Amiya Bhanushali

Amiya Bhanushali is an Indian artist and rope educator who uses she/they pronouns and runs the rope project Silly Hands Shibari. On Urbanaut, the platform where it sells its workshops, the studio’s own tagline calls it India’s first queer-led and only rope-dedicated studio; The Nod Mag more cautiously describes it as probably the only professional studio in the country devoted to teaching shibari.

Coming to rope

The teacher biography on Silly Hands Shibari’s event listings says Bhanushali began practicing shibari in 2021 and is self-taught, with a wider artistic practice that draws on Indian and South Asian narratives. A 2025 profile by Nidhi Gupta in The Nod Mag adds that she came across shibari online during the COVID-19 pandemic, while working for an art platform and as a hand-poke tattoo artist, and that she took her practice further in 2022. According to that article, she learned from the Shibari Study video channel, from events run by The Intimacy Curator, from kink communities in Mumbai and Bengaluru and from kink-themed film festivals. The article names no individual teacher.

Silly Hands Shibari

The sources differ on when the project started. A 2023 Homegrown article by Virender Singh says Silly Hands Shibari was founded during the pandemic, while The Nod Mag in 2025 dates its launch to 2024. The listings say she began teaching in 2023 and has since given workshops, retreats and private sessions in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Goa. Both press profiles describe her as based in Mumbai; the 2026 workshop listings place the events in Bengaluru.

The Nod Mag reports that her workshops combine ethics and vocabulary with hands-on practice, and that private sessions, booked through a form, range from light beginner rope to more intense sessions that can include suspension. Current listings include themed workshops such as one on the futomomo thigh tie and community rope jams for adults aged 21 and over.

Approach

In both interviews Bhanushali puts consent at the center. Homegrown reports that her sessions start with a conversation about roles, boundaries, safewords and limits, that she keeps safety shears and water at hand, and that she treats aftercare as part of the session. She told Homegrown that consent can be paused or withdrawn at any moment and rejected the idea that a partner should always say yes. The same article quotes her wish to build a community where people can explore rope safely.

Her listing biography says that, as her style moved beyond aesthetics, she began to look at links between queerness, pleasure, trauma and neurodivergence. She told The Nod Mag that she wants her space to be safe for LGBTQ+, fat, disabled and neurodivergent people, and that she does not consider her practice sexual. In Homegrown she pointed to the small number of femme and non-binary rope practitioners in India.