Inside the archives of India's most fascinating textile collectors

AJAY BHOJ, NEW DELHI 

A third generation antique dealer, Ajay Bhoj’s family migrated from Surendranagar, Gujarat, to New Delhi in the early 1960s, where his grandparents began selling gold and silver curios at Janpath. Over time, the family shifted organically into textiles, sourcing rare pieces for private collectors, industrialists, and foreign diplomats in the capital. Bhoj himself left school early; at 16, he earned his first real profit after spotting an exceptional Nari Kunjar Patola in the chaos of Ahmedabad’s Manek Chowk. Identifying it in a single glance proved what the elders in his family already knew: Bhoj had inherited the instincts of the trade.

With no formal training in textiles, Bhoj schooled himself the old fashioned way—by reading obsessively. He devoured Rosemary Crill on chintz, BN Goswami on pichwais, and every fragment of textile scholarship he could find. Today, his studio in West Delhi reflects that self taught education: the ground floor is an archive of cloth, and he lives just above it. Students from design schools drop in for hands-on lessons while emerging and established designers mine his collection for inspiration—often walking away with a one of a kind textile. Some of those pieces have already had their celebrity moment: think Alia Bhatt in a hot pink, 160 year old Ashavali sari.

Asked how he assesses rarity today, Bhoj offers two telling criteria. “Older textiles are beautiful, but they don’t always have the refinement of contemporary design—that lack of polish becomes a clue, a kind of charm you only see in truly old pieces,” he explains. Age also reveals itself through dyes: “Deep natural indigos or carbon free black dyes last far longer. If those colours remain intact, you know the textile has survived decades, even a century.”

Yet even with deep knowledge, the trade has its moments of irony. Bhoj recalls one episode that still stings. “Years ago, I bought an exquisite Shikargah lehenga from a vendor in Agra. It was museum‑worthy,” he says. “On impulse, I sent a photo to a long‑standing client—an eminent gallerist. He immediately asked me to ship it over and didn’t blink at the high price I quoted.” Only later did Bhoj realise what he had let go: a four‑metre panel from the legendary 73‑metre lehenga of Maharani Deergh Kaur of Nabha. A multi‑generational heirloom, the original masterpiece comprised 480 kalis, first woven for her great‑grandmother, the Princess of Faridkot, and passed down through the women of the family for bridal use. The weaving—depicting a royal Mughal hunt—was not merely decorative; it captured fauna and scenes that included species now considered endangered in India. Textiles of this calibre often required three men working a single drawloom to produce barely a centimetre per day, much like pieces from the famed Pra‑Kashi collection in the National Museum.

Through the course of collecting craft pieces, Bhoj has naturally drifted into revival work. At the Sutr Santati exhibition curated by Lavina Baldota in 2023, he stood alongside master artisans, recreating a Ramavali shawl inspired by the classic Namavali tradition of Murshidabad—ritual cloths inscribed with sacred text.

But who will become the future custodians of these rare textiles? While Bhoj’s clientele has traditionally been collectors in their forties to sixties, he has noticed a growing curiosity among younger buyers. “People use these textiles to honour their roots,” he says. “Punjabis look for Phulkaris, Maharashtrians frame fragments of old Paithanis. They want their homes to feel like small museums.” He credits the shift, in part, to Sabyasachi’s Kolkata flagship, where vintage textiles became a visual language of luxury—and aspiration. The younger generation, he observes, treats textiles as cultural signalling: patching antique borders onto skirts, upcycling old chogas into occasionwear, and wearing century old fragments as a way of showing sartorial depth.

SALIM WAZIR, BHUJ

A second-generation textile collector, Salim Wazir’s late father, AA Wazir, left his job as a miniature painting re-storer at The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya to return to his hometown, Bhuj. He began collecting textile in 1971; four-and-a-half decades later, that lifelong pursuit lives on in his quiet, gem-like store, Museum Quality Textiles. Amid piles of embroidered textiles and treasures tucked into wooden almirahs, visitors sit on old kantha and patchwork quilts while Wazir passionately unfurls his prized pieces, each accompanied by an impromptu history lesson.

