Shimul Sarkar
“If you come, he is the person who will teach you.”
Two days, and five hundred children.
Shimul Sarkar curates the Gohona Bori residency. He runs each session alongside his mother, Shilpa Sarkar Maiti, the trainer, and a small group of local women, guiding participants through soaking, grinding, shaping and drying across the two days.
He is a partner at Project Solitude LLP, responsible for running the entire residency programme across Kolkata and Chauddhachuli, and one of the curators at the Smritis Memory Studio. In the past he ran the Turiyo Talent Academy initiatives, staging the first Khejuri Mini Marathon in February 2026: over five hundred rural children on a start line, most of whom had never taken part in an organised sports event.
Sport is his training. He studied for a Bachelor of Sports Management at the Indian Institute of Sports Management (IISM), and worked on planning and running large events, among them Indian Super League matches and the Tata Mumbai Marathon, before bringing that experience to a village playground in Khejuri.
Shimul is from Mumbai and has lived in Chauddhachuli since 2019. He came to the craft as part of the household, watching his mother, Shilpa, being trained by his grandmother, Bandana Maiti.
What do visitors most often get wrong on the first day? Expecting a recipe. There is a great deal of detail to the art: the rise of the batter, its softness, its consistency. All of it comes from human judgement, taught by the masters, and none of it can be learned from a printed recipe.
A hidden Eden.
Shimul is also the curator of the grounds at Turiyo. In this short film he talks about his fascination with plant life, and how years of planting and building turned an empty plot into the gardens guests walk through today.
The SpaceTell us who you are and when you would like to come.