The oldest karigar in the workshop has been doing aari work for thirty-one years. The youngest has been at it for four, and is still, by his own description, learning to hold the frame properly.
How the skill passes
Almost nobody learns this in a classroom. It moves from one pair of hands to another, usually within a family, over years rather than months. The first year is spent on plain chain stitch on scrap cloth. Nobody touches a garment until the line is clean.
What they notice
Ask a karigar what makes a design good and you will not hear anything about the motif. You will hear about tension. Whether the fabric will hold the density you have drawn, whether a curve is tight enough to pucker, whether the thread count can take a mirror without a reinforcing patch behind it. Design problems announce themselves at the frame long before they reach a customer.
The economics of it
This work is paid by the piece almost everywhere in India, which pushes workshops toward speed. We pay by the day. It is a slower way to run a studio and it is the only arrangement under which we can ask someone to unpick two days of work because a line is not right, and have them agree.
What they say about it
Mostly that it is hard on the eyes and the back, that the good years are the middle ones, and that they would not do anything else. One of them put it more plainly: the cloth remembers who worked on it.
We think that is true, and it is the reason we have never moved this work off-site.