RITU KUMAR

As the doyenne of Indian prints toasts her 80th birthday, HELLO! gets her thoughts on her lifelong engagement with reviving the country's fashion crafts

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Happy 80th birthday! How do you feel?Can you even believe it? I can't! But when I look back, I can remember a time when there was nearly no prêt fashion in independent India. The British had wiped out entire belts of fashion crafts, and weaving communities were in famine. There were only copies of badly done Indian prints by rotary machines in Lancashire, England on cotton fabrics that were imported from India and then sold back to us. By then, we were an impoverished country, forgetting our fashion aesthetics, taught to aspire for all things British. Hence the foreign cloth burning movement [part of the Swadeshi movement] initiated by Mahatma Gandhi.