From Karol Bagh to Connaught Place: 79 years of Textile House

10 Jun 2026 · Textile House

Every shop has a founding story. Ours begins with a man getting off a train in a city he did not know, in the most crowded year of its life.

In 1947, Lala Gangaram Adlakha came to Delhi from what is now Pakistan. Partition had taken the family's home, their town and most of what they owned. It could not take a trade. He knew cloth: how it is woven, what it should cost, and how to tell good from merely shiny. In Karol Bagh, where thousands of uprooted families were rebuilding street by street, he set up a counter and began again.

A promise made in 1947

His customers had lost as much as he had. Nobody had money to waste, and everybody could spot a cheat, because being cheated was a luxury no one could afford. So the counter ran on one promise: good cloth at a price a working family could pay, measured fairly, with nothing hidden.

It sounds simple. It is also the entire business model, seventy-nine years later.

1979: the move to Connaught Place

By 1979 the shop was ready for a bigger room, and a son had just finished college and joined the counter. The family moved Textile House to Connaught Place, the working heart of the capital, ringed by government ministries and public sector offices.

The location decided our customer for us. The people who walked in were the people who ran the city's paperwork: clerks, section officers, PSU staff, their families. They wanted sarees that could survive a packed bus and an eight-hour desk, suits that ironed quickly, shawls that lasted a decade of winters. We learnt to stock for them, and we never stopped.

The advertisement we never bought

In seventy-nine years, Textile House has not paid for a single advertisement. Not a hoarding, not a newspaper corner, not a film slide in the old cinema halls. Every new customer was sent by an old one. A mother brought her daughter; a colleague told the next desk; a neighbour walked a bride's family over on a Saturday.

Word of mouth is slow, and it is honest. It only travels when the last sale was fair. We protect it with every metre we measure.

Four generations, one counter

Today the shop is run by co-founders Ashok Adlakha and Praveen Adlakha, with Karan Adlakha as managing partner and the next generation already learning how to fold a saree properly. The wooden yard-stick from the first counter still hangs on the wall. Two hundred to two hundred and fifty people still walk in every day.

And now, for the first time, the counter has a wider door. Friends and family have carried our cloth in suitcases to Pune, Guwahati and London for decades. This website is for everyone who could not reach the kerb of Connaught Place: the same shelves, the same prices, packed and posted across India.

That is the whole story. The rest is in the about page, and on the shelves.