Pahar Rakhi Collection 2026

Four t-shirts. On each one, artwork painted onto the cloth by hand, and attached to that painting, real rakhi threads and cords.

Three of the four are built on mandala work. The fourth, Forever Thread, is deliberately not. It is worth starting with why the other three are.

This is a piece about the art rather than the garments. What is drawn on each one, why it is drawn that way, and what happens to the image once the threads that made it a festival object have been taken off.

Why a mandala

Mandala is Sanskrit for circle, though that undersells it. A mandala is a composition organised radially around a single point, where every element exists in relation to that centre. The form runs through Hindu and Buddhist visual traditions, and in both it carries the same basic idea: wholeness, arranged outward from one place.

For a festival built around one specific relationship, a form in which everything refers back to a single point is not an arbitrary choice. Raksha Bandhan has a centre too.

There is also a practical reason the form appealed to us, which is that it is genuinely difficult to execute on fabric. The eye reads radial symmetry instantly. A petal three millimetres out of place is visible across a room in a way that an off-kilter floral would never be. Cloth also moves under the brush and drinks pigment along the weave, so the line you lay down is not always the line you get.

Choosing the hardest form to paint on the least cooperative surface is a decision that shows up in the finished piece. That was the point.

Three of the four designs are built this way. The exception is the one we made first.

Forever Thread Rakhi

The quietest of the four, and the most restrained: linework, negative space, and a celestial motif carried across the chest.

A single thread runs between the moon and the sun. Both are constants. They are the two things in the sky you can rely on. But neither is ever in the same state twice: the moon is always mid-phase, the sun always mid-arc. The thread is indifferent to that. It holds them together regardless of what either one is doing.

Which is a reasonably honest picture of how siblings actually work. There are years of closeness and years where you speak twice. The phase changes. The line between the two of you does not.

Bandhan Mandala Rakhi

Bandhan means a tie, a bond, a binding, and this is the loudest, most joyful design of the four.

Where Forever Thread is essentially a line drawing, this one is colour and density. Vibrant mandala work sits at the centre, with rakhi-inspired cords running outward from it and tassels that move when the wearer does. It is the design that reads from the far end of a room.

It is also the most literal expression of the mandala idea in the collection. The cords are not decoration applied afterwards; they follow the radial logic of the painting underneath, so the thread and the pigment are describing the same structure in two different materials.

Flight of Harmony

Cranes, painted over and around mandala work.

Cranes carry a great deal of weight in Asian art traditions: longevity, fidelity, good fortune. They are very often depicted in pairs, precisely because they are read as birds that stay with one another. Here they are in flight rather than at rest, and that shifts the meaning.

This is the design for the sibling who left. The one who moved cities, or countries, or simply grew up and out of the house. Flight and harmony are not set against each other in it. The birds are going somewhere, and they are going together.

Compositionally it is the most restless of the four. The mandala anchors the piece while the cranes break out of it, which gives the design a tension the other three do not have.

Mandala Ties Rakhi

The most elaborate, and the most physical.

A hand-painted mandala forms the foundation. Over it sits an embroidered mandala patch, and finished onto that are twin cords and golden tassels. Three techniques are stacked in one place: paint, embroidery, and the threads themselves.

The result has a texture the others do not. Painted areas absorb light and embroidered areas throw it back, so the piece changes depending on where you stand relative to it. That is difficult to photograph and obvious in person.

It is also the design where removing the threads changes the most. What is left is a layered painted and embroidered mandala that has nothing festival-specific about it at all.

The second life of the cloth

The threads are meant to come off. They are not decoration to be preserved. Each piece was designed around their removal.

That was the brief we set ourselves, and it is a harder one than it sounds: the image underneath has to be good enough to stand on its own. If a tee only made sense with the threads attached, we would have made a costume. So the artwork is designed first, and the threads are attached to it second. Take them off a piece you had never seen before and you would not think something was missing. You would think it was a hand-painted tee, which is what it is.

Cutting is permanent. There is no re-attaching them next year, so it is worth treating as a real decision rather than an afterthought. Lay the tee flat with the painted side up, use small sharp scissors, and work outward from the centre in single deliberate snips, as close to the cloth as you can get without touching the painting. Several small cuts beat one ambitious one. Wash it inside out in cold water afterwards, and dry it in shade rather than direct sun, both of which matter rather more for hand-painted work than for an ordinary tee.

As for the threads themselves, do whatever your family does. Some keep them, some immerse them in water, some return them to a plant. There is no single rule about it and we would not presume to invent one.

Afterwards

Treat what is left as what it is, which is a painted tee.

All four are cut loose, so they sit untucked over most things and layer under an open shirt or a jacket once the weather turns. The painted area sits front and centre, so anything worn over the top wants to be open rather than closed. Plain bottoms let the artwork do the work.

If in February somebody compliments the artwork with no idea it was ever a rakhi, the collection has done what it was supposed to do.

The pieces

Four designs: Forever Thread Rakhi, Bandhan Mandala Rakhi, Flight of Harmony and Mandala Ties Rakhi. Each is unisex, cut loose, in sizes S, M, L and XL.

Every one is painted by hand, one piece at a time. There is no volume printing anywhere in the process, which means no two are identical: brush pressure varies, stroke angle varies, and humidity changes how pigment moves on a given afternoon. The variation is small, but it is real, and it means the piece you end up with is specifically the one somebody painted rather than an instance of a pattern.

The four pieces are here, if you want to look at them properly.