About us

I grew up around watches, but I never saw our time in them.

My father was part of the first wave that brought international watches into India as the country opened up. Watches were always around me: in showcases, conversations, and family memory.

But even as a child, something about the watch world never fully sat right with me.

Years later, after studying at Columbia University and returning to India to work in the family business in luxury watches and jewellery, I began to understand why.

India had changed.

Quick commerce was reshaping neighbourhood kirana stores. UPI had changed the way we used money. Indian brands were no longer seen as compromise.

Across food, fashion, beauty, design, hospitality, and technology - everywhere you looked, Indian confidence was being rewritten.

But the watch industry had barely moved.

For decades, the watches available to Indian buyers were still asking us to admire someone else’s world.

Foreign landscapes many of us had no connection to. Motorsport races most of us had never watched. Sports like sailing and diving followed by a very small fraction of our country. Even standard GMT watches do not naturally account for Indian Standard Time.

And that old question came back: Where is our Time?

I asked myself what could a watch become if it began with how India actually experiences time - not how it moves, but how it feels.

That answer became IST 1947 – named after September 1st 1947, the day India set its own time.

The time we grew up with.

The time of family homes, school mornings, cricket nights, four-day weddings, temple courtyards, office commutes, monsoon delays, Sunday lunches, and train platforms.

The time that was emotional, elastic, chaotic, precise, funny, sacred, and unmistakably ours.

IST 1947 turns that lived experience into modern watches: serious in their making, open in spirit, and designed with India at the heart of everything.