Jigsaw
For years, my hands have spoken the language of the stitch. Today, House of Bilimoria evolves beyond the garment into a multidimensional archive of the soul. I am an artisan tailor in the era of unhustling, meticulously connecting the dots between my lineage and a life led by Dharma. This is my living jigsaw—a space where the precision of bespoke tailoring meets the fluidity of a seeker. By finding the pattern in the pieces, I look to create work that is slow, sacred, and deeply aligned. Whether through a single stitch or a co-creation, I am assembling a life—and a body of work—that is woven from lineage, crafted for eternity.
I have spent the years since 2023, my 40th, quiet—with little bursts of attempting to emerge, and then very quickly going quiet again. There was only one thing I wanted to do to mark my 40th year, and that was a very potent and heartfelt journey to Bharat Mata. It was after that journey that it became clear I needed to re-evaluate my relationship with my creativity and my work. Something had dawned on me that I didn’t have words for; I could feel it deeply. I came back a Daughter of the Diaspora, which is a thread running through my world and work.
It’s now three years since the initial takedown of the website, and I finally have the instinct and preparedness to bring this new online home to life. It isn’t perfect, or complete by any means. It’s a starting point.
I am back here re-introducing myself, with these deep feelings having integrated into my way of life. The words to describe exactly what has integrated aren’t there; it’s an embodiment that is beyond articulation. It’s Dharma.
There’s an update to the ‘About Me’ where I have placed the pattern. This pattern—what has been—looks different when I look back from where I am now. I am seeing clearly, and being able to understand, what parts were me, what was life, and what was duty.
Duty, in the English dictionary, is defined as:
A moral or legal obligation; a responsibility.
A task or action that one is required to perform as part of one's job.
When I look at duty as defined by the English dictionary, it’s narrow and single-tracked.
Here I am now, looking at my Dharma, which can also be translated into duty. However, one major difference here is that this word is steeped in a rich journey. There are over ten words that translate to duty in the Sanskrit language. This opens a breath of air for my spirit to lean into.
I’m very much walking a new path, one that hasn’t been carved out for me. In the spirit of my name, Śilpa, I’m now carving. I hope that whatever this looks like, there will be some beauty in sharing it with you. Perhaps with each little tap, there could be a bigger tapping into the collective community who are in somewhat of the same place—carving out a path that hasn’t been walked before.
This is an extracted image from the book "Some notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy" published by Abanindranth Tagore in 1895, translated and reprinted in 1914 after Tagore's death.
The image is derived from the medieval era Shilpa Shastra design manual text Sukranti on Murti (statues, idols, images). The design and posture is explained with living beings and shapes found in nature such as leaf, elephant, birds, waterfall, etc
