Above, threads of silk and cotton seem to pour and swirl in intricate, hand-stitched embroidery designs of beads, disks, sequins, glass, crystals, lace and their own patterned and built-up stitching: It's all "precious goods"—maal.

edrolls and suitcases line the workshop's walls, but their owners are not likely to get much sleep, nor will they be visiting their families back in West Bengal and Bihar anytime soon. Nor is the overhead television turned on, as it might be if a cricket match were being played and work were slow. Only the day's several tea breaks interrupt the breakneck schedule.

In coming weeks, brides, grooms and their extended families from many of India's top socialite families will depend on these men to finish bedecking their wedding garments in a manner that, in a former time, would have well pleased even the most demanding prince or rajah. For design partners and workshop owners Abu Jani and Sandeep Kholsa, this is as it should be: Indian pride in the famous Indian art of embroidery, which they have done much to foster.

Abu and Sandeep have placed Indian embroidered garments, such as the shervani (knee-length coat fitted closely at the waist), the gote (wide, flared pajama pants), the ghagra (multi-panel wedding skirt), the dupatta (stole-like head covering) and the kurta and kurti (long and short tunic), on Hollywood red carpets and Mayfair runways— not to mention in Bollywood itself and at the lavish parties of New Delhi industrialists. Their Mumbai shop, in smart Kemps Corner, sells saris for $9000 and shervanis for $16,000. For a single wedding, some 50 garments might be sold to one family for the several daytime and nighttime appearances

The art of Mughal-style embroidery starts with an abundance of raw materials, from a profusion of ornamental maal above to thread, below, that varies by material, weight and color.

Yet for 37-year-old embroiderer Rehmat Shaikh, a married man with a young son in his West Bengal village four hours from Calcutta, his monthly salary of 8000 rupees ($200) seems like decent pay. His brother working on the railroad back home makes much less, he says, and risks his life every day. Shaikh meanwhile takes pride in his precise and artful work. "I know no less than 1000 different designs," he says, not an unreasonable number given the great variety of embroidery pieces—in metal, cotton, silk, plastic, glass and Swarovski crystal, all known collectively as maal, literally meaning "material" or "stuff," but here with the connotation of "precious goods"—that he applies to the fabric with different stitches and knots.

François Bernier, the French physician in Mughal emperor Aurangzeb's court, wrote of much the same work 300 years ago in his Travels in the Moghal Empire: "Large halls are seen in many places, called karkanahs, or workshops for the artisans. In one hall, embroiderers are busily employed, superintended by a master." He continued, "[M]anufactures of silk, fine brocade, and other fine muslins, of which are made turbans, girdles of gold flowers, and drawers worn by females, so delicately fine as to wear out in one night" might cost up to 10 or 12 crowns, "or even more when embroidered with fine needlework."

But in at least one way, things have changed. Bernier noted, "In this quiet and regular manner, their time glides away, no one aspiring to any improvement in the condition of life wherein he happens to have been born. The embroiderer brings up his son as an embroiderer." No more: Shaikh's father was a farmer, and Shaikh wants his own son to grow up to work as an it man in an office in Bangalore. Perhaps due to the globalized garment trade and to the growth of India's middle class, both at home and abroad, whose members can afford fine embroidery work, many more workers have entered the embroidery trade than in previous generations, and it seems likely that many kinds of office work will be available to the generation that will follow.

Shamina Talyarkhan, founder of Shameeza Embroideries, reviews orders from New York, which are then listed on an erasable board.

Shaikh's specialty is zardozi. This uses a straight needle with cotton or silk thread in a cross-stitch, often to apply all varieties of maal, frequently in gold and silver, to the fabric. Zardozi is a highly creative art and may use nothing more than colored threads to create organic or geometric designs, sometimes couched over a paper cutout called a wasli to raise the pattern or runstitched along the folds of a pleated metallic ribbon, called gota, to create the veins and ribs of a leaf or petal. The craftsman can also freely modulate both the length of the stitch and its orientation on the fabric, crosshatch the stitching alternately on the diagonal or use French knotting to vary shimmer and smoothness.

Working four, five or six to a frame, young craftsmen often choose the embroidery trade in pursuit of upward mobility.

Abu's and Sandeep's 33-year-old floor supervisor is soft-spoken Firoz Malik, who can lend a hand with the workshop's other main embroidery technique, ari, which is done with the same kind of hooked needle used in French tambour lace-making, itself a craft of Eastern origin. Firoz's eighth-grade education is considered advanced for a man in the needle trade.

