Master the vanishing Indian artform of edible filigreeThe Art of Gohona BoriNow in focus

Gohona Bori is a delicate love letter written in lentil batter and sunlight. Join us for a two-day village residency in Purba Medinipur to learn the fine art of hand-piped ornaments.(Sessions run on alternate weekends from Dec 2026 to Feb 2027)

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Winter 26–27

The Gohona Bori Residency

Claim your spotat the winter piping table.

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Season: Dec ’26 – Feb ’27
First session: 5–7 December 2026
Each session: Two nights · food and stay included
Group size: 3–4 families at most

Close-up of a young woman's hand piping Gohona Bori from a cloth bag onto a board dusted with poppy seed, rows of finished patterns in front

The most fragile masterpieces adorn your plate

Gohona Bori — also called Naksha Bori — is made by soaking lentils overnight, grinding them into a paste, seasoning it, and then piping that paste by hand into patterns so fine they look like alpana drawn in relief. The shaped bori are set out in the winter sun to dry, then fried and eaten.

‘Gohona’ means jewellery. The name is literal. The patterns pressed into each piece are the same motifs a Bengali household would recognise from ornaments and from the alpana painted on a courtyard floor.

Nandalal Bose called them jewels found in the frangible box of Mother Bengal. Rabindranath Tagore was struck enough by the designs to have them preserved on the walls of Visva-Bharati.

Crafted only when the winter air bites just right

The season decides, not us.

The batter needs cold air to rise properly while it is being whisked. The shaped bori need clear, mellow winter sun to dry to the right crispness and the right white.

If the sky clouds over halfway through a day’s work, the batch is lost — soaked lentil paste cannot be stored and used later.

Which is why sessions run only between November and February, when the mornings here sit around 10–15°C. It is also why the shop takes orders in advance and nothing is available year-round.

In a nutshell

Two winter nights, hand crafted, in village stillness

The Garden House: an orange guest cottage with tin roof and veranda chairs

Two nights

You arrive, the lentils go into water overnight, and the batter is built over two stages the next day. You are guided through grinding, shaping and setting out.

Entirely by hand

No machines. The lentils are ground on sheel-nora, the traditional stone. Purists say a blender changes the texture, and here we agree with the purists.

Woman in hairnet wiping a jar of homemade pickle

You take it home

Every bori you make over the two days goes back with you.

Three or four families

Each session takes 3–4 families at most, so that everyone gets close, hands-on guidance.

See how the 2-day ritual unfolds

Beyond the residency

Make Turiyo your own.

Every programme is custom designed, in conversation between you and the Turiyo team.

Orange house with red tin roof above the pond, ducks swimming in front

The big pond at Turiyo, ringed by palms and trees, seen from the ghat

Where you stay

A two-acre village property, nine generations old.

You stay at the Maiti Bastu (the family homestead) in Chauddhachuli — a remote village in Khejuri II, Purba Medinipur. The original quadrangular mud house has given way to brick, but the trees, the ponds and the contours of the land are as they were. The stay is not accommodation attached to a workshop. It is half the reason to come.

The Stay →

Welcome to Turiyo Residency · Turiyo, on YouTube

Why Turiyo

Turiyo: the fourth.

তুরীয়Sanskrit for “the fourth”

Turiyo is the state of pure consciousness beyond waking, dreaming and deep sleep, described in the Mandukya Upanishad. Turiyo Residency takes its name from it.

It grew from Sandip Maiti’s Conscious Living Framework, which holds that a spiritual life need not mean leaving the material one: we live in the karmic plane, and can still walk toward consciousness through work, detachment, and the paths of devotion, knowledge and yoga, all at once.

From the Maiti family’s nine-generation Bastu in Chauddhachuli, rural Bengal, Turiyo puts that thinking into practice by keeping memories, crafts and stories alive, and passing them on.

Read the Conscious Living Framework →Sandip Maiti

What we are actually trying to do

We stopped trying to sell it.

Turiyo began working on Gohona Bori in November 2021, and for the first stretch the plan was the obvious one: build a market, scale production, get the product into cities. We have moved away from that.

The goal now is narrower and, we think, more useful. Keep the craft intact in its traditional form. Teach it to anyone genuinely interested in learning it. Let it survive on its own terms rather than on the terms commercialisation would impose on it.

A small quantity is still made to order each winter, for people who want the thing itself rather than the lesson. That is the shop. It is not the business.

The village

Chauddhachuli.

Population 3,903. Nine villages in the Haludbari gram panchayat. A haat that sets up every Wednesday and Sunday. A school founded in 1885. The ruins of what may be India’s oldest post office, twenty minutes away. Two district-champion girl footballers. A man who has sung at local ceremonies for forty years.

You will have time here. It is worth knowing where you are.

Busy village haat with banana sellers under blue tarpaulins

Places

The Haat

The village market that sets up every Wednesday and Sunday, and the lifeline of the locals.

Places

Khejuri Post Office

The ruins of what is said to be India's oldest post office, twenty minutes' drive away.

Worker at clay ovens inside the puffed rice mill

Food & work

Local Puffed Rice Mill

Muri is the staple after rice here, and a handful of local mills still make it by an indigenous process.

People

Football Champions

Two girls from Holudbari High School who became district champions in women’s football.

People

Benu Kishore Nayek

A farmer, and a full-time musician who has sung at local ceremonies for forty years.

The Village

The shop

Or just order some.

Gohona Bori in winter, pickles and Aamsotto through spring and summer, each in its own production window. All handmade by the women of Chauddhachuli. Advance booking only: quantities are fixed before each batch, and we serve a handful of customers each year.

Book ahead →

All handmade by the women of Chauddhachuli.

Past work

Before this.

Since 2020 Turiyo has run programmes in this same cluster of villages — a nursery school, an alternative learning space built with students from Ringling College, a digital primary care clinic, and a rural sports talent programme that put five hundred children on a start line in February 2026. Those projects are complete or handed on. They are the reason we are known here.