ABOUT THE FOUNDER

Chitraksha is a designer and entreprenuer, born into a Rajasthani family and raised in Pune.

Growing up away from her ancestral landscape, she absorbed the pace, language and culture of the city around her, while carrying a quiet curiosity for the place she came from. Rajasthan existed first as memory, then as fascination, and eventually as a design language.

Her relationship with her roots deepened during her time studying fashion. She found herself repeatedly returning to its colours, clothing, crafts and ornamentation for inspiration. After graduating from NIFT Mumbai, a role in Jaipur brought her closer to the world she had long been trying to understand.

In Jaipur, the distance collapsed. The city felt at once unfamiliar and inherited. Its painted walls, pottery studios, bazaars, old homes and everyday rituals opened a new way of seeing. Every surface held a story. Every craft carried patience, history and hand.

Kumawa was born from that return.

It is Chitraksha’s attempt to reconnect with her roots in a modern context. Not by preserving them behind glass, but by allowing them to move, adapt and become wearable.

Kumawa is a luxury ready-to-wear label translating Indian heritage into contemporary clothing.

The studio works at the intersection of cultural memory, craft intelligence and modern form. Each collection begins with a study of India’s visual traditions: textiles, painted surfaces, inherited silhouettes, craft objects, colour and ornament. These references are examined, distilled and shaped into garments for the present.

Rooted first in Rajasthan, Kumawa begins with the landscape of its founder’s inheritance. Blue pottery, Kota Doria, hand block printing, regional clothing and painted walls form the brand’s earliest vocabulary. From here, the house is imagined as an evolving archive of India’s many craft cultures, moving across regions with curiosity, restraint and care.

Every garment is made in limited numbers through considered fabrics and hand-led processes in collaboration with master artisans across the country. The work is slow by intention, allowing material, surface and silhouette to inform one another.

Kumawa believes in craft as a living language. Clothing is not made to preserve the past untouched, but to let it travel forward.