She Learned Block Printing in Jaipur. She Brought It Back to the Northeast and Made It Her Own.
Anisha Hussain, handblock printing artist and entrepreneur, Kamrup, Assam
આ વાર્તા જે પ્રશ્નને અનુસરે છે:
“What does it look like to import a craft tradition and remake it entirely with local identity — and to do it alone in a region where no one else has tried?”
Anisha Hussain of Kamrup is doing something no one else is: handblock printing on local Northeast motifs and fabrics. Four years in, her factory trains artisans and her designs travel across India.
When Anisha Hussain returned to Assam from Jaipur, she brought a technique that had never been applied to the patterns of the Northeast. Handblock printing — a craft with roots in Rajasthan — printed on local NE designs, on local NE fabrics. No one else was doing it. She decided she would.
Four years later, she runs the only brand of its kind in the region. Her products move between categories: home furnishing (curtains, cushion covers, table runners, bed runners) and fashion (eri jackets, mekhela chadors, men's kurtas, stoles). The fabrics come from local weavers she works with directly — she gives them yarn, they weave, she prints.
A finished curtain takes 15 to 20 days. Pricing for cotton is around ₹1,200 per metre; eri silk, around ₹3,000. She has a factory where she trains artisans — two permanent, several on contract. She wants to train more. The knowledge should not stay with one person.
Labour scarcity is her biggest challenge. The work is precise and slow, and not everyone is willing to do it at the pace it demands. But Anisha is not in a hurry — she is building something meant to last.