Opening Keynote Address during the Grand Opening of the 10th Anniversary Jubilee of the Global Sustainable Fashion Week - “The Fabric of Heritage and Sustainability” 

18 September 2026

Hon’ble Mayor, Excellencies, Representatives of the Hungarian Government, designers, weavers, friends of cloth, and the fashionable people of Budapest,

Jó reggelt kívánok.

Thanks to Mayor of Budapest, colleagues from the Canadian Embassy, all sponsors and organisers for this invitation. It is a particular pleasure to speak about Indian heritage of textiles in Hungary, because this is a country that has never treated cloth as a trivial thing.

Let me begin with a word. In Sanskrit, the word sutra means a thread, and it also means a text. The word tantra comes from a root meaning to stretch, as a warp is stretched on a loom, and it too came to mean a system of thought. In Latin, texere means to weave, and from it we get both textile and text. Two languages, far apart, arrived at the same intuition: that to weave and to compose are the same act. Cloth is not decoration. Cloth is a way of thinking, and every civilisation that has one has written some part of itself into it.

Today, I want to talk about what India has written into cloth over five thousand years, why that record turns out to be startlingly relevant to the questions European fashion is now asking itself, and what the agreement concluded between India and the European Union in January opens up for the businesses in Hungary.

But I want to start in Hungary, and specifically in front of a vat of blue dye.

Anyone who has visited the old blue dye works at Pápa knows the scene. Bolts of linen. Carved wooden blocks, some of them two and three hundred years old. A resist paste whose recipe each family guarded. The cloth dipped, lifted, oxidised in the air, dipped again, until white patterns stand clear on deep blue. In 2018, UNESCO inscribed kékfestés on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, together with the closely related traditions of Austria, Czechia, Germany and Slovakia.

Now consider what is in that vat. Until the seventeenth century, European dyers used woad. Then a stronger, deeper, faster dyestuff arrived from Asia and displaced it almost entirely. The Greeks had called it indikon, which means, simply, the Indian thing. The colour that gives Hungarian folk textile its identity carries the name of my country in its own name.

And consider the method. Resist paste applied with hand-carved wooden blocks, then immersion in indigo, then repeated dipping and airing. In Kutch, in Bagru, in Sanganer, Indian printers have worked to that same grammar for centuries. Our ajrakh cloth passes through sixteen or more stages of printing, washing, mordanting and sun-drying, resist against indigo and madder. When a Hungarian kékfestő and an Indian ajrakh printer meet, they do not need an interpreter. They need a table and a set of blocks.

Even the vocabulary is shared.

Chintz comes from the Hindi chhint.

Calico comes from Calicut.

Khaki is the Hindi word for dust-coloured.

Bandana comes from bandhani, our tie-resist dyeing.

Dungaree comes from a district of Bombay.

Cashmere is Kashmir.

Pyjama is Persian by way of India.

European fashion has been speaking Indian for three centuries without always noticing.

Heritage Indian textiles have long fascinated the world. The muslins of Bengal were called ab-e-rawan, running water, and baft-hawa, woven air, and shabnam, evening dew, because a length laid on wet grass at dawn became invisible. Yarn was spun at counts that no machine has since matched, in humid riverside sheds, often by young women whose eyesight was good enough for the work for only a few years. A full sari would pass through a finger ring.

Then Kashmir. The kani shawl is not embroidered and not printed. It is twill tapestry, built up weft by weft with dozens of small wooden bobbins, one for each colour, following a coded pattern read aloud by a master. A single fine shawl could take two or three years. When Napoleon's officers came back from Egypt with Kashmir shawls, Europe lost its head. Joséphine owned them by the hundred and had them cut up into cushions and dresses, which horrified everybody and settled the fashion. The looms of Lyon, Norwich and Paisley set themselves to imitating the Kashmiri buta motif. They imitated it so persistently that the world now calls that motif paisley, after a Scottish town that copied it.

