Woven Love: OBEETEE's Century-Long Story of Craft, Culture and The Artisans
Cover Story in The Style List Artisan Edit
What is common to Rashtrapati Bhavan, Soho House New York, Park Hyatt Vienna and, more recently, India's new Parliament building? The answer lies beneath your feet.
For more than a century, OBEETEE rugs have travelled from the weaving belts of Bhadohi and Mirzapur to palaces, hotels and homes across the world. Their story is one of scale and splendour, certainly, but it is also one of patience. Of hands working over wool. Of patterns slowly emerging, knot by knot. Of a craft that has survived changing tastes, changing markets and an increasingly machine-made world. From grand homes and palaces to hotels and public buildings, the brand has built its name on quality, design and, above all, craftsmanship. Its patrons have included Jawaharlal Nehru, Queen Elizabeth II and Amitabh Bachchan, a list that says plenty about the place OBEETEE has held in India's design story.
But the real story of OBEETEE begins in the weaving communities of Bhadohi, Gopiganj and Mirzapur. Here, carpet weaving is a way of life, with families working on looms for generations, learning the craft from parents and grandparents and passing it on to the next generation. It is where OBEETEE's century-old story still feels most alive.
The brand's heritage house in Mirzapur, now a guest house, offers a glimpse into its past, while the O'Ganj Factory continues to be an important part of its present. But buildings and archives can only tell part of the story. The rest is in the hands of the people who make the rugs.
Why Handmade Still Matters
A hand-knotted rug can take months to complete. But the time involved is only one part of what makes it special. As Rudra Chatterjee, Chairman, OBEETEE and Managing Director, Luxmi Group, explains, a good hand-knotted carpet represents years of skill.
“It represents skills that can take years to master—the judgement of tension, colour, proportion, yarn and knotting that an experienced weaver makes almost instinctively.” That instinct is difficult to replace.
As people become more thoughtful about what they bring into their homes, a handmade product offers something increasingly rare: a genuine connection between the person who creates an object and the person who eventually lives with it, says Chatterjee. “A machine can reproduce a pattern,” Chatterjee says, “but it cannot reproduce judgement, instinct or the accumulated intelligence of the hand.” This is perhaps why handmade products feel different. No two are exactly alike. The subtle variations within a handcrafted piece are not flaws. They are signs of authenticity. They reveal that the piece has been interpreted by a human being rather than mechanically replicated. “In a world increasingly defined by speed and sameness, people are beginning to value the deeply personal nature of the handmade,” says Chatterjee.
It is also about how people are shopping today. There is a growing interest in buying fewer, better things—pieces that have a story, last longer and can become part of a home for years. “People are looking for fewer pieces with greater meaning—pieces with provenance, integrity and the ability to remain relevant for many years,” he says.
Artisan first
At the centre of the loom is the julaha, the weaver that Kabir so eloquently centred in arguably his most famous composition. “Because there can be no OBEETEE without its artisans,” says Chatterjee. The weaver, the artisan, he who spins dreams into reality, has been a focal point for OBEETEE since its existence. For OBEETEE, artisans are not simply people who execute a design. “A design may begin as an idea on paper, but it is the artisan who gives it form, texture and life,” points out Chatterjee. “Their understanding of yarn, colour, technique and construction cannot be separated from the character of the finished piece.” Hence, he calls them “custodians of knowledge and partners in creation.”That relationship becomes clear when you meet the people behind the looms.
RAJEEV MISHRA, Village: Bhidun Meerganj, Age: 62
Mishra started at the bottom of the trade. “I started at the very bottom of this trade—washing, repairing, and clipping carpets—long before I ever owned a loom of my own,” he says. It took years before he could set up his own loom. The early years were not easy. Work was uncertain, payments would be delayed, and there was a lack of infrastructure for a small artisan. It took him three years of hard work before he finally broke even and the business began to take shape.
Today, Mishra owns 33 looms across two depots and leads a team of 17 weavers. His work supports a family of 18. “OBEETEE gave me something no one else did—consistent work, fair trade practices, and the confidence that I could build something lasting,” he says. His approach to life is summed up in a simple line: “agar zindagi mein kuch pana ho to tareeke badlo, iraade nahin—if you want to achieve something in life, change your methods, not your dreams.” For him, the loom has become much more than a workplace. It is the foundation of a life he has built himself.
URMILA TIWARY, Town: Gopiganj, Age: 60
For Urmila Tiwary, weaving high-knot rugs has been part of her life since 1982, when she married into the Tiwari family and her husband taught her the craft. Today, the couple still sit together outside their home and weave — “his hands and mine working the same wool, the same patterns, decades later. I never went to school, but I don't need to read to count my knots,” she says. “My fingers know the pattern before my mind does.”It is a skill built over decades.
Weaving continued through pregnancies, raising children, farming and running a household. “Weaving has been the one constant through everything,” she says. “I never went looking for reasons to keep going all these years — the work itself gave me the reason. It's the complexity of the Nizam rugs that keeps me at the loom even now.” Even at 60, she continues to work on complex designs. What keeps her going is the challenge. “The design is never simple; there is always a new nuance to get right,” she says. “As long as a pattern can still surprise me, I don't feel like stopping.” It is a reminder that craftsmanship is not simply about repeating something perfectly.
