new announcement is coming soon !!
गुरु कृपा
Sheesh Mahal Sohna Since 1974
Three generations, one workroom.
Sheesh Mahal Sohna began as a single room in Nehru Bazar, Sohna, with two looms and a family that could not bear to sell cloth it had not seen made.01
The shop on Nehru Bazar
Walk into Baba Salasar Market and you will find the same ground-floor room, a little wider now. Bolts stacked to the ceiling, a bench worn smooth by fifty years of women sitting down to think, and someone who will pull out nine sarees before you decide on the second. Nobody here works on commission. If a piece is not right for you, we will say so.
02
Three generations, one counter
My grandfather opened it in 1974 with money borrowed from his brother. My father learnt to tell real zari from imitation by the weight of it in his palm, in this room, standing where you are standing. I grew up under that counter. The shop has never been sold, franchised, or handed to anyone outside the family — and it never will be.
03
The people who actually make it
Ram Prakash in Varanasi has woven our katan for thirty-one years. The chikankari comes from four households in Lucknow, the same four since 2003 — Nasreen does the shadow work, her sister the jaali. We pay before the piece is finished, never after it sells, because a karigar with rent due cannot wait on our sales figures. Their names are on the tag.
04
Where the cloth comes from
We buy in small lots, in person, twice a year. No agents, no bulk mills, no white-label bundles bought sight unseen. It means we sometimes have four of a saree and never five, and that a weave you loved may not come again. We would rather that than sell you something we cannot vouch for.
05
Why it takes as long as it takes
A bridal lehenga is fourteen weeks because nine hundred hours of zardozi cannot be hurried. A fall and pico takes an afternoon because a machine can do it in ten minutes and a person does it better. We finish every piece before it leaves and cut it to your measurements — a garment that does not fit is not a garment, it is a regret in a cupboard.
06
Why we bother
Because a handloom saree outlives the woman who buys it. Ours are worn at weddings, then at their daughters’, then cut down into something else. Selling that is not retail — it is being trusted with an occasion. Fifty years in, that is still the part we cannot get used to.
@sheeshmahalsohna
New arrivals, the workroom, and what our customers are wearing.
