Made slowly, in Sillanwali.
A three-hundred-year craft, carried across a border in memory, kept alive in one small town in Sargodha.
1710 — an art is born in Kaithal
The naqshihand-scratched lacquer pattern lacquer tradition traces to the town of Kaithal, in the Punjab of undivided India, around 1710. It is remembered in the lineage of Ustad Karmi, whose workshops married two older skills — turning wood on a lathe and working with coloured lac — into a single craft: scratch a design back through the lac and the colours beneath surface as fine rainbow lines.
For over two centuries the craft passed from ustadmaster artisan to apprentice, hand to hand, without a written manual. The knowledge lived in the wrists.
1947 — carried across a border
At Partition in 1947, artisan families packed what mattered — their tools, their sticks of lac, and three centuries of instinct — and crossed into the new Pakistan. Many settled in Sillanwali, a town in the Sargodha district of Punjab.
What could have been lost in the upheaval took root instead. Sillanwali became the quiet capital of Pakistani lacquer woodcraft — today home to around one hundred workshops, still working ustad to apprentice.
The craft's standing was recognised internationally when naqshi work received the UNESCO Seal of Excellence in 2007.
How a rosewood disc becomes an heirloom
Every piece moves through the same four hands-on stages — the reason no two are ever identical.
- 01
Turning
A block of sheeshamrosewood is turned on the khraadtraditional wood-lathe until it finds its shape — a plate, a box, a bead.
- 02
Layering lac
Sticks of coloured lac are pressed to the spinning wood. Friction heat melts them on in layers — red, then yellow, then green.
- 03
Scratching
The artisan scratches the design back through the layers by hand. Each cut reveals a colour beneath, so the pattern reads as rainbow lines.
- 04
Engraving
Where a piece carries a name, date, or ayat, it is engraved last — in English, Urdu, or Arabic — and confirmed with the family first.
The workshop today
We are one of Sillanwali's workshops, working the same way our craft has for generations — by hand, made to order, one piece at a time. What has changed is who the pieces are for: a plate for a nikkah, an ayat for a new home, a box named for a child, a desk set for a company.
A naqshi piece is meant to outlast the giving. Made slowly, in Sillanwali; shipped carefully, to your door; paid for in cash when it arrives.