The ari needle is held vertically like a dental pick, moving up and down rapidly in a sewing-machine motion. Firoz first picks up the maal one by one onto the barrel of his needle. He punches the needle down through the fabric and, with his left hand holding a spool of thread underneath the embroidery frame, makes a quick loop around the needle's hook before pulling the thread back up through the fabric and over a millimeter left or right, thereby fixing the maal in place before making the next upand- down needle punch. The ari needles are of different sizes, depending on whether the thread is single, double or triple, and according to the diameter of the holes in the sequins and beads that are being attached.

During the height of the wedding season, many sleep in the shop at night and each morning place their bedrolls on overhead shelves.

Ari work goes faster than zardozi, but if it's done carelessly, the chain stitch on the underside of the fabric can unravel if the thread is broken in any one place. Having to tie stop knots to mend it breaks the rhythm and jars the smooth, fast lines that ari is known for, so embroiderers must get it right the first time. A flower pattern measuring 10 by 25 centimeters (4 x 10") might take an ari man 15 hours, which is about half the time of a zardozi job of the same area.

Both ari and zardozi embroidery work are said to be of Persian origin and were perfected under the Mughals. An even finer Persian embroidery called chikan kari reached nearperfection under the nawabs of Awadh in the 19th century; that has been revived and brought to an even higher level by Abu and Sandeep. Using untwisted cotton thread on cotton fabric in white and off-white tones, chikan work is known for its 35 unique stitches, including shadow (applied underneath the fabric, so the top side is smooth yet shaded from below); jaali (separates the warp and weft threads into bundles of four within a reinforced perimeter, thereby making screen-like perforations in the fabric); and murri (shaped like grains of puffed rice). Each one is simple yet very elegant. The chikan workers are all village women, and they do not work with the men in Mumbai: They work in a haveli, or country house, outside Lucknow.

Abu and Sandeep's design department is staffed with recent graduates of India's top fashion institutes, all with a practical, problem- solving outlook. One recent project was to lighten a Rabari-style coat—traditionally made by that tribe in the Kutch area of Gujarat— which uses glass mirrors stitched into place in a mosaic pattern. But such work is impractical for modern wear and impossible to drape attractively. The designers replaced the glass with metal foil in different hues, thus achieving the same reflective quality, broadening the color palette and at the same time lightening the wearer's shoulder load enormously.

In the 16th century, in the time of the Mughal emperor Akbar, his vizier Abu al- Fazl ibn Mubarak wrote in the Ain-i Akbari, a logbook of his emperor's reign:
His majesty pays much attention to various stuffs; hence Irani, European, and Mongolian articles of wear are in much abundance…. The imperial workshops in the towns of Lahore, Agra, Fatehpur, Ahmedabad and Gujarat turn out many masterpieces of workmanship, and the figures and patterns, knots and variety of fashions which now prevail astonish experienced travelers.… [A] taste for fine material has since become general, and the drapery used at feasts surpasses every description.

In central Mumbai, Shamina Talyarkhan has long astonished even the most experienced travelers with her eye for fashion. Recently named by Time magazine as one of the world's top businesswomen in the luxury trade, she remembers how she started in the 1970's. Freshly arrived in New York, wearing saris and lugging suitcases of embroidered dresses up and down Fifth Avenue, she found disappointment. "They didn't buy," she says, "but I learned something important—how to design and sell embroidered pieces to famous couturiers— people like Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent, Escada, Ralph Lauren and Reem Acra—so they could fit them into their own creations."

Now, her busy workshop in Mumbai's Worli district turns out swatches, samples and full production runs for these and other top designers. "We start with pure ideas," she says, "playing back and forth with mood prompts and word associations. Then I turn them into a swatch, and I get feedback, then into a full size sample, and get more feedback. Only then do I go into production." The order board hanging near the supervisors' station lists current and upcoming jobs by level of urgency. Today, all of them seem to need to be finished and shipped by tonight.

Her men embroider Mughal-style elements onto panels of western fabrics like tulle, georgette and chiffon, which are then re-sewn into garments ranging from ball gowns and wedding dresses to fancy sweaters and casual jackets. At first, it seems strange to see fine Indian stitchery combined with suede, or crushed and coiled crepe, or tiger-stripe-printed silk, pleated and covered with peekaboo black netting. But then it all makes perfect fashion sense: Just as in Akbar's time, it is an amalgam of diverse tastes and traditions.

