Every Day Is Take Your Daughter to Work Day
I landed my dream job.
This September, I joined Sonya Sapru Designs as Storyteller. It has been a long time coming. When I was a teenager, I was the model and my mother took the photographs. Many of her clients assumed I already worked with her. I wished! I watched my mother build Sonya Sapru Designs from a Mac in my bedroom when I was in school. It has grown into a studio that designs, prints, and sells internationally. I loved it when she took me on work trips, sourcing fabrics and learning about design and aesthetics.
And now I get to do this work with her.
My mother designs every digital print we make and travels across India researching craft heritage and living craft practices. My work is the research, writing and archive around it: the stories of making, the descriptions and blog posts that accompany each collection, and the cataloguing of the collections and their narratives. I also lead Design Delhi, our urban design collaboration.
This has been a long time coming. In 1999, my mother published Zaika, a cookbook of Kashmiri Pandit cuisine built on extensive research into her family’s recipes. It was a way of giving me a clear sense of my inheritance, and of who I was. Now I am asking what more she can give me, and what we can make together.
That question frames the direction the studio will take on. Our work draws on our Kashmiri heritage to co-create a living legacy. Laurajane Smith (2006) argues that heritage is better understood as a process, something people do and negotiate in the present, than as a fixed collection of objects or traditions. Cookbooks are a good example of this. Cookbooks are not just a record of a cuisine. They help to make it, by deciding what is written down, standardised and passed on. Zaika was an act of making. It gave me a definition of what it meant to be Kashmiri. Now, almost thirty years later, Sonya and I are defining what being Kashmiri means to us, together. Every day is now Take Your Daughter to Work Day.
This summer, for my thirty-first birthday, we travelled to Kashmir together. It was my first time spending time in Srinagar. We packed a lot into the week we were there. It was a trip of research and learning, of food and textiles, and of design curiosity, a shared creative engagement with the city and its making traditions. Those days led us to ground our questions about heritage in material: in the prints, fabrics and recipes through which a legacy is made and handed on. We have spent the time since our return reflecting, researching, and building a collection. At the same time we are shaping a new direction for the studio. A direction that creates a collaborative inheritance, a living legacy.
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References
Smith, L. (2006). Uses of Heritage. Routledge.
