A reflection on craft, the divine feminine, and finding your place across cultures
There's a particular kind of disorientation that has nothing to do with jet lag.
I've been home for about 2 weeks now, and I still don't feel fully here. Part of me is still moving through everything I experienced, holding onto moments that don't feel ready to be understood yet, let alone explained. I think that's how it's supposed to feel when a trip changes something in you.
Why I Went
I've been to India many times before, with family, through childhood, and during my Master's research in 2013 and even got married in Goa.
But this time felt different from the start. After ten years of running my jewellery business, I'd reached a point where the constant doing, the pace of building and producing and refining, had started to drown out the quieter question underneath it all: why am I making any of this?
I needed to step away. To create space. To reconnect with purpose and creativity in their most honest forms.
But if I'm being truthful, what I was really searching for was something harder to name. A sense of belonging. Not in a simple, straightforward way, but in the deeper sense of understanding what it means to feel connected to a place that has always been part of you, and yet sometimes feels just out of reach.
Slowing Down in Jaipur
I spent the first week in Jaipur alone, which felt significant in itself. There was something confronting about that solitude, not uncomfortably so, but in a way that left nowhere to hide from what I was actually feeling. I'd planned to use that time practically: explore production, begin building relationships in a more formal, business sense. But almost as soon as I arrived, that intention softened.
It didn't feel right to approach it with urgency.
So instead, I slowed down. I let go of outcomes. I allowed myself to simply observe.
The most meaningful experience of that week was working one-to-one with a Meenakari artist Jaswant Ji, something I'd been drawn to for years but had only ever encountered from a distance. Being inside his family home, watching him work, understanding the tools he'd made by hand, seeing how the craft is passed down quietly through generations, it made everything feel more real, more human.
What stayed with me most was the patience of it. Nothing rushed. Every stage given the time it needed. His hands moving with a certainty built over years of repetition.
Trying it myself was a different thing entirely. Engraving, especially, forced a kind of stillness I'm not used to. You can't fake your way through it. You either sit with it and make the mistakes to learn, or you don't.
And I realised how rarely we allow ourselves to be beginners again. There was something uncomfortable in that at first but what I appreciated was that it pulled me out of my usual mode of producing and perfecting, and brought me back to simply learning.
Feeling It All at Once
There were moments that week I didn't expect to move me as much as they did. Visiting the City Palace and understanding the layers of intention behind its design and how nothing is placed randomly, how everything aligns in specific way to planets and spirituality. And then Govind Dev Ji Temple- the echos of which I heard calling me while I was at the top of the palace in the ornate blue room. During Holi the temple is filled with colour, sound, devotion and community. I didn't go looking for an emotional experience. But standing there, I felt something I couldn't easily explain.
It wasn't just what I was seeing. It was what I could feel.
If I'm honest, being alone in Jaipur wasn't always easy. There were moments of real overwhelm, a heightened awareness, a sense of vulnerability that I hadn't quite anticipated. The city is vivid and relentless in the most beautiful way, but that intensity has an edge to it when you're navigating it on your own.
What steadied me, more than anything, were the small shrines. Tucked into street corners, nestled into the walls of buildings, present in the most unexpected places, offerings to Ma, to Shakti, to something much older and quieter than the noise around them. I found myself pausing at them without really planning to. And in those pauses, something would settle. A reminder that I was held, even when I didn't feel it.
Spirituality there from the beginning and it wove itself into the craft experience too, in ways I'm only beginning to sit with. There's something in the Meenakari process, in the fire and the kiln, in the motifs and the intention behind each piece, that speaks to the same energy I kept encountering at those shrines. A tradition that holds the feminine at its centre, even when that isn't the first thing you see.
I'll be writing more about that in the coming weeks because I think it's become central to what I'm bringing back into my own work. But for now, I'll just say: India kept reminding me, quietly and persistently, that there are forces larger than the ones we can see.
Coming Home to Myself in Gujarat
The second part of the trip, in Gujarat, shifted everything again. Visiting ancestral villages. Being in the spaces where my family comes from. Hearing stories I'd never heard before. Spending time with relatives across generations.
Before going, I'd wondered whether I'd feel out of place. Whether my broken Gujarati would create distance. Whether I'd land in that familiar in-between - not fully belonging here, but not fully separate either.
What I found instead was something much softer. There was an ease I hadn't prepared for. A familiarity that didn't need to be proven. Moments of connection that had nothing to do with language and everything to do with something quieter and harder to articulate.
Spending time with the women in my family — my Fai, travelling with my mum, thinking about my Baa, grounded me in a way I didn't realise I needed. It made me think about lineage. About the strength that moves through generations without always being spoken. About how the lives of women who came before me have shaped my own in ways I'm still discovering.
What I'm Carrying Home
I keep returning to the idea of belonging. Not as something fixed or easily defined, but as something that shifts and morphs depending on where you are, who you’re with, and how open you are to receiving it. This trip didn’t hand me a clear answer, but it softened a lot of the questions I’d been holding.
Belonging doesn’t have to mean fully fitting into one place or one identity. It can exist in fragments. In moments. In the quiet recognition that passes between people who share something without needing to name it.
Creatively, I know something has shifted, even if I’m not ready to fully define it yet. There was a quiet but important validation in everything I witnessed, the craftsmanship, the slowness, the intention behind every detail. It reaffirmed why meaning matters so much to me in what I create, and why I’ve always been drawn to pieces that hold more than just aesthetics.
I think the deeper realisation has been recognising how much of my design language already carries these influences - the familiar shapes, patterns and colours, interpreted through my diaspora lens. Creating in a way that allows people to feel connected to their roots, while also honouring the identities we’ve built away from them.
I’m not rushing towards a conclusion though. For now, I’m letting it sit. Letting it land slowly. Staying in this in-between space a little longer before trying to turn it into something... although something is brewing...