And then chintz. On the Coromandel coast, artisans drew with a bamboo pen, the kalam, applying mordants and resists so that madder and indigo would bind permanently to cotton. The results were bright, washable and fast, and Europe could not reproduce them. Painted hangings and bed covers went into Dutch and English and French houses by the shipload. The response was instructive. In 1686 France banned printed Indian cottons. England followed with the Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721, forbidding first their import and then, remarkably, the wearing of them. Europe protected itself from Indian cloth by legislation because it could not defeat it in the market.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, on the standard estimates, India was producing something close to a quarter of the world's manufactured goods, and the greatest part of that was textiles. By the beginning of the twentieth century that share had fallen to around two per cent. That collapse is a long story of European imperial tyrrany, and I will not tell it today. I will tell you instead what one man did about it.

Mohandas Gandhi returned to India in 1915 and concluded that the most consequential thing an Indian could do was to spin.

It sounds absurd. It was not. The British empire's economics ran through cloth: Indian raw cotton shipped out, Lancashire cloth shipped back. Gandhi proposed that Indians spin their own yarn on a simple wheel, the charkha, weave it into coarse hand cloth, and wear nothing else. Khadi. He spun daily for the rest of his life. He required it of everyone around him. In 1921 the spinning wheel went into the centre of the Congress flag, and it is the ancestor of the wheel on the flag of India today. Even now, by long convention and by specification, the Indian national flag is made of hand-spun, hand-woven khadi.

The genius of it was that it turned a domestic act into a political one. Anyone could join. A woman in a village with no vote and no property could participate in the freedom movement for one hour a day at a wheel that cost almost nothing. Cloth became the instrument through which an unarmed movement reached the economic foundations of the most powerful empire on earth.

Khadi is why an Indian audience will never accept that handmade cloth is a niche. It is the one fabric in the world that helped end an empire.

And it is not a museum piece. In the financial year 2025-26, the Khadi and Village Industries Commission recorded a turnover of close to twenty billion euro. Khadi textile sales alone have risen more than sixfold in twelve years. Over twenty million people now draw livelihood from the khadi and village industries ecosystem. My Prime Minister, Narendra Modi has promoted it relentlessly, young Indian designers have made it fashionable, and khadi has walked the runway from Delhi to Paris.

A handloom consumes no electricity. None. The power source is a human body, and the fuel is lunch. There is no boiler, no motor, no drive shaft. The loom is made of local timber and can be repaired by the weaver. Production is distributed across some three and a half million weavers and allied workers in over thirty-one lakh households, mostly rural, of whom more than seventy per cent are women working within their own homes and villages. India today makes roughly ninety-five per cent of the world's handwoven cloth. Almost everywhere else, this capacity simply disappeared.

The raw materials are an argument in themselves. Indian weavers work with dozens of indigenous cottons, including the rain-fed kala cotton of Kutch that needs no irrigation. India is the only country on earth that produces all four commercial silks: mulberry, tasar, eri and muga. Eri is called peace silk because the moth leaves the cocoon before it is processed. Muga, a natural gold that gets brighter with washing, grows nowhere but Assam. Then pashmina from goats at four and a half thousand metres in Ladakh, sheep wool from the Himalaya, jute, linen, hemp, Himalayan nettle, banana and bamboo fibre, and lotus stem thread from Manipur. The dye shelf is madder, indigo, chay root, myrobalan, pomegranate rind, turmeric, catechu, lac, and iron filings fermented with jaggery for black.

The techniques are a grammar. Jamdani, where the pattern is inlaid by hand with a supplementary weft, thread by thread, with no mechanical repeat. Ikat, where the yarn is tied and dyed before weaving, so the design has to be calculated in advance and appears only as the cloth grows, and in the double ikat patola of Patan both warp and weft are dyed in that way and must meet exactly. Bandhani and leheriya. Kalamkari and ajrakh. The gold-wrapped zari brocades of Banaras. The airy extra-weft of Chanderi and Maheshwari. Phulkari, chikankari, kantha. And behind each of these a named place: Kanjeevaram, Paithani, Baluchari, Sambalpuri, Kota Doria, Bhagalpur, Uppada, Kullu. A great many today carry Geographical Indication protection, which is, if you think about it, a product passport invented long before anyone asked for one.

