About Us

Rafunaama. The word carries two meanings at once. Rafu is darning, the slow and patient work of mending a tear so carefully that the fabric holds again. Naama is a story, a letter, a record. Together: stories of mending. That is what we are here to do: create, listen, and share stories of mending across South Asia. 

 

The subcontinent has always stitched. Through centuries of displacement, division, and violence, it has been women, queer people, and those pushed to the margins of caste and religion who kept the needles moving. They carried the patterns in their hands when they were forced to leave everything else behind. They stitched their grief and their longing into phulkari and kantha, into ikat and bandhini, into quilts that held whole communities together. This knowledge was resistance and care made visible in thread.

 

Rafunaama is a platform for South Asian textile artivists who believe in the quiet power of fabric to mend what has been broken: to heal, to archive, to resist, and to dream. We believe that the craft traditions of this region are not relics to be preserved behind glass but living tools for social healing, feminist solidarity, and collective imagining. We work across communities divided by partition, by communal violence, by caste, by border, by the everyday separations that our political present keeps deepening. We bring that inherited knowledge of stitching into the present, into circles and workshops and collaborative tapestries, as a way of reaching across those divides.

 

Our name holds our method. Darning does not hide the damage. It acknowledges the tear and works with it, thread by thread, until something whole emerges that carries the memory of what was broken. That is what we are trying to do with communities across South Asia and the diaspora: acknowledge the wounds that history has left, and stitch carefully toward something new.

 

We run a small artist grant, a community library programme, collective textile projects, and stitching circles across India and beyond. We work with artists and communities from Punjab to Palestine, including those most at risk from their own governments and their own societies. We learn from the women and queer and marginalised people who have always been the holders of this craft, and we try to build platforms and spaces worthy of what they carry.

 

Rafunaama is based in New Delhi and works across South Asia and the diaspora.

 

Logo Design: Bhawna Parmar