Rupali Barua: Kolkata Fashion Entrepreneur and Wife of Actor Ashish Vidyarthi

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Last updated: 22 September 2026

Rupali Barua co-founded the Kolkata handloom label NAMEG in 2020. Three years later, in May 2023, she married actor Ashish Vidyarthi and drew wider public attention. Let’s look at her background, her work with NAMEG, and how her identity as an entrepreneur took shape well before her marriage made headlines.

Quick Facts

Early Life and Family

Rupali Barua grew up in Guwahati, Assam. Gulf News reported that she works for a high-end clothing retailer in Kolkata, and Pratidin Time put her age at 50 around the time of her May 2023 wedding. No credible source gives an exact date of birth, school or college for her.

Rupali Barua’s Professional Career and NAMEG

Three women started NAMEG in 2020: Namita Dashora, Meghali Barua Lahiry and Rupali Barua. Their shared interest was India’s handloom heritage, according to the label’s own “Our Story” page. The boutique runs out of a three-storey store on Raja Basanta Roy Road in Kolkata, selling Jamdani, Tussar silk, Baluchari, Kanjivaram and Banarasi sarees.

Press coverage followed almost immediately. NAMEG’s media page lists write-ups going back to 2020, several of them in The Telegraph’s T2 supplement, with another feature in 2022. That same page also notes a visit from Ashish Vidyarthi, who filmed a video about the store — something NAMEG says happened before the couple married.

How Rupali Barua Built an Identity Beyond “the Actor’s Wife”

Long before she was known as Ashish Vidyarthi’s wife, her business was already being written about in Kolkata’s press.

• 2020: NAMEG opens. T2 and other Kolkata outlets cover it more than once through the year.
• 2021: More T2 features follow, alongside pieces in Siren News and News Stardom, plus a writeup of the co-owned Café Na-Ru-Meg on LBB.
• September 2022: Vidyarthi visits NAMEG and posts a video about it, per the store’s own media page.
• 25 May 2023: Barua marries Vidyarthi in Kolkata. Bollywood Hungama and Gulf News both reported it as an intimate registry wedding — a court ceremony in the morning, followed by a small gathering in the evening. Vidyarthi told the Times of India, as quoted by Gulf News, that marrying Barua at this stage of his life felt extraordinary.
• 2 January 2026: Vidyarthi and Barua are hit by a motorcycle while crossing a street in Guwahati. Both are taken to Apollo Hospital; Vidyarthi posted on Instagram that he was fine and Barua was under observation as a precaution.

Three years of press coverage before the wedding is why NAMEG, and not the marriage, is the earliest public record of her work.

Rupali Barua and Ashish Vidyarthi’s Marriage

The wedding took place on 25 May 2023 at a Kolkata club, in a registry ceremony followed by an evening get-together for close family and friends. Bollywood Hungama and Gulf News described the outfits: Barua in a cream or white-and-gold Assamese mekhela chador, Vidyarthi in a matching white and gold Kerala mundu, a nod to his own mixed Kerala-Bengal background. This was Vidyarthi’s second marriage. He was previously married to Rajoshi Barua, daughter of actor Shakuntala Barua, from 2001 until their divorce in 2022; they have a son, Arth.

This article covers only publicly confirmed details of her personal life.

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Conclusion

Rupali Barua’s public profile started with NAMEG in 2020, not with her marriage to Ashish Vidyarthi three years later. The label’s own press record, backed by Kolkata’s fashion coverage, shows a business already known in the city before her wedding made her a household name.