The Karun Thakar Fund Selection Committee is pleased to announce the 2025 – 26 Scholarships have been awarded.
The Fund received its highest number of applications yet, and the Selection Committee was hugely impressed by range of fascinating research applicants shared.
The Committee is pleased to be supporting eight students this round. The awardees’ are researching textiles and dress cultures spanning Rwanda to Japan, and have summarised their work below.
In 2025 The Karun Thakar Fund celebrated five years of support for African and Asian textile and dress studies and practice. The Selection Committee is extraordinarily proud of the Fund’s impact so far, and is looking forward to continuing our work after a pause of two years (2026 and 2027) to focus on a major shared project between Karun Thakar and the V&A. The Fund will return with the next round of Project Grants in Spring 2028.
Subham China, PhD student, Jadavpur University
My doctoral research at Jadavpur University, titled Forced Migration of Skills: Bengali Textile Workers in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Transoceanic Slave Trade, addresses a critical gap in textile studies by foregrounding the displacement of textile knowledge through systems of slavery. While scholarship on South Asian textiles has focused on elite production, export economies, or aesthetic traditions, there remains a marked absence of attention to the labour, experiences, and embodied skills of non-elite producers, particularly Bengali needlewomen, who were forcibly relocated for their textile skill repertoire as slaves to serve the textile economies of Cape Town, Batavia, Manila, and Mexico, shaping the evolution of textile traditions in Mexico and Cape Town. This project reconceptualises forced migration not solely as the relocation of individuals but as the transoceanic movement of craft techniques and cultural memory. It challenges dominant Eurocentric and elite-oriented frameworks in textile historiography by recentring the voices, practices, and contributions of enslaved South Asian women whose work shaped hybrid textile cultures across colonial geographies. The research draws on material artefacts that testify displaced practices and the persistence of craft knowledge while enslaved. By integrating analysis of archival sources, the study reconstructs the routes, mechanisms, and actors behind coerced movements of textile workers, foregrounding how displaced artisans navigated, preserved, and transformed their practices across the transoceanic worlds.
Isabella Inskip, PhD student, University of Edinburgh
I am a PhD candidate studying Mughal encampments and mobility at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Dr Yashaswini Chandra and Dr Glaire Anderson.
Through exploring the significance of textile-based architecture across the Mughal world, my research will shed new light on how some of the textiles in the V&A’s collection were originally used and appreciated.
The Karun Thakar Fund Scholarship Award will ensure that I can visit significant global collections of Mughal tent hangings as I progress into my second year of doctoral study. This will include fieldwork in India where I will engage first hand with collections in Rajasthan and Gujarat, as well as visits to London to continue my engagement with the wide variety of tent hangings housed at the V&A. These trips will feed directly into my final thesis, helping me to understand how encampments intersected with diverse aspects of Mughal life such as imperial and sub-imperial building practice, displays of kingship and the imperial relationship with the natural world.
I would like to express my thanks to the Karun Thakar Fund and the Selection Committee for choosing to support my project and I look forward to updating you on my journey through the world of Mughal mobility.
Ouzra Karimi, PhD student, Oxford University
My doctoral research, ‘Threads Across Borders: Hazara Women’s Embroidery, Textile Trading, and Entrepreneurship’, explores the transnational and gendered dimensions of displacement through the lens of Hazara women’s embroidery and textile trading, examining how these practices serve as sites of cultural expression, resilience, and entrepreneurial adaptation. This research addresses a critical gap in our understanding of how Hazara women – an understudied community in academia, draw on traditional embroidery skills and the opportunities afforded by social media to sustain cultural heritage while navigating new economic and social landscapes in the diaspora.
Despite the rich heritage of Hazara embroidery, its contemporary role in women’s economic life and cultural transmission in the diaspora remains largely undocumented. My research seeks to fill this gap by documenting the intergenerational stories, skills, and adaptations of Hazara women involved in embroidery and textile trading. I focus, in particular, on khāmak-dozee and other embroidery styles from older generations being revived and reinterpreted by younger generations, exploring how they function both as creative labour and as living links to homeland traditions. I also examine how these practices are preserved, adapted, or transformed across generations.
I am sincerely grateful to the Karun Thakar Fund’s support for recognising the significance of this work and for supporting my efforts to document, analyse, and share the evolving story of Hazara women’s embroidery enterprises in the UK and online. I aim to gather visual and material records of their work, and position these practices within broader conversations about migration, identity, and textile heritage.
Jiatao Li, PhD student, De Montfort University
My research, ‘Revitalising Li Barkcloth Heritage through Community Research and Cross-cultural Analysis’, investigates the past and present of Li barkcloth, a nonwoven textile tradition practiced by the Li people of Hainan, China. Although this barkcloth heritage was included in China’s national intangible cultural heritage list in 2006, it has largely vanished from daily life. My research documents its remaining practices, community memory, and symbolic transformation through fieldwork in remote mountain villages across several dialect regions.
