I travelled across borders in search of antique bridal wear and found stories of migration

Over the next two years, I travelled between India and Pakistan in search of more antique bridal wear. I began in Mumbai, continued to Delhi, and then onwards to Lahore.

The more I looked, the deeper my fascination grew—not just with the dresses but with the history they carried of both the owners who had commissioned them and the kaarigars who created them. These garments were traces of a time, place, and community now scattered across the South Asian subcontinent.

Many from the initial Dongri set of bridal outfits came from families who had migrated from Northern India to Mumbai in search of economic prospects, and the humidity of the city made it nearly impossible to preserve these delicate pieces, causing the zari to tarnish and the silk to give way. Migrants who had moved from Northern India to Karachi, similarly, found their sherwani and karakulis unfit for the climate of their new home. Finding little use for them, they were often discarded or sold. In a way, the dresses mirrored the impact of migration itself: once part of a cohesive whole, these treasured pieces were now fragmented and fading. In every city, each conversation I had with a shopkeeper—anecdotal, winding, and often over cups of chai—offered another thread to pull.

Later, in Lahore, I began to understand the deeper connections these garments had to the history of Partition—which was, at the time, the largest migration in human history, with an estimated 16 million people crossing what is now the Indo-Pak border. Before Partition, the greatest kharkhaanas in North India were found where feudal wealth was concentrated: Awadh, Punjab, and Delhi. The landed class and elites of these cities served as patrons to a largely Muslim workforce that populated these ateliers. When Partition occurred, India experienced a migration of both Muslim patrons and Muslim artisans. The craftsmen who remained make up most of the embroidery workforce in India today.

I stumbled upon old zari buyers in the Anarkali bazaar of old Lahore, just like I did in Mumbai, walking in the opposite direction of rush hour traffic, quite far from where I had intended to be. There, the shopkeepers told me slightly different stories of the dresses: that they had been brought over from India both pre and post-Partition and that people had sold them for the same reason—out of financial hardship in a newfound home.