Indian Design sensibility. When it comes to design, in a space/product relation, how can one with minimum intervention sprinkle the Indian flavor on things? A character that goes beyond “just surface Indianization.” Today all around, I’m witnessing a gamut of things and products declaring their Indian character; designers basking under the sun of creativity and the tag of creators. But the design of a majority of things being sold under the tag “Indian design” is very superficial.
However, a general description of the modern architecture in urban India today would be confused structures of mortar and other construction materials stuck together stripped of thought and ideology. “Aesthetics and design language” go in for a toss in the so termed hasty cost-saving battle. Things that seem beautiful and meaningful unfortunately many a times are replicas or inspired unethically from foreign sources. True intelligent design suiting the context seems a rarity.
The high-end furniture market in the country, with the skill-sets of craftsmen developed over centuries in a variety of product/material techniques and the cheap labor that is available can become the revolution today. It will be pleasing to attach the words - “quality products, original design and efficient production” to the country, a title that Europe has enjoyed since long.
As far as my part is concerned here, I’m on a ride to study the Art Deco to design further.
Deco movement/style is still modern against the sensibility of today and is a movement which accounts to very few that touched the country in whatever restricted way.
In the 1920s and 1930s in India, it appealed to the novelty-Indians who were albeit traditional in many respects but receptive to the foreign values traditions and visual and artistic influences. Adopting to the western lifestyle, traveling to Europe to enjoy season, sightseeing and paying homage to their sovereign, the elite Indian was embracing it with open arms.
Deco cosmopolitanism, sophisticated styling, associations with luxury and glamour and conscious machine age aesthetics appealed to rich India. However the Indian Deco scenario was highly restricted and influenced greatly by French art and style and had little to do with India. The colors, motifs, forms, stories and ideologies here were foreign in approach and showed little references to the place it came to. It was the exact Deco of Europe that had set itself in the country, non-affected by the strong personality of India. Bombay was exposed to European currents in fashion transmitted by regular waves of people who arrived there, including architects and designers in search of work. Prosperous Business people, whose success under British rule had given them a high regard for western thinking, were particularly receptive to the European taste and it was precisely this group that financed the development of the city.
The Coming of Art deco ideas in the city epitomized modernity, reflecting it visually in its new architecture, whose elegant streamlines forms, sparse put potent ornament and machine aesthetics glamorized the new age and its technologies. Although the social and cultural conditions that inspired the art deco in the west was largely absent in the Indian social and cultural environment, yet Art deco opened minds and gave way to the idea of modernism here.
However, the rich Indian dictionary of culture, design, motifs, architecture and other such “could-be” inspirations were not utilized in this cultural revival. A foreign concept, it came and pasted itself onto the Indian background without much alterations and considerations.
A great Art deco palace built between the 1931 and 1944 , the new palace in Morvi is a carnival of de luxe Art deco commissioned by maharaja Mahendrasinhji Lakhdiraj. The exterior of pink plaster defined by strong horizontal lines accentuates the building’s architecture embracing the horizontal with its long and low structure and curved corners. Borrowing from the styles of the ocean liners, luxury hotels and cinema interiors of the period, the palace exemplifies a charmed living in the cocktail age.
“The new palace with its clean, functional and unimaginative appearance belongs in inspiration firmly to the age of pre-stressed concrete rather than to the age of distressed stone, even though it is in fact constructed of the local granite. Inside however, the princely India is having its last fling. Six drawing rooms, six dining rooms and fourteen bedrooms jostle for space with swimming pool, card room, billiard room and bar. The rooms decorated and designed in art deco style, even down to such details as tubular-framed furniture are pure European in taste. Lifts descend to a subterranean bedroom decorated with erotic murals, and a bathroom made of seashells.”-(The Palaces of India By the Maharaja Of Baroda.)The “Indianness” in the deco tradition is restricted only to the artworks with manipulated Indian themes. (pics from the book Palaces of India by maharaja of baroda)
Another stylish Art Deco royal residence was Manik Bagh, commissioned by Yeshwant Rao Holgar, the Maharaja of Indore in 1930. This new palace in Indore, stands besides the old, in the centre of the city. It is said to be synonymous with the Maharani, whom a British officer once described as,” very much the type of modern English public-school girl, a good tennis player and very up-to-date in fashions of dress”
“Society painter Bernard boutet de monvel’s portraits of the prince in traditional Maratha and western evening dress captures his elegant and self –assured style in both worlds.”
An art enthusiast, oriented towards the Western avant-grade in Paris, heir to the ancient Holkar family, Yeshwant Rao Holkar had the palace decorated by the architect Eckart Muthesius, of the same age, with technical and aesthetic refinements; darkly tinted and clear window panes in metal frames for regulating the light of day, the first air conditioning system in India, unusually simple furniture of wood and metal, pictorial carpets, lighting fixtures as light sculptures, walls treated in alternating colors, Para vents as cubist paintings in space. Art for living made a fairy tale palace of modernism in India come true.
Ruhlmann, Wassali Luckhardt, Micheal Dufet and Eileen gray are a few names from which the interior elements were sourced. The interiors of Manik Bagh featured both highly simplified, functional, serially produced furniture and more decorative, individual pieces in exotic materials in the high French style.
Another Art deco masterpiece, Umaid Bhawan, in Jodhpur was build by maharaja Umaid Singh between 1929 to 1944 as an employment project during the period of prolonged droughts. The palace architecture is a curious synthesis of Art Deco and indigenous architectural and decorative traditions.
The architectural detailing of Umaid Bhawan is principally Indian, but the clean lines and streamlined, cool treatment of sculptural elements are entirely Deco in style. Although there was a peek of Indian influence in the architecture, motifs, soft furnishings, murals and paintings visible in the Palace but the furniture and the interior still were a European statement.
However in viewing this style/movement under the lens today, replicating it or even following the same lines of design makes no sense. If art Deco in India has to be reinterpreted today, it’ll be of a little altered nature. The ability to assimilate and modernize local decorative traditions of the style can be very well used to design and re-design objects which stand for the “new” and the “modern” and yet have a flair of India in them.
“In the spirit of the Deco for the search of the “modernistic,” receptive to changing times, yet respecting the traditions and techniques of the past- the new Indo-deco derives itself from the luxuriant and elegant French taste but transformed by regional influences. The style is for the modern Indian house, following the French Deco traditions- clean lines, restrained stylized decorations and simplistic. The Indianess of the furniture comes from the form, technique or the materials that India has to provide.”
