In a cramped workshop tucked inside Kumartuli — Kolkata’s centuries-old quarter of idol-makers — Sujit Malakar spends a full day shaping a single mukut, a ceremonial crown, out of a plant most people in the city have never touched. The material is shola: pale, spongy, and so light it seems to float in the hand. For generations, it has been carved into the ivory—white filigree crowns, jewellery and figures inseparable from Bengali ritual and art.
Sujit is the fourth generation of his family business Sholar Shilpa Mandir and he gave up a government job to continue the work.“This art has been passed down to us from our forefathers. I am the fourth generation.” That inheritance is now under strain, courtesy, a disappearing supply chain.
Shola grows in marshy, waterlogged land like the wet edges of paddy fields or the shallow water bodies scattered across rural Bengal. Farmers bring it in from Uttar Dinajpur, Murshidabad, Malda, Bongaon, and Medinipur. Sujit remembers the time when the best shola in the region came from much closer to home: Rajarhat, on Kolkata’s own doorstep. It once produced a stem so fine it resembled sugarcane, with a whiteness that was unmatched. That source is gone. Rajarhat’s wetlands have been built over — swallowed by the city’s expansion into townships and real estate. Sujit sums it up in a line that plays on the near-rhyme between the Bengali words for the plant and for gold: “Okhane akhon shola howa r bodol-e shona hocche” — roughly, “Where shola once grew, it’s all turned to gold now.” The marsh became money, and the craft lost its raw material.
The numbers tell the same story. Shola used to be bought in bulk, in bundles, cheaply. Now artisans buy it piece by piece — anywhere from 30 to 100 rupees each, depending on thickness, with roughly 40 rupees as an average. The thinner the stem, the cheaper it is, but thin stems also yield less usable material. And even at these prices, supply is unreliable.
What makes the crisis harder to see from the outside is that shola art hasn’t lost its market entirely. Sujit says demand for high-end, elaborately worked pieces remains steady. What has collapsed are the mid-range and everyday items that once formed the bulk of an artisan’s income. With raw material now expensive and scarce, there’s simply not enough shola to produce at that volume, and the economics of low-margin work no longer make sense.
Ranjit Sarkar, who runs Shilpalaya in Kumartuli, sees the same collapse from the retail side and describes it in starker terms. Two decades ago, he says, shola elephants and boats — fully worked, decorative pieces — were bestsellers. Today, almost no one asks for them. "There's hardly anyone left in Kumartuli who makes shola art," he says. Many shopkeepers and artisans have simply moved to other, steadier products. “We need to look after ourselves,” he says. “That’s why we make other things and not shola. Who will wait for a custom order?”
And yet, in one of those ironies that only a dying craft seems to produce, shola has just had its most glamorous year in living memory — on a stage about as far from a Kumartuli workshop as it’s possible to get. At the 2026 Met Gala in New York, designer Mayyur Girotra dressed fashion consultant Diya Mehta Jatia in a sculptural gown built around a bodice carved by four artisans from Kolkata’s Malakar community — the same surname, and the same craft lineage, as the Malakar family in Kumartuli. The artisans worked with rubber waste rather than real shola, since the genuine material was too fragile to survive a red-carpet evening, and spent nine weeks painstakingly carving each piece. Mayyur Girotra had travelled to Kolkata himself to meet the craft’s master carvers before the work began and has spoken of shola as a distinctive, indigenous craft of Bengal that is, in his own words, sadly dying.
The same art that international fashion is currently celebrating as couture-worthy is, at home, struggling to find enough raw material. Kumartuli’s artisans aren’t short on skill or even short on admirers. They’re short on marshland.
Even for those still practising, the work is unforgiving. About 30 per cent of every piece of shola is discarded in the making of a single item — a margin the material’s rising cost makes increasingly hard to absorb. And the craft itself demands a kind of patience that Sujit says is disappearing along with the raw material. People do come to learn, he says — but almost none stay. It takes a full day to make something as modest as a single mukut, and few are willing to commit years to mastering a trade with, as he puts it, “no future.” That absence of a next generation may be the deepest wound. Shola, along with shankha (conch-shell) and mati (clay), is counted among Bengal’s indigenous crafts—materials and techniques tied specifically to this land and its ecology.
Sujit frames his own choice to leave a government job and continue his family’s work almost as an act of stewardship, for a craft he calls “pure, like a flower.” But stewardship needs someone to pass it to. “I hope the art lives,”Sujit says. “I hope the artist lives.”
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