Creating a storm with stunning shawls

A resident of the quiet city of Kota, the elegant shawl creator, Madhulika Hada is a Hada Rajput who is silently creating a storm with her stunningly beautiful shawls in cashmere. Each piece is a canvas for her signature style of stunning hand embroidery and bead work. One of the most acclaimed of Chauhan branches, the Hadas belong to the Agnikula and two of the prominent Rajasthan states of Bundi and Kota were ruled by them. Madhulika, married into a small noble family of Koela, is a woman of immense creativity with a deep understanding of the craft of embellishment.

She is supported unanimously by both her children, daughter Aishwarya Singh, married to Aditya Singh, son of former Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh. When not posing as ex-CM’s daughter-in-law, pursuing his many charity programmes, Aishwarya happily poses in her mother’s shawls. As her filmmaker son who, besides shooting for Yash Raj Films also shoots his elegant mother and beautiful wife draped in these heirloom quality shawls.

Madhulika’s work on cashmere is nothing short of museum quality. She looks at pictures of past portraitures and selects motifs typical of Kashmiri embroidery form. The paisley, the jaal, the bootas and the medallion designs. She then reproduces them using a variety of decorative embroidery techniques, including zardozi, aari, tepchi, resham do taar, etc. She enhances her cashmere in vibrant hues using gold threads, pearls, beads and resham. Each piece a stunner and a veritable hand me down for generations to come.

“While the designs come to me as visions from a collective memory, the design bastions belong to the rich history of hand crafting that all of us Rajputs have had the good luck to experience up close,” she says.