Heritage Craft Tours
Yatrapuri is about trying to explore the Indian Heritage Sites and Indian Handicrafts. Kalapuri’s craft tours aims to connect the global traveler with India’s artisans and craft communities.
We journey into the nooks and crannies of rural India with individual travellers or travel groups, giving them a first-hand look at how India’s traditional crafts are practiced. Travellers are given the unique opportunity of interacting with artisans, watching them in the process and uncovering stories seldom found in books and travel magazines.
Each tour is completely customized, catering to the interests, tastes and budgets of individual travelers or travel groups. We work closely with our customers to make travel, accommodation and meal arrangements that meet their specific requirements.
At present we organize tours in various villages across the Kolhapur, Sangli, Sindhudurg, Raigad, Satara, Nashik, Pune of Maharashtra and Belgaum, Bagalkot, Hubli of Karnataka. We’ll soon be commencing tours to Gujarat, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.
Meet the Artisans
For nearly 23 million artisans in India, handicraft has not merely been a livelihood, it has been life itself.
​
Through age-old practices rural craftspeople have been telling stories about their day-to-day lives, their hopes and their history. Sadly, every few years many of the country’s artisans abandon the crafts that have been central to their lives, in search of more lucrative employment.
​
At Kalapuri, we aim not only to keep these waning traditions alive, but to breathe new life into the work of rural artisans.
Our efforts at present are focused in the many regions of Maharashtra and Karnataka, India, where we’ve partnered with various NGOs, SHGs. Together, we work closely with nearly 400 women (across 50+ villages) engaged in such crafts as handweaving baskets, jewellery, terracotta, sarees, embroidery, patchwork and more. We are also working with artisans creating tribal folk paintings across Maharashtra.
Our work with artisans involves organizing training programs, through which we introduce them to modern production standards and contemporary design aesthetics, identifying buyers and markets for the products created and creating or identifying platforms where the artisans, their work and their stories can be featured.