India, Oct. 17 -- Somewhere in an old haveli in Lucknow, an old wooden box creaks open. Inside, wrapped in yellowing muslin, lies a wedding shawl-its borders heavy with gold embroidery, the kind that glints even in shadows. The threads are slightly tarnished, the motifs a little frayed, but they still tell stories of the hands that stitched them, of the families who packed up their lives in a hurry one August morning in 1947 and carried pieces of home sewn into their clothes.

This is the art of zardozi. Not merely embroidery, but an oral history woven in metal on the fabric of undivided Hindustan. Zardozi was born in the courts of kings and queens, but it survived because ordinary people, the zardozikaars, kept it alive. People who passe...