Phulkari is on every kurta on the internet. Actual hand production is close to gone.
Where it survives at scale is Trinjan, run by Kheti Virasat Mission, which began in four villages in 2017 and now works with around 290 women artisans from their own homes: 137 spinners on charkha, 28 fabric weavers, 29 in crochet, 24 knitters, and others across phulkari, khes, darri, natural dyeing and hand-spinning. Rimpy Kaur of Kotli in Muktsar district is one of them.
The name is the point. A trinjan was the gathering where women spun and talked together. The revival is named after the social form, not the product.
Phulkari is GI-registered, covering Punjab plus Ambala and Hisar in Haryana. It is the only Punjab textile with that protection.
The gap between how visible the motif is and how little of it is still made by hand is the whole argument for recording the people who still do it.
The work is darn stitch in floss silk on hand woven khaddar, worked from the back, and a bagh is the version in which the ground is covered completely.
It was made by women for their own households and for daughters' marriages, over years, in the trinjan, where the spinning and the stitching were done together.
The silk came from Kashmir and Bengal and the khaddar was local. The commercial versions now use machine embroidery on mill cloth and are a different object with the same name.