Growing up in Rampura Tunki at the northern edge of the old city wall of Surat in the forties, the clatter of looms never let up, day and night. I was old enough to gather that it was textile weaving that was bringing bread to the family table. Years before, in the 1930s, my father had brought in two master jacquard weavers from Varanasi to upgrade his small weaving factory to make viscose jacquard saris. Textiles of the past had little or no place in the rough and tumble of our modest ‘art silk’ business. That business – and town – I was unexpectedly to return to, two decades later. The shift from textile weaving, which my family was engaged in, to textile printing – the job assigned to me – kept me away from hobbies or distractions for the entire decade of the seventies. While I was preoccupied with making modern textiles, Shilpa’s eager-eyed forays into our small-town bazaars, started from her college days, had thrown up a cache of beautiful old textiles – jamewar shawls and jamdanis, patolas, Parsi garas and Paithanis – many of which she would bring over for print ideas. By the early eighties, textiles from India’s many regions and periods had entered our lives, only to ensnare us both. It was not until the nineties that Shilpa and I began to search for Indian textiles of greater antiquity. I feel humbled by the millennia-old ingenuity of our textile processes and am in awe of the mastery over them that our artisans had achieved. Even today, the creativity and adaptability of our textile artists make India a treasure-house of hand-worked textiles.