Shadowing his father for years, he now looks back at the first ever textile he discovered that instantly drew him in. “A Sindhi Memon dress approximately 90-years-old, it was a tunic with an embroidered yoke worn by the bride on her wedding day. The embroidery, often done by the bride’s mother or grandmother, is created using floss silk in a pakko style (strong and dense). This one was discovered in north-east Kutch and I was mesmerised by the intricacy of it,” he recalls.

The Sindhi Memon community, primarily traders who migrated from Sindh, brought their textile traditions to Gujarat, where Kutch eventually became the centre of these travelling legacies. Among the 3,000 textiles that lie in his current repository, some reserve a special space, backed by their fascinating stories. Wazir has a soft spot for under-the-radar textiles of Saurashtra located on the Kathiawar Peninsula of Gujarat. “We’ve collected several baby quilts from this region,” he says. “They were made by the Charan Gadhvi community after a wealthier caste prohibited them from using imported fabrics in their work. One woman refused to accept that rule. She began salvaging discarded Manchester roller prints, English chintz, and other foreign scraps from rubbish heaps and tailoring floors, piecing them into quilts.” What emerged was an act of defiance and a distinctive textile language—a patchwork where East meets West, stitched lovingly into baby quilts that combine colonial era prints with local composition, symmetry, and colour play.
 

It’s fitting, then, that Kutch sits at a historic crossroads—bordering Sindh, shaped by centuries of trade and migration. Every community that passed through left something behind: a motif, a stitch, a way of making. This is why the textiles Wazir collects carry multiple lineages at once. “People often think Kutch has one look,” he says. “But no two pieces mean the same thing. What seems like a single aesthetic from the outside is, up close, an archive of identities linked to heritage, marital status, and migration routes.”

ARUN PARMAR, NEW DELHI

“My grandfather was a feriwala,” Parmar says. “He would walk through the heritage villages of Kutch—Mandvi, Tera, Dayapar—many brushing the Sindh border, buying old textiles from homes in exchange for metal vessels.”

 

Now over two decades into the business, Parmar collaborates regularly with museums and private collectors. But what fascinates him most is the journey of these heirlooms. He’s often asked why families ever parted with such pieces. “Textiles were treated like property or gold,” he explains. “During divisions, they were literally cut in half—each sibling took a share. Once split, each half went its own way.” Many of the heirlooms Parmar encounters today have survived on such fragmented paths, pieces of a story that once belonged to a single household. 

A significant milestone for him arrived during the pandemic, when he acquired a zari Ashavali dupatta from Gujarat—a piece he cross‑referenced meticulously through books, later discovering a similar example in the V&A. “Nobody else had understood its value,” he says. “I showed it to a museum owner, and he immediately recognised it.” Parmar credits much of his learning to a circle of collectors, historians, and scholars who trade notes and debate provenance.

Among the rarest textiles one can find today, Parmar lists Kashmiri kani shawls—those woven for the French or British markets—alongside figurative phulkaris once used as storytelling tools that surface only through chance. His own most treasured pieces reflect this breadth. For instance, a breathtaking Tree of Life kantha from Jessore in East Bengal, dating to the late 19th century. Worked in exceptionally fine quilting and embroidery, it likely served as an asan—a cloth placed beneath idols or ritual objects.“It’s a masterpiece,” Parmar says. “Every inch is hand‑stitched storytelling.”

Even the younger generation, often stereotyped as disengaged, is beginning to understand the pull of heritage cloth. Parmar recalls a student from Canada who flew in simply to learn about Parsi embroidery. Another young buyer in his twenties purchased a rare indigo Naga Sangtam warrior shawl, worked in natural dyes and cowrie shells. Parmar’s clientele is changing, and the shift is emotional as much as aesthetic. “People come looking for memories,” he says. “A woman once bought a patola here because it reminded her of her grandmother.” The piece she purchased was a Vohra Gajji Patola, a rare double‑ikat woven in Patan between 1875 and 1900 for the affluent Ismaili Vohra community. Its crisp geometry and tumpal motifs link it to patolas once traded across Southeast Asia.

But what matters most to him is not the sale. “I don’t want these pieces disappearing abroad,” Parmar says. “I want them to stay within India, within our history.” He cites the Tapi Collection as a model—an archive built for education, not just private prestige. “We need more of that– This can’t only be a commercial pursuit.”

This article originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar India's June-July 2026 print issue.

All images: Courtesy Ajay Bhoj, Salim Wazir, and Arun Parmar

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