Inside an old Kochi home, under rays of golden sunlight, a muscular female bodybuilder strikes a powerful pose. Draped around her shoulders, unmistakably, a Banarasi. The image has nothing to do with the saree’s usual vocabulary of stillness and occasion. But for Tilfi—a Varanasi-based label built on five decades of family weaving history—it is a fitting summary of their approach to craft since they began: inherit the craft language, then ask what else it can say.
Tilfi’s story begins two generations before Varanasi with the Khanna family. The house still invokes the name of its patriarch Bashimal Khanna, who built a life trading fine textiles across Lahore and Amritsar and is remembered for a career built on integrity and discernment. When the Partition in 1947 dismantled this world overnight, the family fled with only what could be carried by hand. Bashimal’s son, Dwarka Das Khanna, rebuilt the trade from nothing, moving from Srinagar to Mumbai before settling, in the 1960s, in Varanasi—a city whose loom finally matched the family’s own exactitude. It was the next generation, under Rajan Khanna, that widened the business into block-printed and screen-printed textiles, supplying leading retailers across India and abroad, even as the family's original wholesale handloom operation continued to run out of Varanasi.
