Dedicated to the Pahadi Folk
for the love of Mountains
Nikhil Negi and Muskaan Gupta met while studying at NIFT Gandhinagar in 2019. Bonded by their shared love for the mountains, its people and aligned ideologies, they began to collaborate more deeply in 2022 through their project “Footprints in the Wind”, based in Nikhil’s hometown of Lippa Village. During Muskaan’s tenure as a student at NID, the project evolved gradually, while Nikhil pursued his career as a textile designer, working closely with craft clusters across Himachal Pradesh.
In 2025, they founded their collective, Forgotten Folks.
Through this initiative, they aim to document Pahadi communities, focusing on lived experiences, cultural knowledge and everyday resilience. Their work seeks to preserve indigenous narratives while creating space for respectful representation and context-sensitive engagement with mountain communities.
Handgrown
Slowly but surely, we help ensure steady demand for indigenous produce, so farmers can earn more without worrying about buyers, thereby strengthening the local economy.
Handmade
We work with the community to create and promote handloom and handicraft products, where artisans are involved as creators, so they can earn with dignity and crafts continue to flourish.
Handtold
We aim to build a circular ecosystem where profits flow back into the community through projects on ecology, folklore, and oral history, shared through films, archives, photo stories and more.
ARTIST BIO
Nikhil Negi
Nikhil Negi (b. 1999, India) is a textile designer and handicraft enthusiast from Lippa, Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh. Growing up, he developed a closeness to the traditional arts and crafts of his people, inspiring him to pursue a degree in Textile Design from the National Institute of Fashion Technology. Here, he won the award for Best Graduation Project (2022) for his work “Taseer” fabrics in Jacquard , inspired from the imprints in soil left during the COVID-19 migration.
Early in his career, he recognised problematics in how craftspeople are represented in the commercial ecosystem, prompting reflection on his role within it. Grounded in lived experience, his practice focuses on reviving interest in community crafts through collaborative efforts that dignify craftspeople, not as labourers, but as artists in their own right. He has worked with traditional textiles such as Kulluvi and Kinnauri weaving, Lahouli knitting, and Tsugden carpet weaving, with local wool remaining his primary material of choice.
ARTIST BIO
Muskaan Gupta
Muskaan Gupta (b.2000, India) is a visual artist from Dehradun, Uttarakhand. She completed her Bachelor of Design from National Institute of Fashion Technology, Gandhinagar where she was the awardee for Best Academic Performance (2022). Immediately after, she pursued her Master of Design in Photography from NID which she completed in 2025.
She was awarded the Ford Foundation Grant for her work on ecology and folklore within the Kinnaura tribe as well as won the TOTO Award for Photography (2025) for the same.
Coming from the western Himalayan region, her practice focuses on representing the changing landscape and the communities connected to it. She works closely with materials and people, letting her surroundings shape her process. Muskaan's work spans photography, filmmaking, sculpture, painting and collage. Simultaneously she also explores and experiments with darkroom printing and alternate processes to produce images.