OUR STORY
Why AshVed Exists
Somewhere in India, an artist has been painting the same story for four decades, featuring a goddess, a harvest or a village retelling its own history through pigment and line. This knowledge moves from one pair of hands to the next, often unseen and rarely rewarded. The lack of sufficient income means that there is no guarantee the artist's children will want to carry it forward.
That absence of recognition is what led to AshVed. It is not a business plan, but a single conversation with an artist whose life story felt larger than the canvas in front of us.
That conversation led to more. We found ourselves drawn into Pattachitra art that carries the weight of scripture, and into Gond paintings built from dots that seem to flicker before resolving into shape. From there, we turned to India's contemporary artists, who look at our motherland and paint her as something bold and unflinching rather than nostalgic.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped believing in the line the art world draws between "folk" and "contemporary." Both are simply India examining herself, and we wanted a home where both could be placed side by side.
Both are India looking at herself.We wanted both on the same wall.
AshVed carries two names within it — the very things a tradition needs to survive its own time. It is a name built to be carried forward, the way we hope to carry forward the artists, the crafts, and the memory of those who gave us reason to begin.
Our name is built from two Sanskrit roots: Asha, meaning hope, and Ved, meaning knowledge. Together, they represent exactly what a living tradition needs in order to outlast its own era.
We chose this name because it reflects our purpose to carry forward not just artworks, but the people and practices behind them. Every tradition we work with, whether centuries old or entirely contemporary, deserves the chance to thrive rather than merely survive, and that includes the artists themselves. We believe a craft only stays alive when the person practising it can actually afford to keep doing so, which is why we choose to work directly with artists rather than through intermediaries.
AshVed is less a shop and more an evolving record of Indian art, where every piece has been sourced by hand, in person, from its maker.
Step further. There is more here than you expect.
ABOUT THE FOUNDER
Meet the Founder
Kruti Virmani spent years reading numbers before she ever thought to read a canvas. A finance professional by training and a banker for over a decade, she built her career on the same instincts that now define AshVed — patience, precision, and the discipline to look past the surface of things. But somewhere between balance sheets and boardrooms, a different kind of value kept pulling at her attention: the kind that can't be modelled or forecast, carried instead in a brushstroke, a pigment, a hand passed down through generations.
What she brings to AshVed is not the eye of a hobbyist but the rigor of someone who has spent a career asking what is this actually worth, and why — applied now to artists and traditions the market has too often overlooked. Every piece in this collection has been personally sourced, questioned, and chosen by her, with the same seriousness she once brought to a portfolio — except now, what's being protected isn't capital. It's legacy !!
AshVed exists because she was unwilling to let either go unnoticed.
Step Inside the Archive
Explore the founding collection — the first 500 works, across eight traditions and Pichwai.
EXPLORE THE COLLECTION