"My motifs are inspired by all kinds of sources," says Shamina, as she points to her library of pattern books and museum catalogues, "from bidri, or inlaid metal, and glassware patterns, Mughal textiles in the V&A's collection, even miniature paintings. But I had to educate my workers too about quality control. My fabrics are mostly pale greens and pinks, lavenders and peach tones, and their hands were often soiled from long bus commutes. Luckily, soap flakes usually did the job. My biggest problem was the apprentices' reluctance to use thimbles. Blood dripping from pricked fingers just doesn't wash out!"

The process of arranging an embroidery frame is almost as complicated as setting up a loom. Cloth must be stretched tight to be embroidered, but Shamina's fabrics are usually too delicate to be stretched and embroidered directly; they must first be stitched flat onto a stronger nylon-mesh backing. The backing is then stretched over the frame by a cord with multiple loops. The desired patterns are then pounced onto the stretched fabric using chalk powder and paper templates perforated with pinholes. Four to six men can work comfortably around one frame, sometimes working on a single large pattern, more frequently working on multiple smaller pieces to be cut out and sewn individually onto sleeves, backs and bodices. The needle must be pushed firmly through both the base fabric and the nylon-mesh backing. When the job is complete, the mesh threads are unraveled and pulled away one by one, leaving the fine fabric free with the embroidery work intact.

Haze silhouettes skyscrapers in Mumbai, top; in New York, above, a shipment of embroidery awaits unpacking at Shameeza Embroideries, where other finished dresses, below, await their clients.

Twenty-six-year-old Muhammad Khalid from Bihar is working on a painstaking four-handed job with his bench-mate Tasleem Muhammad, shaping and holding down the pleats of a flower design to be sewn tightly in place. If it is not done right and consistently, the quality controllers who inspect each piece will send it back to be redone. Muhammad and Tasleem are part of a larger production team responsible for a six-week job: 270 pieces of four panels each, later to be cut out of the fabric and tailored individually into each dress.

At another frame, ari workers are fixing five different kinds of blue beads as well as square and round sequins onto the fabric. A needleman picks up each shape in a repeated sequence, sometimes stacking two of the same shape at a single position in order to add a third dimension to the design. To save time and motion, an expert might pick up multiple beads onto his needle, which he can drop one by one into each chain stitch without having to pick them up individually. A needleman's eyes are the first thing to deteriorate in this work—not backs or legs as in Mumbai's unskilled trades—and threading a needle is easy in comparison to stitching tiny beads into a perfect line with zero tolerance for disorder.

Shamina's best workers, she says, are her swatch makers, because it is the swatches that are scrutinized back in the New York or Paris design studios before approval for full production. Even so, swatches sometimes go through several versions, sent back and forth to Mumbai with cryptic comments handwritten on the order card, like something on a doctor's prescription pad: "Only 1 and 3 dot rows, no 4 dots," or "Add space between floating fade out beads," or "Fewer sequins per dot," and on and on.

When jobs back up in Shamina's workshop, she sends them out to her subcontractor, Muhammad Muazzam Siddiqui, one of Mumbai's many start-up embroidery entrepreneurs who are satisfying the demand for handmade pieces, which has exploded thanks to Internet-based marketing and sales. Any Web site selling low-end Indian garments offers much the same kind of ari and zardozi stitchery, but the difference is not only that the maal is plastic and glass rather than gold and crystal, but also—and critically—that the detail, the quality control and the overall coverage of the cloth is far less than what Shamina, Abu and Sandeep produce.

Among Siddiqui's 40 employees, all clustered around 15 embroidery frames, is 22-year-old Mustaqim Shaikh, from Mednapur village in West Bengal. Shaikh started as an apprentice near his home after finishing fourth grade and, ever since coming to Mumbai six years ago, has felt that he made the right decision. Looking over at his boss, he says he sees himself wearing those shoes in the not-so-distant future. After all, he explains, in a prospering country that adds hundreds of thousands of cars to its roads every month, it is only natural that more people than ever are buying the most finely embroidered kurtas and kurtis, saris and dupattas.

Louis Werner (wernerworks@msn.com) is a writer and filmmaker living in New York City.

David H. Wells (www.davidhwells.com) is a freelance documentary photographer affiliated with Aurora Photos. He specializes in intercultural communications and the use of light and shadow to enhance visual narrative, and has twice won Fulbright fellowships for work in India. His photography regularly appears in leading magazines. A frequent teacher of photography, he publishes The Wells Point at www.thewellspoint.com.