This phase of the project involves interviews with both state-recognised “inheritors” and overlooked community elders, as well as the collection of rare archival and material evidence. In addition to Hainan, I will travel to Xishuangbanna, South of China, to compare Li barkcloth with lesser-known Hani barkcloth traditions. I will also draw connections to Pacific barkcloth cultures to position Li barkcloth within a broader global textile narrative.
This work contributes to decolonial heritage studies by foregrounding indigenous voices and expanding understandings of cultural sustainability, symbolism and textile knowledge in marginalised communities
Prerana Nair, PhD student, University of Edinburgh
My doctoral study explores the significance of Indian textiles in shaping regional connections within the Indian subcontinent between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the European companies emerged as dominating powers. This project specifically looks at how double ikat silk patola (singular patolu) of Gujarat found a new home in the Southwestern part of the Malabar region (modern-day Kerala) within the Indian subcontinent, where they were primarily used as a sacred cloth, locally known as veerali pattu.
The Karun Thakar Fund will be used to conduct object-based analysis of ‘export patola’, a type of patola produced specifically for the southeast Asian markets. These trade silks are today in collections of international museums, including the V&A, and they will be studied and compared with the extant pieces documented from the Malabar region as part of my study.
Henry Muye Pan, MA student, SOAS University of London
My research is focused on the survey and theorisation of Japanese kabuki costumes, focusing specifically on the mutual influence between Japanese cultural history and kabuki costumes as manifestations of cultural aesthetics, as well as their influence and integration in modern popular culture. The study of performance costumes is an under-represented research area in the crossover of Asian theatrical studies and Asian dress. In the case of a rapidly evolving medium such as kabuki theatre, though standardized classic kabuki costumes have been well-documented, the most representative costume pieces of modern kabuki such as those of shinsaku kabuki have yet to be examined and placed in the wider theoretical cultural lens. As such I would like to examine the design and craft process of these modern kabuki costumes, and in turn theorize the integration of the traditional kabuki medium in Japan’s wider contemporary pop culture.
Pragya Sharma, PhD student, University of Brighton
As an everyday domestic practice in India, hand-knitting from the subcontinent has received short shrift within the existing scholarship, which is predominantly Eurocentric. The present-day positioning of the craft in the country is closely intertwined with the British Empire and the subsequent establishment of mission education. Although hand-knitting was learned and practised by all genders, the intergenerational skill was (and is) generally acquired through informal channels of learning, within the domestic spaces. As a socially constructed practice, the skill was defined as a hallmark of an ideal housewife. In the absence of any definitive, recorded history of the craft from India, my project traces the introduction and evolution of knitting in colonial and post-colonial India, situating it within the wider socio-cultural entanglements.
Spread across museums in the UK, India and the US, the extant handknitted objects that trace their provenance to India are as old as the late eighteenth century, with the largest collection of objects living in the V&A museum. These are mostly socks, gloves and caps. Following a decolonised approach, my research explores if there are distinct characteristics that can come to define an ‘Indian’ way of knitting. I adopt an interdisciplinary methodology that combines archival study, object study and oral history methods, underpinned by the themes of material culture, domesticity and colonial history. Closer examination of the objects reveals alternative readings through comparative studies of motifs, patterns and designs.
Curiously, these knitted objects in museums share a close history with the practice of Kashmir shawl-weaving, with similar evolution in borders, motifs, patterns and repeats. Narratives of who made the knitted objects, in what circumstances, and using what tools and techniques – the maker’s hand is hard to ignore. I also probe into how the objects transitioned, from curiosities and commodities to becoming museum objects, focusing on the larger collecting practices of Indian hand knitting. At present, there is limited information on the knitted objects on the collections’ websites and in museums; while some are uncatalogued, others are miscatalogued with contested provenance or incorrect style. My investigations will help museum and institutional staff explore the provenance of their collections and contribute to the information about the objects by expanding catalogue records.
Since my research is built on a nearly non-existent study of knitting from India, constructing hypotheses becomes crucial which necessitates accessing a diverse array of sources to discover evidence. It involves research visits of various kinds, to museums, libraries and institutions across regions, studying archival documents such as unpublished documents, gazetteers, writings of British men and women, missionary records, as well as women’s periodicals and magazines, in India, Europe and the UK. The generous support from the Karun Thakar Fund will enable me to undertake these aspects of my research.
Fiona Uwamahoro, PhD Student, London College of Fashion
My PhD research at the London College of Fashion (UAL) , “The Rwandan Field of Fashion”, explores the emergence and institutionalisation of Rwanda’s fashion sector. Through a sociological lens, I trace the trajectories of three generations of designers and fashion entrepreneurs, while also examining the roles of national and transnational intermediaries in shaping the Rwandan Field of Fashion. Methodologically, I employ ethnographic and participatory approaches informed by the African research paradigm of Ubuntu.
This research not only documents a rapidly evolving creative sector but also contributes to wider conversations on the African creative economy and decolonial knowledge-making. As I enter the final stage of my thesis, the Karun Thakar Fund Scholarship enables me to complete my research while laying the foundations for future projects, where I hope to further explore participatory and curatorial forms of research grounded in African epistemologies.
