India Has Been Wearing the Wrong Pants for 30 Years. One Brand from Gurgaon Is Quietly Fixing That.

There's a rash that nobody talks about. You've probably had it — that slow burn on your inner thighs after a long yoga session, the clammy second skin of synthetic leggings on a humid Delhi afternoon, the way polyester holds heat against your body like a grudge. You assumed it was just part of moving. Shubham Tyagi assumed the same thing. Until he didn't.

Shubham was working in the US healthcare sector when he first noticed something that felt oddly out of place. Yoga — ancient, Indian, deeply rooted in the subcontinent's soil — had become a lifestyle religion in the West. Studios on every corner. Entire retail ecosystems built around the practice. And almost all of it wrapped in synthetic, petroleum-derived fabric that had nothing to do with the tradition it was clothing.

He came back to India. Started practicing himself. And then one day, mid-asana, his skin told him something his brain hadn't fully processed yet: this fabric is wrong. Not uncomfortable in a minor way — wrong in a fundamental way. Polyester doesn't breathe. It traps sweat. Against Indian skin, in Indian heat, in a practice that is supposed to connect you to your body, it was creating a barrier between you and that very experience.

That observation — small, personal, almost embarrassingly simple — became the seed of something real.

In 2022, Shubham Tyagi founded KSHM alongside his brother Shivam Tyagi. The name itself is a statement before a single product is unboxed. KSHM is derived from a Sanskrit word meaning 'earth.' Not a made-up brand name. Not a Western transliteration. A word that already existed in the language of the very tradition the brand was built to serve.

The thesis was almost provocatively straightforward: make activewear from natural cotton, for Indian bodies, for Indian weather, at a price that doesn't require a second mortgage. No performance polymers. No moisture-wicking chemical coatings. Just cotton — breathable, skin-kind, centuries-tested cotton — cut and constructed to move.

The market they stepped into was, on paper, hostile to this idea.

Synthetic materials account for nearly 70% of India's activewear market — polyester, spandex, nylon dominating by virtue of their performance-driven qualities. The global activewear giants had already planted flags: Nike, Adidas, Puma, Decathlon. Their marketing budgets dwarfed what most Indian D2C brands make in a year. Their shelves were everywhere.

And yet. 65% of Indian consumers now express a preference for eco-friendly products, a number that has shifted dramatically in just a few years. India is the fastest-growing activewear market in Asia Pacific, projected to reach USD 41.2 million by 2033. The consumer is changing faster than the product shelves are. People want to move — yoga, gym, dance, just the general daily business of living in a body — and they're increasingly asking whether what they're wearing is doing them any favors.

That gap — between what the market was selling and what a genuinely thoughtful Indian consumer actually wanted — is exactly where KSHM found its ground.

What's emerged from that thesis isn't just a line of pants. It's something closer to a design philosophy.

The Dhoti-Cut Yoga Pants are inspired by the traditional Indian dhoti — once worn by yogis, meditators, and leaders like Gandhi — modernized for how people move today, offering 360-degree mobility from handloom natural cotton. The Boxate Yoga Pants — now the brand's bestseller — draw their silhouette from ancient yogic dress: roomy at the top, tapering at the ankle, constructed so the hem stays put whether you're deep in a forward fold or running for the metro. The RootsUp line carries a tree motif representing the human cycle — origin, life, and return to origin. Every product carries a quiet piece of cultural memory, worn without ceremony on ordinary days.

The customers noticed. Three lakhs of them, and counting, across India — from yoga studios in Bengaluru to office corridors in Delhi NCR. Not because of a celebrity endorsement or a moment of viral luck, but because a woman in a reel stretched in a pair of cotton pants and thought: that looks like what I've been looking for. And then bought them. And then told someone.
There's a version of this story that ends in a funding round, a Shark Tank appearance, a lifestyle magazine spread. Maybe that's coming.

But what makes KSHM interesting right now — before all of that — is how it got here. A founder who got a rash. A word pulled from Sanskrit. Cotton, when everyone else was selling polyester. A bet that India didn't need to import the idea of what good activewear looks like — it just needed someone to look inward for the answer.

The pants, it turns out, were always here. It just took someone willing to go back to the earth to find them.