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Meet the Collector: Karun Thakar’s Mission to Share the Hidden Histories of Indian Chintz

The author, collector, curator and philanthropist sees textiles not only as an overlooked art form but also a unique one: “My fascination stems from the fact that no other material is so close to our bodies, touching our skin and absorbing our imprints.”

“I spend my life uncovering hidden histories and hidden stories,” says Karun Thakar, one of the world’s most prolific textile collectors. Sitting under a rare, luminous piece of Indian embroidery in his London mews house, he waxes poetic about the forgotten hands behind the abstract masterpieces he feels “the Western art movement has always ignored.”

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For Thakar, textiles are the most intimate form of art. “They are touching our bodies all the time,” he explains. “They resonate with every aspect of our life, birth, and death.” Made for personal or domestic use, they carry with them the stories of their long-forgotten owners and makers. And if you ask why an antique textile looks the way it does, you begin to uncover how people lived and what they considered beautiful.

In a new book, Chintz: A Global Story, and a series of six exhibitions in Japan and the U.K. in 2026, Thakar shows how the quintessentially English look came to be. We may not know much now about the workshops that printed cloths of sparkling ivory with dyes of red and white. But we do have an image of chintz, and all too often a negative one. “In Britain,” writes Thakar, “‘Chintz’ suggests something old-fashioned, decorative and bourgeois.’” But, he argues, Indian textile artists produced “the first globalization of design.” It’s a story of empire, indigenous artistry and medieval mercantilism.

For 1,000 years before the dawn of colonialism, the Indian subcontinent sat at the heart of global trade routes. Caravans on the Silk Road and trading boats on the Arabian Sea shaped tastes across Europe and Asia: patterns and pigments poured down from China and Central Asia, while pieces of dyed Indian cotton made their way as far as Indonesia and Japan. By the 16th century, European traders intensified global demand for Indian textiles, supplying in turn the inspiration for new designs that drew on East and West.

“Commercial agents would bring European prints of flowers, Chinese dragons, Turkish designs, and so on,” says Thakar. “And these Indian artists who had been producing a certain thing for generations were presented with a whole new visual language. They revolutionised traditional Indian designs, under the influence of colonialism and trade, and they are the first global artists to do that.”

Accompanied by a series of academic essays, the book illustrates pieces of Indian chintz made to Japanese designs for domestic use in late-medieval Kyoto; ritual hangings commissioned by the 18th-century court of Siam; and enigmatic Buddhist temple hangings from pre-colonial Sri Lanka. Along with thousands of pieces of domestic furnishing, destined for the European market, they were made in workshops in Gujarat or Southeast India, but the only evidence for their design is the textiles themselves, rare survivals that hint tantalizingly at a lost world.

Avalon Fotheringham, curator of South Asian textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, describes this as an anthropological approach: “textiles present the same kinds of challenges that any anonymous art does, particularly in the non-Western tradition. But you can still read them very deliberately to find out why the design is the way it is.” Without signatures or inscriptions, you rely on “an instinctive feel” for textures and the warp and weft of precious scraps of cloth.

Thakar inherited that instinct from his mother, who ran a couture shop in Delhi after migrating from what is now Pakistan during the Partition of India in 1947; on the perilous journey across the violent sectarian divide, she wrapped her jewellery in strips of “phulkari”—mesmerizing abstract compositions of thickly embroidered silk made on both sides of the Punjab—that Thakar still treasures.

“From an early age I was crocheting and sewing and embroidering”, he says. “But after we came [to England], mum gave up her shop and started working on a horrible factory floor.” Thakar began working in the East End of London in the 1980s at “the sharp end of monitoring racist attacks on the Black and Asian community,” and sought respite in the beauty of textile art. After he was attacked by skinheads, he took time off work and began to visit National Trust properties with his late partner Dr. Roy Short as “a kind of escape.” Now, after decades of hunting down textiles from Ghana to the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan, Thakar has gotten serious about opening his holdings up for study.

He will put a small part of his collection on display at three National Trust properties this May; it’s the Trust’s first textile exhibition, and it will explore themes of “migration, trade, craftsmanship, colonialism, global history and beauty.” Partnering with the V&A, Thakar set up a scholarship, with donors including the textile designer Lulu Lyttle of Soane—whose chintzy wallpapers caused so much controversy during boris johnson’s renovation of 10 Downing Street—to fund research into global textile art. According to Fotheringham, the annual $50,000 fund has allowed the institution to “keep techniques alive and bring them to a wider audience.” To date, it has supported projects including a Ugandan podcast on the colonial history of cloth made from tree bark and research into quilting made by the Siddhi community, descendants of African sailors and slaves in Pakistan and Western India.

Thakar’s focus, according to Fotheringham, on the “specific textiles practices within communities—women’s work, for example, rather than just kings and queens”—comes at the right time for an institution like the V&A, founded in the high Victorian era. “When we opened, it was very much about seeking out the best examples of art and design according to the standards of that era,” she says. “But now it’s more about representation and… the stories of the everyday lives of people across Asia and Africa.”

By sharing his collection, Thakar hopes to change public perceptions of textile art. With shows planned at major London galleries through 2026 and 2027, he wants to move away from outdated perceptions of taste. That effort will begin in the U.K. this spring at Osterley House in West London with an exhibition of Punjabi phulkaris (“Journeys – Global Textiles from the Karun Thakar Collection”) that he hopes will engage the local Asian communities in the same intimate relationship that marked his own life.

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For John Wieland, Collecting Art Is About Feeling at Home

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SEE ALSO: Young Fair Art Antwerp Leans Into the City’s Centuries-Old Collecting Culture

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