350 artisans spent 90 days crafting President Murmu's intricate Northeast-themed Republic Day invite

President Droupadi Murmu's Republic Day invitation this year arrived not as a simple card but as a carefully assembled box—the product of 350 people working across three and a half months to honor the craftsmanship of India's Northeast. The National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad orchestrated the effort, with professors Andrea Noronha, C.S. Susanth, and Ashok Mondal directing a network of 200 rural artisans scattered across the hills of Assam, Tripura, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Manipur, alongside 100 students and faculty members who assembled the pieces on campus.

The work split cleanly into two phases: forty-five days spent sourcing materials directly from villages in the Northeast, then another forty-five days of assembly and finishing at NID's Ahmedabad location. Every component inside the bamboo-mat box was handcrafted from the ground up. The invitation text itself was engraved onto a wooden slate. Around it sat objects chosen to represent each state—Assam's Gogona, a jaw harp that produces melodic tones; Tripura's delicate cane jewelry; Nagaland's stinging nettle fabric, woven from a plant that predates cotton in the region but is now practiced by only a handful of remaining artisans; Mizoram's ornate Puan Chei textile; and Manipur's Longpi black pottery, shaped in a style that echoes Neolithic traditions and decorated with the Shirui Lily.

Professor Noronha explained that pulling off such a logistical operation in mere months depended entirely on the National Institute's deep roots in these communities. The institute has alumni embedded throughout the Northeast hills—people who know the artisans personally, who understand which traditions are on the verge of disappearing, and who could connect the design team to craftspeople still practicing skills that few others remember. The stinging nettle fabric from Nagaland exemplified this: the material existed for centuries before cotton arrived, yet today almost no one weaves it. Without those on-the-ground connections, Noronha said, the invitation could not have happened. "Craft like this is created over decades," she noted. "The invite simply scratches the surface of what local craft in the North East looks like."

The invitation was designed not as a disposable object but as a permanent wall hanging—something meant to stay in a household long after Republic Day ceremonies concluded, serving as both a tribute to living traditions and a form of education about the sustainable skills still practiced in the Northeast. This year's focus on the eight Northeastern states continues a pattern established in 2025, when the same collaborative approach highlighted craftwork from five Southern states: Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh.

The timing of the invitation's completion coincides with India's choice of chief guests for the 77th Republic Day Parade at Kartavya Path in New Delhi. For the first time, the nation invited the European Union's two top leaders together—Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, and António Costa, President of the European Council. The gesture signals deepening ties between India and the EU, even as negotiations continue on a proposed Free Trade Agreement. The invitation box, then, carries a dual message: inward, celebrating the artisanal heritage that defines Indian identity; outward, signaling to Europe that India's cultural confidence is rooted in living traditions, not nostalgia.