Revealing ‘Untold India’: Atlanta Lifestyle Brand Blends New Designs, Traditional Artisanship

Growing up in Kolkata, Mitun Chaudhuri experienced a world of influences in her hometown, but she also found herself traversing India’s vast hinterland and encountering its dizzying diversity. 

With a father who worked for the state government of West Bengal, the family’s every spare vacation was spent in other parts of the country, from Kerala to Bihar. 

Inevitably, that meant encountering the cultural riches of each region, from cuisine to crafts, with Ms. Chaudhuri’s parents making sure each itinerary included local museums and movies.

“In India, different regions offer a completely different experience,” Ms. Chaudhuri told Global Atlanta, noting how this peripatetic upbringing persuaded a young girl to adopt adventure as a way of life. 

“That appreciation in me grew that everybody is not the same — who we are in Kolkata is not the same as who they are in Bangalore,” she says. “My mom always made sure that she bought a sari from every region that she visited.” 

That love for fabric wove a thread of interest in her that would never unravel, though Ms. Chaudhuri’s own career started with tech rather than textiles. 

Now, she runs Maka Maka Lifestyle LLC, a fashion and home goods company that elevates the story of craftspeople in India and beyond, inviting consumers into a compact where their purchases help preserve ancient methods of production at risk of disappearing. From jamdani muslin to kantha embroidery, the company is largely focused on India, but always with a broader appeal and ambition.

That’s reflected in its name: Maka Maka is a Hawaiian word meaning “friend,” embodying the approachability the brand wanted to represent when it evolved out of Rajboori Textiles, a vegan silk trading company Ms. Chaudhuri had created to supply designers.

“I wanted a global name, you know? Something that was not Indian, so we did not look at Sanskrit names and all of that stuff, because I wanted people to ponder over the name. That curiosity should be there.” 

Her clear vision now comes only after a meandering personal journey. 

Selected as a Rotary scholar, Ms. Chaudhuri came to the United States to study business at the University of Georgia, following that up with an MBA from Georgia State University. She longed to delve into architecture or interior design, but management and information systems seemed to offer better prospects at the time. 

As she took up a job in software, however, the travel bug persisted. With her husband at the time, she visited places as remote as Svalbard above the Arctic Circle, where she recalls snowshoeing with a guide who carried a rifle to ward off polar bear attacks.

Soon, she felt drawn to take a step back toward craft and culture. 

“The corporate world was just too stifling for me; it was very boxed in for someone like me,” she says. 

She moved to Vancouver and later founded a trading firm that would become Rajboori, having seen a need for purveyors of “peace silk.” Produced according to Ahimsa (non-violence) principles, the silk is harvested only after the worms emerge naturally from their cocoons, a departure from the standard process of boiling larvae to extract the fibers.

“I think that was the time I decided that I needed to explore these places where people actually do the work. So I visited India, and I went to the villages in Bihar.”

On return in 2015, most artisans she had met in the village of Bhagalpur had begun to source silk from China and trade hand looms for machines. 

“That was very disheartening to see, and I think that kind of even pushed me harder to keep on continuing this path. As designers, as entrepreneurs, we all have to kind of band together to support artisanal work — globally, not just in India.”

Maka Maka as a brand was born formalize this focus on artisans and center their stories, building a model that’s sustainable both environmentally and economically.

While her flagship Maka Maka cafe, a sort of showroom and shop devoted to artisans’ work, didn’t take off, Ms. Chaudhuri still collaborates directly with artisans, consulting with them on their designs while cutting out the middle man. “I don’t negotiate with my artisans,” she adds. 

Dedicated to circularity, the company imports off-cuts from sari production, working with local seamstresses in Norcross to fashion them into Western-style garments and bags.

This results in an eclectic inventory, imported or made in small batches and featuring unique items, from platters, jewelry and sculptures made of repurposed metal, to hand-loomed pillow covers from Nagaland, peace silk scarves and pashminas, and handmade shola flowers made from the pulp of a tree native to eastern India. 

Traditional fabrics may come into the country duty-free, but hefty tariffs imposed on India by the Trump administration have threatened the parts of the business that rely most on India craftsmanship — ironically harming the very artisans whose talents cannot be reproduced by American workers. Shop owners also now face uncertainty around their cost structures, including boutiques and museum gift shops looking for distinctive items. 

“Now they are having to kind of rethink their assortment or hike prices to some extent while their wholesale prices are also changing,” Ms. Chaudhari said. “It’s really probably not affecting the big ones so much because they have the scale, but it’s just the smaller entities that are getting impacted.”

More impactful than the tariffs has been the removal of the so-called de minimus exemption, which previously allowed shipments of less than $800 to come into the U.S. without incurring duties. 

Ms. Chaudhuri, who focused on e-commerce in her Georgia State MBA, said the move has created upheaval for Indian micro-merchants newly brought into the global economy by smartphones and online platforms like Etsy. 

With enough inventory to last through the holiday season, Maka Maka is waiting out the trade tumult, hoping the new year brings a resolution. 

In the meantime, the company is seeking deeper relationships with retailers and wholesalers that buy into its ethos, all while continuing to give a platform, and more business, to the “hero of our story” — the artisan. 

On Nov. 1, Maka Maka banded together with Neha Negandi and Malika Garrett to put on Untold India, a curated craft, fine arts and storytelling evening featuring food, wine, artist discussions and performances including a mashup of the Indian dance form Kathak with Spanish Flamenco. Learn more about the event here. The event was supported by the Consulate General of India, which also just unveiled its own corner devoted to handicrafts from each Indian state within its building in Sandy Springs. 

A part-time instructor at Georgia State, Ms. Chaudhuri is set to meet this month in Rajasthan with the leadership of Jaipur Living, a large Indian home goods company with a North American headquarters in Atlanta. The company pioneered a distributed manufacturing model that helps weavers stay in their villages instead of migrating to huge urban centers. Read more about Jaipur Living‘s origins

A possible followup? A study-abroad program bringing students to India to learn about sustainable sourcing and responsible entrepreneurship, building on trips Ms. Chaudhuri has already led for discerning buyers and friends.

They’ll go to major cities, of course, but she also hopes to impart some of her wanderlust, which roars to life when meeting with artisans on their home turf, as in rural heartlands like Kutch, Gujarat, a sweeping district for craft production in western India.

“After a point, it’s like, I just need to breathe,” she says. “I need to go somewhere. That’s kind of how it is.”

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