but to build on it: to take a motif rooted in centuries of devotional storytelling and give it a degree of grandeur and shine suited to how it will now be used, as a framed object for a contemporary wall rather than a folded cloth for a dowry chest.
Framed for the present
Each finished tapestry is set into a brass finish frame, available in four oval variations and one rectangular format. The frame is treated as part of the composition rather than an afterthought — a beaded inner edge, a polished outer rim, and in one variety, an ornate carved crest — designed to hold the embroidery the way a locket holds a portrait, something made to be looked at closely and kept on display.
The result is a collection that asks to be read on two levels at once: as a contemporary object for a modern home, and as a piece that carries, however many removes away, the artistic memory of the women of Chamba who first picked up a needle and began telling a story in silk.