Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum presents En Route, a collaboration between Maria Grazia Chiuri, Karishma Swali and the Chanakya School. The exhibition explores the concepts of mapping and discovery at two different sites, the Vatican in Rome and the museum in Mumbai. The art works express an artistic synergy that reveals layers of meaning through painstaking craftsmanship, and acquire a potent resonance in the 19th century Museum that is a storehouse of India’s great craft traditions and the history of the city. The works are an archive of textile traditions that have travelled with merchants, pilgrims, migrants and artisans, continually evolving through exchange.

In the Museum’s central exhibition rooms, art works presented in 2025 in the Vatican Apostolic Library are displayed for the first time in India. Commissioned as a site-specific installation for their Jubilee year, the Vatican invited Maria Grazia Chiuri and Karishma Swali to create a body of work in dialogue with the collections. Within one of the world's oldest libraries, the artist and designer duo encountered the writings of six women whose journeys became the starting point for En route. Their writings reveal a form of scholarship grounded in curiosity, observation and experience. The stories of these six intrepid women who challenged conventions in the 19th century are creatively interpreted through overlapping cartographic impressions, rendered with various embroidery techniques, almost as if each stitch retraces the women’s steps in an act of solidarity and homage.

From the Vatican Apostolic Library to Mumbai, En Route considers how knowledge travels, how it is preserved, and how each generation finds new ways of taking it forward.

The exhibition marks the fortieth anniversary of Chanakya's founding.