Now the part I find most compelling. Consider the sari. It is a single rectangle of cloth. It is not cut. There are no offcuts, no waste, no pattern pieces, no sizing. It fits whoever wears it, at whatever size, through pregnancy and age and weight. It is handed down. When it wears thin, several old saris are layered and joined with running stitch into a kantha quilt, which is itself a celebrated art form. When the quilt goes, the cloth becomes a floor rag, a bag, a lamp wick. Zero waste design, extended use, repair, reuse, and finally cascading down to a lower-value application. That is the circular economy as a textbook would define it, embodied in an object two thousand years older than the phrase.

Look at what European law is now requiring. The EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles. The Ecodesign Regulation, with its ban on the destruction of unsold clothing. Digital Product Passports arriving for textiles. Mandatory extended producer responsibility across every member state by 2028. Durability, repairability, traceability, natural fibres, low embodied energy, no overproduction. Europe is legislating, at considerable effort, for a way of making cloth that millions of Indians never stopped practising.

This is not left to nostalgia. Prime Minister Modi's framing for the sector is what he calls the 5F vision: Farm to Fibre to Factory to Fashion to Foreign, one integrated chain from the cotton field to the export order.

Under it: National Handloom Day every 7th of August, the date chosen for the anniversary of the Swadeshi movement of 1905. The Handloom Mark and the India Handloom Brand to certify authenticity. The National Handloom Development Programme, which has put close to two thousand crore rupees into 794 handloom clusters, upgraded looms for over a lakh of weavers and skill training for around ninety thousand workers. A law reserving eleven categories of article for hand production. A new Mission for Cotton Productivity approved this May, which deliberately widens India's fibre base into flax, ramie, sisal, bamboo and banana. Kasturi Cotton, our traceable branded cotton. A new Centre of Excellence for Handloom Technology at IIT Delhi. And Bharat Tex, which this July brought together participants from 130 countries in Delhi.

All of it sits inside Mission LiFE, the Prime Minister's call for lifestyles that are light on the earth, and inside the target of a 350 billion dollar textile sector with 100 billion dollars of exports by 2030.

Which brings me to why this event is well timed.

On the 27th of January this year, in New Delhi, India and the European Union concluded negotiations on the largest trade agreement either side has ever made. Two billion people. About a quarter of world GDP. Ratification is now under way on both sides, and when the agreement enters into force, European duties on Indian textiles and apparel fall to zero from the first day. Those duties currently run between roughly four and twelve per cent, and the labour-intensive sectors covered account for some thirty-three billion dollars of Indian exports. A parallel track covers geographical indications, which protects Tokaji and Szegedi paprika on your side and Kanjeevaram and Pashmina on ours.

This translates into four practical propositions for the businesses-

First, sourcing. Small-batch, natural-fibre, hand-woven fabric, with a named cluster and a documented method behind it, arriving at zero duty, from a supply base that can already answer the questions a Digital Product Passport is going to ask.

Second, design partnership. Hungarian design education and the Hungarian fashion sector working with Indian clusters. Kalocsa and Matyó motifs interpreted on Chanderi. Hungarian blue dyers and Indian block carvers in the same workshop. I would like this Embassy to help make that happen, and we will.

Third, trade in the other direction. As Indian tariffs come down, India's enormous investment in textile processing, water recycling, effluent treatment, testing and instrumentation becomes a market for Hungarian engineering and chemistry. The PM MITRA parks are being built now.

Fourth, technical textiles. Hungary's automotive and medical manufacturing needs advanced materials, and India is building that capacity at scale. There are joint ventures waiting to be formed.

India and Europe have been crossing threads for a long time. What is in front of us now is the chance to make something load-bearing out of that: not sentiment, but cloth, and orders, and workshops, and livelihoods in Hungarian towns and Indian villages at the same time.

Fashion has spent thirty years learning to make things faster and cheaper. It is now being asked, by its customers and by its regulators, to make things that last, that can be repaired, that can be traced, and that leave the earth roughly as they found it. India has never done it any other way.

Thank You.