Home and Design Trends volume 8 no. 3 | 2020

How would you define Indian design? What role does it play in our past, present and future?

I studied design almost 23 years ago at NID, Ahmedabad, where I had teachers with training from different corners of the world. One among them was Padma Shri-awardee Kripal Singh Shekhawat, who was deeply entrenched in reviving the forgotten art of Blue Pottery in India. Under his tutelage, I learnt about a new world that was in plain sight but remained unacknowledged. That world was this incredible country that we call home – India.

I vividly remember the bathroom at Kripal Singhji’s house. It was elegant and simple – it had just one bar of soap, one bottle of shampoo, one brass tap and two hooks. It was essential, but not minimal, much like Gandhiji’s Sabarmati Ashram or even the centuries-old Charpai. There is beauty in this basicity, and that leads me to define Indian design with just one word – Essentiality.

People often ask me what Indian design ‘looks’ like. But Indian design doesn’t have a look, it has a belief, and a sense of ethos. It’s almost like DNA – we don’t all look alike but it binds us together. It is becoming increasingly clear with time that unless we own our DNA, we will have no place in the global design world. Unfortunately, racism, or the consciousness of ‘us’ and ‘them’ within our own country inhibits this acceptance. The very simple acknowledgement of ‘we are many’ is central to the idea of India and Indian design.

Design schools teach us the ‘process’ of designing; something I spent many trying to unlearn. There is no template to design, because every route comes with its own opportunities and challenges to discover and learn from. As a designer, I’m inherently shy of color and prefer to let objects speak in their original colors. But when I was designing the Narendra Bhavan in Bikaner, I decided to take inspiration from the bursts of color in the dry land and celebrate it. I learnt and unlearned, made mistakes and undid them, and that created the best outcome. As a design practice, we don’t have a style, because style is the end and not the beginning, and you can only get to the end through the tunnel of learning.

My projects are the outcome of a dialogue and I always say that I am never the only designer – there’s the client, the carpenter, the contractor and everyone involved with it. In the course of this dialogue, everybody is enrolled into the idea, no matter how challenging, and we all begin to work towards a common goal. To do this, it is important to work on a small footprint. This circles back to the concept of Essentiality, where we look at the smallest detail, the smallest curve, and determine its value.

But how do we determine if a project, a piece of furniture, a detail is beautiful? According to me, it all comes down to function. Ask yourself why you find something beautiful – is it because of how it looks, or because of the function it fulfills? This will lead you down the road of personal discovery, and with time, you can learn to identify the balance in every project.

Over the years, I have come to see that there is something truly special about India, and Indian design. We have given the world concepts like Yoga and Ayurveda– simple arts that connect us all. If this simplicity can percolate into objects and spaces, we will have ourselves a wonderful world of plurality where everything is connected, but also has its own identity. This is the idea we need forward into the world in the future.