Giving Due Credit
Perhaps one of the clearest examples of what OBEETEE's artisans can achieve is the work created for the new Parliament building. Nine hundred weavers from Bhadohi and Mirzapur worked on the carpets. More than 600 million knots were used, with close to a million man-hours going into the project over nearly two years. Some sections were as large as 17,500 square feet before being joined together to create one seamless carpet. The designs were equally symbolic. The Rajya Sabha carpet features a lotus motif in kokum red, while the Lok Sabha carpet has a peacock in agave green.
But for Chatterjee, the most impressive part was not the size of the project. It was the teamwork. “What stayed with me wasn't the scale,” he says. “It was watching individual weavers, each responsible for one section, somehow keep their work indistinguishable from the next person's.”
For a long time, the luxury industry has celebrated the finished product without always talking about the person who made it. And OBEETEE wants to change that. Its rug traceability programme allows customers to discover more about the person and process behind selected carpets. “When you buy wine or olive oil, the grower's name is on the bottle,” Chatterjee says. “When you buy tea — or historically, a carpet — you see the company, not the person who made it. That always struck me as backwards, and it's part of why traceability matters so much to us now: a customer should be able to know whose hands actually made what they're bringing into their home.”
Chatterjee points out that the brand’s responsibility is therefore not only to preserve a craft, but to value the people who carry it—to ensure that their skill is respected, their contribution is recognised and their communities have the opportunity to prosper. Thus, some OBEETEE collections carry a code that can be scanned to reveal the name of the weaver who made it, the village it came from, and the yarn, dyes, and time that went into it. That single detail changes how a customer relates to the object — they are no longer buying "a rug;" they are buying the work of a specific person whose name they now know.
Home & Hearth
Those with an eagle eye will have noticed that the brand name now reads – Obeetee: Carpets and Home. OBEETEE's next chapter takes this idea beyond the floor. With OBEETEE Home, the brand is expanding into furniture, bedding, textiles and other objects for living.
For Rudra Chatterjee, a seminal shift is happening in Indian homes, and one that a brand such as Obeetee needed to respond to. “The way people think about their homes has changed,” he says. “A home is not experienced as a collection of separate categories, but as one complete environment.”
Angelique Dhama, CEO, OBEETEE Carpets (Retail) concurs. “The opportunity is that Indian homes are changing faster than the market has caught up with,” she says. People are increasingly looking for homes that feel connected rather than made up of unrelated pieces. “Customers no longer want to assemble a home piece by piece from unrelated categories and design languages,” says Dhama. “They want a coherent point of view.”
OBEETEE already had many of the skills needed to make that move: design experience, knowledge of materials, manufacturing capabilities and, most importantly, a relationship with artisans built over generations.
The first categories include furniture and bedding. The furniture line is crafted in solid Indian teak, with Italian Carrara marble accents and brass-plated detailing, offered across nine upholstery options. The bedding collection is built around 100% cotton percale, linen blends and quilted covers — designed for everyday elegance rather than occasional use.
Moving into furniture and bedding also means entering a very competitive home market. For OBEETEE, the biggest challenge is making sure that expansion does not weaken what the brand is known for. “Every furniture and bedding piece we introduce has to meet the same standard of craftsmanship that OBEETEE is known for on the floor,” says Dhama. “Or it isn't worth doing.”
“What sets us apart is that no one else can put a century of hand-knotting knowledge behind a sofa or a bedcover,” she says. The new Ahmedabad store, for instance, brings rugs and furniture together, giving customers the chance to experience OBEETEE as a complete home rather than separate categories.
Keeping Indian Craft Alive
For Chatterjee, the future of Indian craft is not about choosing between tradition and modern design. It is about bringing the two together. “I believe history should give a brand confidence, not constrain its imagination,” he says.
The same can be said of Indian craft. “Indian craftsmanship has the potential to become one of the country's most powerful contributions to global design,” says Chatterjee. He believes India can be known not only as a place where beautiful things are made, but also as a source of new ideas and design. “What gives me hope is the growing confidence with which Indian designers are engaging with their own inheritance,” he says. Designers are increasingly using Indian materials, techniques and traditions without feeling the need to make everything look traditionally Indian. That opens up a bigger conversation between designers and artisans. Designers bring new ideas. Artisans bring years of knowledge.
OBEETEE has even worked with individual weavers by giving them visual references—from textiles and landscapes to memories of their own villages—and allowing them to interpret those ideas themselves.
For Chatterjee, that changes the role of the artisan. “When a rug like that sells, the artisan is not anonymous labour behind the piece,” he says. “They are its author.”
Perhaps that is where the next century of OBEETEE begins. Not with leaving the past behind, but with giving it room to grow. The loom remains. The hands remain. The skill remains. What changes is where those hands can take it.
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