Our Story
A Cardiac Surgeon. An Engineering Manager. Two people. One kitchen table. One piece of Dhokra brass that refused to be put down.
HeerMaya didn't start in a boardroom. It didn't start with any kind of plan, honestly.
What actually happened: a brass Dhokra pendant ended up on our kitchen table. Dancing figures. Rough cast surface. Nothing like anything you find in a mall or scroll past on a shopping app. Shwetank picked it up. Handed it to Bhavana. Neither of us put it down for a while.
And somewhere in that moment — between a cardiac surgeon who already makes jewellery in his spare time and researches craft traditions across regions, and a software engineering manager who was about to start learning to make jewellery herself — we realised we'd both been heading toward the same thing without knowing it.
That's HeerMaya.
Selling jewellery was the easy part to explain. The harder part to explain — and the more honest part — is that we just couldn't stop buying it, making it, and learning about it.
What HeerMaya Means
HeerMaya — two words, one idea.
Heer — you know the story. The Punjabi woman who loved on her own terms, who didn't adjust herself to fit what the world wanted. That doesn't cover it, actually.
Maya — Sanskrit word for magic, illusion. That thing that happens when a handmade piece lands in your hands and something just clicks. Nothing to do with the price tag. Nothing to do with the brand name.
Put them together and you basically get us — two people who kept being pulled toward the same idea. The woman we make jewellery for already knows who she is.
Her outfit is not the point. Her occasion is not the point. She is the point.
Meet the Founders
Founder
Bhavana Gahlot
(Engineering Manager · IT Multinational Company)
By day, Bhavana leads engineering teams at a multinational technology company — managing complex systems, large-scale projects, and the kind of problems that require both precision and vision.
By the weekend? She's on the floor of a craftsman's workshop in Maharashtra — watching hands work, asking questions, trying it herself. Or at home at her workbench, getting it wrong, then less wrong, then slowly starting to understand.
This is the part most people don't know about HeerMaya. Bhavana doesn't just source and sell — she creates. She has spent weekends with Dhokra artisans, oxidised silver craftsmen and tribal jewellery makers — not as a buyer, but as a student. Sitting with them. Learning from them. Understanding what the craft actually demands from the person making it.
"When you've tried to make something yourself — even badly, even as a beginner — you look at a master craftsman's work completely differently," she says.
"Once you get it in your hands — not just your head — mass-produced jewellery genuinely stops making sense."
The combination of engineering precision and hands-on craft turns out to be exactly what HeerMaya needed. The same instincts that make a good engineering manager — attention to detail, systems thinking, the ability to see what others miss — make an extraordinary eye for craft.
Bhavana handles everything from curation and creation to the HeerMaya brand identity, digital strategy, and the artisan partnerships that keep the collections authentic.
She is, in her own words, "still figuring out how to balance two full-time loves — and completely unwilling to give up either."
CO-FOUNDER
Dr. Shwetank Vashistha
(Cardiac Surgeon)
Dr. Shwetank Vashistha spends his working life doing something most people will never do — operating on the human heart. The precision required. The calm under pressure. The understanding that every detail matters because the stakes are absolute.
Here's the part that surprises people. Outside the hospital, Shwetank designs jewellery.
Not a hobbyist. Not someone who dabbles. Not as a side project. He digs into craft traditions across India and Central Asia — what region, what technique, what the motifs meant to the people who made them. Then picks up the tools and tries it himself. Everything he learns feeds directly into what HeerMaya carries.
"I research a region before we carry anything from it," he says. "The motifs aren't decoration. They meant something to the people who made them — protection, identity, devotion. I need to know before we carry the piece."
The surgeon's precision shows in his design work — an obsession with proportion, with the relationship between weight and form, with the question of what makes a piece feel right on the body rather than just looking right on a screen. He brings a maker's understanding to HeerMaya that no amount of sourcing trips can replace.
His particular rabbit hole: why humans across completely different cultures all reached for the same solution — jewellery — to carry meaning. The Bastar Dhokra artisan and the Turkmen silversmith and the Rajasthani oxidised craftsman never met. Never shared notes. And yet they all arrived at something that carries weight beyond the metal. He finds that extraordinary. Honestly, so do we.
What We Believe
Ask either of us at any point and we'll tell you the same thing — jewellery is never just jewellery. We've said it so many times it's basically tattooed on the inside of our heads.
That Dhokra pendant? The artisan who made it learned the technique from his father. His father learned from his. Going back four thousand years. The Afghan coin necklace on your neck? Women crossed the Hindu Kush wearing pieces like it — not as accessories, as their entire family's savings, hammered flat and hung around their bodies.
So when you buy from us — you're choosing which story travels with you. That's a real choice. We think it deserves a real explanation.
We think that matters. We think you deserve to know what you're wearing and why it's extraordinary.
Two people. Two very different careers. Both making jewellery with their own hands. One completely shared belief — that the most beautiful things are the ones made by hand, with purpose, by people who gave a damn.
What We Carry
- Ancient lost-wax brass casting from Bastar. No two pieces identical. Ever.
- Silk Route jewellery from the borderlands of Central Asia. Coins, lapis, carnelian.
- Darkened silver with tribal motifs — peacocks, elephants, dancers, deities.
- Pan-India tribal traditions — beaded, fabric, handpainted, handwoven.
Come Find Your Story
We're a startup brand. Just the two of us, really, plus the extraordinary artisans whose work we carry. We don't restock infinitely. When something sells out, it's often gone — because that's the nature of handmade.
What we do have: a genuine belief that the right piece of jewellery — found at the right moment — can feel like something that was waiting for you.
We hope you find yours at HeerMaya.
With love from Panvel, Maharashtra 🌸
Bhavana Gahlot & Dr. Shwetank Vashistha
Founders, HeerMaya