Kolhapuri & Mojari: Footwear as Art
Two Thousand Years of Charma and Paduka in the Deccan and the Mughal Court
Indian traditional footwear is not one craft. It is the Maratha Kolhapuri chappal, a flat leather sandal stitched from a single piece of vegetable-tanned leather without nails, glue, or metal, and it is the Persianate mojari or jutti, a curled-toe embroidered slipper covered in silver thread and mirrors. This lesson walks from the Charmakar workshops of Subhashnagar in Kolhapur, where Shahu Maharaj broke caste conventions in 1902, to the palace workshops of Mughal Agra and Rajput Jaipur, through the 2019 Geographical Indication battle, the 2025 Prada Milan controversy, and the Bhagavad Gita's teaching that any work done as worship attains perfection.
A King, a Cobbler, and a Runway
In 1902, the same year he signed the first Reservation Act in Indian history, the young Maratha king Shahu Chhatrapati of Kolhapur began doing something his fellow kings considered unthinkable. He walked into the Charmakar leather workshops of Subhashnagar and sat down on the packed-earth floor next to cobblers while they worked. He watched an old craftsman pull a strip of vegetable-tanned buffalo leather across his knee and stitch it, without nails or glue, into the T-strap of a Kolhapuri chappal. He placed a state order for several hundred pairs. He announced, loud enough that everyone in the lane could hear, that the craft was the pride of his kingdom.
One hundred and twenty-three years later, in June 2025, the Italian fashion house Prada walked a pair of brown leather sandals down a Milan runway for its Spring/Summer 2026 men's show. The sandals were unmistakably Kolhapuri chappals: the braided T-strap, the single-piece sole, the hand-stitched edges. The show notes did not mention Kolhapur. Within forty-eight hours the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce and the Kolhapur artisan cooperatives had filed formal protests. Within a week Prada had issued a public acknowledgement of the craft and opened talks with Kolhapur cobblers. The Charmakars of Subhashnagar, who had been making these sandals for eight hundred years, suddenly had the world's attention. Shahu Maharaj's old idea, that the craft was the pride of the kingdom, had become, for one news cycle, the pride of the planet.
Two Traditions Under One Word
Indian traditional footwear is not one craft. It is at least two. The Kolhapuri chappal is a flat leather sandal stitched from a single piece of vegetable-tanned hide, still made in the districts around Kolhapur in Maharashtra and across the border in northern Karnataka. The mojari, also called jutti or mojdi, is a curled-toe embroidered slipper covered in gold thread, mirrors, or silk, still made in Jaipur, Jodhpur, Delhi, Amritsar, and Lucknow. They sit on opposite ends of the Indian footwear spectrum. The chappal is a working person's craft descended from village tanneries. The jutti is a court craft descended from Mughal palace workshops. Both are art. Both almost died in the twentieth century. Both are being rebuilt in the twenty-first.