Suraiya Hasan Bose

Suraiya Hasan Bose (1928–2021) was an Indian textile conservator, designer, and manufacturer, who worked to preserve traditional Indian textile art and techniques. She worked with the Indian Cottage Industries Emporium and the Indian Handloom and Handicrafts Export Corporation before establishing her own textile manufacturing unit to produce traditional Indian textiles. Her designs have been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Biography Suraiya Hasan was born in 1928 in Etawah, Uttar Pradesh, and raised in Hyderabad, Telangana. Her father, Badrul Hasan, established a bookstore and a handicraft manufacturing unit in Hyderabad. His handicraft unit focused on manufacturing traditional Indian bidri (metalwork) objects. She studied textile design at Cambridge University. Her uncle was the Indian freedom fighter, Abid Hasan Safrani. She later married Aurobindo Bose, the nephew of Indian freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose. Her family were significant participants in the Swadeshi movement, a nationalist movement that focused on producing and using native Indian textiles over imported British cotton during colonial rule in India.

Career After studying textiles at Cambridge University, Hasan Bose joined the Indian Cottage Industries Emporium, a governmental organization dedicated to producing and manufacturing traditional Indian handicrafts. Along with Pupul Jaykar, from the 1950s she managed the Handloom and Handicraft Export Corporation, a public sector undertaking of the Government of India in Delhi, and directed their export unit. During her tenure in Delhi, she collaborated with Indian handloom artists and art conservators such as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Martand Singh and Lakshmi Jain to revive traditional Indian handicrafts.

In addition to manufacturing textiles, Bose built an archive of traditional motifs for textile patterns in India, using these to create new designs and reconstructing heritage jaalas or graphs used to set looms for weaving patterns. Her original designs were exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2015, as part of a special exhibit on the fabrics of India. Bose also established a training unit, in order to teach handloom, weaving, and textile art to widows who did not have other options for employment, as well as a school to provide free education to the families of weavers and handloom artists. In 2019, Bose was the subject of a book that recorded her contributions to textile conservation in India.