I travelled across borders in search of antique bridal wear and found stories of migration

What began as a chance discovery in Dongri led me through the scattered histories of Partition and to a now-extinct form of craftsmanship

By Muskan Mumtaz

29 March 2025

Image may contain Ayesha Sana Person Face Happy Head Smile Adult Wedding and Hair antique bridal wear

Photographed by Saqlain Muran

It all started by accident. I found myself alone in Dongri, about 30 minutes from where I was dropped, with a dying phone and spotty network. I’d spent the afternoon flipping through old vinyl in Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar, then worked my way downtown in search of a cab. But I’d gotten hopelessly lost—far from where I’d planned to be—fighting the chaos of evening traffic, desperate to find a way out.

Amid the noise and clutter of the streets, I stumbled upon something unexpected: a small storefront, tucked in a quieter part of the street, displaying the most exquisite zari dupatta I had ever seen—a garment that looked out of place against the metal shutter it was tied to.

The piece seemed like it belonged to another time, and indeed, it did. When I asked the price, the shopkeeper clarified that they weren’t selling garments; they were buying them. They explained that families would come to sell their heirlooms for a nominal amount and that the buyer would then melt down the copper, silver, and gold zari for scrap value. Seeing these magnificent, intricate garments being reduced to raw material was unsettling. They weren’t just beautiful but a living record of so much more: of family history and craftsmanship that are impossible to find today.

I spent my childhood summers in Kashmir hunting for antique shawls with my mother, who instilled in me a reverence for old-world artistry. We would spend hours poring over old shawls, marvelling at the density of the sozni needlework, the neatness of the workmanship, and the softness of an antique pashmina. When I saw such exquisite zari pieces hanging carelessly in Mumbai, I thought of my mother’s words: "You can't find this work anymore. This craftsmanship has vanished with the craftsmen."

I left with six bridal sets that night. It felt almost disrespectful to leave with them in a plastic thela meant for vegetables and cargo. I told the shopkeeper I felt sad taking someone’s precious wedding heirlooms home with me. He laughed, reassuring me the only two people who attached any value to these dilapidated pieces were him and I.

When I took them back home to Washington D.C., and my mom saw the six vintage shaadi ke jodhe in my bag, she lectured me, in typical fashion, by asking, “Dukhaan khol ni hai?” (Are you going to open a store?). I took this as an oddly compelling idea and booked a ticket back to Mumbai two days later.

Over the next two years, I travelled between India and Pakistan in search of more antique bridal wear. I began in Mumbai, continued to Delhi, and then onwards to Lahore.

The more I looked, the deeper my fascination grew—not just with the dresses but with the history they carried of both the owners who had commissioned them and the kaarigars who created them. These garments were traces of a time, place, and community now scattered across the South Asian subcontinent.

Many from the initial Dongri set of bridal outfits came from families who had migrated from Northern India to Mumbai in search of economic prospects, and the humidity of the city made it nearly impossible to preserve these delicate pieces, causing the zari to tarnish and the silk to give way. Migrants who had moved from Northern India to Karachi, similarly, found their sherwani and karakulis unfit for the climate of their new home. Finding little use for them, they were often discarded or sold. In a way, the dresses mirrored the impact of migration itself: once part of a cohesive whole, these treasured pieces were now fragmented and fading. In every city, each conversation I had with a shopkeeper—anecdotal, winding, and often over cups of chai—offered another thread to pull.

Later, in Lahore, I began to understand the deeper connections these garments had to the history of Partition—which was, at the time, the largest migration in human history, with an estimated 16 million people crossing what is now the Indo-Pak border. Before Partition, the greatest kharkhaanas in North India were found where feudal wealth was concentrated: Awadh, Punjab, and Delhi. The landed class and elites of these cities served as patrons to a largely Muslim workforce that populated these ateliers. When Partition occurred, India experienced a migration of both Muslim patrons and Muslim artisans. The craftsmen who remained make up most of the embroidery workforce in India today.

I stumbled upon old zari buyers in the Anarkali bazaar of old Lahore, just like I did in Mumbai, walking in the opposite direction of rush hour traffic, quite far from where I had intended to be. There, the shopkeepers told me slightly different stories of the dresses: that they had been brought over from India both pre and post-Partition and that people had sold them for the same reason—out of financial hardship in a newfound home.

Crossing Wagah on my way back was an emotional experience. I wondered how many dresses in my bag were making their way home, and what “home” even meant to inanimate objects, and to us. Perhaps I was taking them in the wrong direction, considering there was a good chance that both their owners and makers had also made the journey to Pakistan. I thought about the lives these garments had witnessed—how they had moved with their families through decades of upheaval, loss, and rebuilding. And now, here I was, a stranger, walking them across a border that had cleaved the Indian subcontinent, carrying their history in the folds of my journey.

All the dresses I collected landed in Kashmir in the hands of our famed rafoogars, who perform a type of darning embroidery that refurbishes damaged garments by recreating the fabric from within itself. Because many of the dresses had been folded in the same arrangement for decades, causing the corner fabrics to weaken, it seemed best to refurbish them to extend their lifetime. Before they were sent for darning, I photographed them on my younger sister in a family friend’s heritage home by Nishaad Bagh in Srinagar to memorialise the moment and setting they most naturally belonged.

Although I had initially planned to open a “dukaan of puraane kapre,” as my mother had teased, somewhere along the way, I realised I couldn’t stomach selling these pieces. They had travelled enough.

I realised their journey was more than a matter of geography or ownership—it was a story woven through generations, stitched with tales of migration, loss, and endurance. They had been worn on wedding days, in times of joy, and abandoned in times of exile and pain. They were no longer just garments—they were witnesses to the history of a divided land, carriers of memories too precious to be lost to time. They had transcended being a commodity, and I can’t think of a price to capture their worth.