Meera Muzaffar Ali

Address:J-94,Saket,New Delhi - 110017, 
Telephone:+91 11 26524135
+91 11 26527154
E-mail:muzaffar_ali@yahoo.com


Kotwara, an international couture brand, crafted by filmmaker, painter, Muzaffar Ali – the Raja of Kotwara, and his architect wife Meera Ali was established in 1990 to revive the traditional craft of the region of Awadh, India, through sensitively understanding its ethos, upgrading its design content and modern day universal relevance in it's application. Innovations from Kotwara are based on forms inspired by different craft techniques expressed in a variety of different ways and silhouettes. Zardozi and Chikankari has been the forte of Kotwara with some of the finest craftspeople working for generations at Anhalwara Palace, Kotwara in Lakhimpur Kheri and Kotwara House, Qaiserbagh Palace Complex, Lucknow.

Over the last 20 years, Kotwara has been a symbol of style and elegance reinventing embroidery and weaving and creating silhouettes which have a timeless quality. Kotwara has been blending cultures and styles from different parts of India ~ Lucknow, Kashmir, Hyderabad, Kerala, Bengal ~ integrating the best into an Indian idiom.

Kotwara supports the Dwar Pe Rozi Society ~ Employment at Doorstep ~ aimed at emancipation of women and rural India through humanistic education and craft. The Society runs a school based on these values producing extremely self confident rural youth poised to take charge of their lives. It is also supported by the Rumi Foundation, which uses communication arts to sensitize the world to the oneness of human race.

Kotwara has been a pioneer in promoting Sufi music in India and has created several titles composed by Muzaffar Ali with artists like Abida Parveen, Shubha Mudgal, Sukhwinder Singh, and Hansraj Hans amongst others. With this genre of music, Muzaffar Ali created a World Sufi Music Festival, Jahan e Khusrau, dedicated to Hazrat Amir Khusrau, a decade ago under the aegis of the Rumi Foundation. This festival has been held in the Delhi and this year it traveled to London. It brings together the poetry music of the entire sub continent and the world in a unique celebration. Rumi Foundation also publishes ‘Hu – The Sufi Way’, a journal to celebrate the mystic poetry of different poets and regions with its fifth issue on the Sufis of Awadh under production. The past issues have been on Hazrat Amir Khusrau, Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, Sufis and Rishis of Kashmir and Sufis of the Punjab. Recently Muzaffar Ali presented a program of ghazals of poets of Hyderabad at the Chowmahala Palace in the voice of Abida Parveen with recitals by himself.