Meet the artisan behind the Saharanpur bull mask
Imran Khan is 42, a fourth-generation woodcarver, and the man behind every Saharanpur folk mask we sell. We spent an afternoon in his workshop.
By Rohan Mehta · 20 May 2026 · 3 min read
Imran Khan's workshop is at the back of a courtyard in old Saharanpur — the part of the city you reach by walking past the perfume sellers and turning left at the third paan stall. There is no sign on the door. There has never needed to be one. If you are looking for Imran, the boys playing cricket in the lane will point you in.
He is 42. He has been carving wood since he was nine. His grandfather and great-grandfather did the same work in the same lane, and his daughter — who is fourteen, and at present uninterested — is, as far as anyone knows, the most likely person to carry it forward into a fifth generation. He says this with the resigned cheer of someone who has accepted that his daughter will make her own decision and that there is nothing useful to be gained by worrying about it now.
The work
The Saharanpur tradition is best known for jali — the perforated, lattice-style carving you see on screens and partitions across north Indian palaces and havelis. But Imran's family has always done something slightly different. They carve folk masks.
The masks were originally made for wedding processions. A baraat in north India was — and in many places still is — led by dancers in masks: bulls, horses, peacocks, occasionally tigers. The mask makers were a quiet but essential part of the wedding economy. When the dancing tradition began to fade in the 1980s, the mask-making families faced a choice: stop, or find another reason for the masks to exist.
Imran's father chose the second. He started making them as wall objects, smaller, more refined, with the painting done in the brighter folk palette that contemporary buyers in Delhi and Mumbai responded to. By the time Imran took over the workshop in 2008, the family was selling masks to architects in Delhi and to a handful of conscious-design boutiques that had begun to discover Saharanpur in earnest.
How a mask is made
A bull mask takes Imran roughly five days from start to finish. The mango wood is seasoned for at least eighteen months before he begins, otherwise it will warp. He carves the basic head shape with a single curved chisel his father gave him in 2004, then refines the eyes, the curve of the horns, and the slightly comic flare of the nostrils with smaller tools. The painting is done by his wife, Nasreen, who learnt the folk palette from her own mother in Mathura. The natural pigments — turmeric for the saffron, indigo for the blue, lac residue for the deep red — are mixed fresh for every batch.
When the mask is finished he signs the underside in pencil. The signature is small, in Urdu, and easy to miss. If you have one of Imran's masks on a wall in Bengaluru or Bombay or Goa, that signature is there — turn the piece over and you will find it.
What he wants you to know
We asked him, towards the end of the afternoon, what he wanted us to tell the people who eventually buy his work.
He thought about it for a while.
"Three things," he said. "First, the wood is alive. It will move with the seasons. A small crack along the grain after the first monsoon is not a defect — that is the wood breathing. Don't worry about it.
"Second, the colours will deepen with time, not fade. The lac and the indigo settle into the grain over the first year. In ten years it will look richer than it does today.
"Third —" he paused, looking at the half-finished mask on his bench — "tell them that someone made this. Not a factory. Not a machine. A person, who lives in a city you've probably never visited, who has been doing this since he was a child. When the mask is hanging in your home, that person is in some small way also in your home. That is what I would like them to know."
We left the workshop as the call to Maghrib prayer was beginning. Imran walked us to the end of the lane, shook hands, and went back to his bench.
Every Saharanpur folk mask in our collection is carved by Imran Khan and painted by Nasreen Khan in this workshop. The artisan card that ships with your piece carries his name, his village, and a small photograph of his workshop. Browse the Home Décor collection to see the current set.