In August 1905, as Bengal braced for a partition designed by the British to split its Hindu and Muslim population along communal lines, Rabindranath Tagore walked through the streets of Kolkata asking strangers to tie threads on each other’s wrists. It was Raksha Bandhan, and Tagore had repurposed a domestic ritual, sisters protecting brothers, into a public act of protest. Hindus tied rakhis on Muslims, Muslims tied them on Hindus, and for one day at least, the colonial administration’s attempt to engineer division through the Bengal Partition met a street-level answer in silk thread. The gesture was Tagore’s response to a strategy of divide and rule that he saw threatening the nationalist movement at its foundations; the rakhi, in his hands, stopped being only a family custom and became a symbol of a shared, non-negotiable bond between communities.
When Tagore turned a ritual into protest
More than a century later, the thread has kept its symbolism but acquired a balance sheet. Raksha Bandhan is now one of the biggest festival-linked retail events in the Indian calendar, and the story of how it got there says as much about India’s e-commerce boom, its gig economy and its small-manufacturing base as it does about siblings and sentiment.
A festival with a turnover
The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) estimates that India’s rakhi trade could reach nearly Rs 25,000 crore this year. The broader Raksha Bandhan-related trade, including sweets, dry fruits, gifts, apparel, electronics, decorative items, puja articles and other festive products, is expected to cross Rs 30,000 crore nationally. Delhi alone is estimated to account for around Rs 4,000 crore, with major markets such as Chandni Chowk, Sadar Bazaar, Karol Bagh, Lajpat Nagar, Kamla Nagar, Rajouri Garden, Gandhi Nagar, Khari Baoli and Laxmi Nagar seeing increased shopping activity ahead of Raksha Bandhan. These figures are CAIT estimates based on inputs from traders and trade associations, rather than audited market data.Much of the physical production still runs through India’s traditional craft clusters. Kolkata remains a major wholesale and manufacturing hub, supplying rakhi traders across the country. Khadi rakhis from Nagpur, Sanganeri prints from Jaipur, seed rakhis from Pune, tea-leaf rakhis from Assam, jute rakhis from Kolkata, and bamboo and Madhubani-art rakhis from Bihar now sit alongside mass-produced options, driven in part by women’s self-help groups and artisan collectives for whom the rakhi season is a source of supplementary household income.
Threads with a message, threads with a name
What has changed most visibly is the design vocabulary. This year’s rakhi shelves carry threads built around Viksit Bharat, BrahMos and women’s-empowerment themes alongside the more familiar Rudraksha, Swastik and Bhaiya-Bhabhi pairs, a sign of how quickly manufacturers now respond to the news cycle and government messaging, treating the rakhi as a wearable billboard as much as a ritual object. Superhero and cartoon-branded rakhis for children, evil-eye designs marketed as fashion accessories that can be worn past the festival, and premium metal or stone-studded pieces round out a market that has moved well beyond plain thread.Personalisation has become the dominant pitch, and not just at the top end.
A thread for every trend
Sellers now routinely offer rakhis with a brother’s name sublimated onto acrylic or wood, or a sibling photograph printed directly onto the pendant, products that would have required a jeweller or an artist a decade ago and are now templated, priced from under Rs 50 apiece, and turned around in bulk by small manufacturing units in cities such as Ahmedabad, Delhi and Jaipur. The wider gifting trend has moved the same way: industry trackers this year note a decline in generic mass-market combo set, the standard thread-plus-sweets hamper, in favour of curated boxes that buyers can customise by age, taste or budget, from wellness kits to eco-friendly packaging.
Minutes, not days
The most disruptive change, though, has been in delivery. Quick-commerce platforms have turned the rakhi thali, once assembled by a sister at home or bought over a shop counter, into a same-day, sometimes same-hour order: thread, roli-chawal, sweets and a small gift bundled and dispatched from a neighbourhood dark store. For siblings living in different cities, or those who simply left the shopping too late, this has effectively replaced the courier parcels and last-minute market runs of previous years.That speed now comes with an asterisk. Since January this year, the quick-commerce platforms have all dropped explicit “10-minute” delivery claims from their branding, after the Union Labour Ministry pushed quick-commerce companies to stop advertising rigid delivery windows, citing rider safety concerns following gig-worker protests. Blinkit’s tagline shifted from promising goods “in 10 minutes” to simply listing what it delivers; some of them now advertise “groceries in minutes” rather than a fixed number. The underlying model, dark stores, real-time inventory, delivery fleets built for speed, is unchanged, and rakhi orders still move fast during the festival rush; platforms have simply stopped putting a number on it.
The vendors left behind
For the street sellers who used to own this season, the shift has been harder to absorb than a change in app copy. Rakesh, who sells rakhi threads and thalis from a stall in one of Delhi’s older markets, has watched the balance of the trade move online over the past few years.“The availability of Rakhi threads and thalis online have changed things a lot for us,” he said. “People get things delivered in minutes, there is also the aspect of personalisation. Customers can get their money back if they do not like a design but that is not the case for us. The demand has not dropped dramatically but we can definitely sense a shift now.”His account captures something the trade-body turnover figures don’t: this isn’t a market in collapse so much as one being quietly redistributed. Total demand for rakhis hasn’t fallen, traders’ projections for this year are, if anything, higher than last year’s, but a growing share of it is being captured by platforms that can offer instant refunds, endless design catalogues and delivery to a doorstep hundreds of kilometres away, none of which a pavement stall can match. A street vendor operates on thin, fixed margins and cannot offer the kind of no-questions-asked returns that have become standard on e-commerce and quick-commerce apps; a design that doesn’t suit a customer is a sunk cost for him in a way it isn’t for a platform with centralised inventory. What he is describing is less a festival in decline than a festival whose profits are migrating toward whoever controls speed, choice and convenience, the same forces reshaping most other categories of Indian retail.
Opportunity online, obstacles offline
The same platforms squeezing street vendors have opened a door for a different kind of small operator: the home-run, social-media-first rakhi business. Instagram and WhatsApp catalogues have made it possible for someone with no shop and little capital to sell personalised or handcrafted rakhis directly to customers, without a physical stall or a wholesaler in between.But reach isn’t the same as revenue, says says a woman running an online rakhi business. “The biggest opportunity is using social media to reach more customers and promote products,” she said. “But the biggest challenges for a new small business are building a customer base, increasing sales, competing with larger companies and recovering costs. When sales are low in the initial stages, profits can be very small, or there may be no profit at all.
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“It’s a reminder that the barriers for small players haven’t disappeared with the shift online — they’ve simply moved. A social media page can put a home business in front of thousands of potential buyers, but it competes in the same feed as established D2C brands and marketplace sellers with bigger budgets, faster fulfilment and the cushion to absorb a slow first season. For someone starting out, the gap between visibility and an actual, sustainable customer base can take more than one festival cycle to close.
A hundred and twenty years of the same thread
The distance between Tagore’s Kolkata processions and this year’s app-driven rush is, on the surface, total: one was a deliberate refusal of commerce, staged to make a political point about unity in the face of engineered division; the other is commerce itself, organised around choice, speed and margin. But the thread running between them, literally, is the same one: an ordinary domestic ritual, elastic enough to be pressed into whatever a moment demands, whether that moment calls for resistance or for a same-day delivery slot. What has changed is not the rakhi but who gets to decide what it means, and increasingly, that decision is being made by whoever can get it to your wrist the fastest.
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