DRAVIDIAN DESIGN: FORGOTTEN GENIUS OF TN IDENTITY

OR a country as vast and layered as India, a single, monolithic "Indian design" is an impossibility - and perhaps even an injustice.

- RIZVI MANZAVALLI

The strength of this civilisation has always been its plurality: of languages, landscapes, rituals, food, crafts and ways of imagining the world. If design is, at its core, the way a culture thinks through form, function and meaning, then our design story must also honour this diversity.

In that sense, a mature national design narrative for India will not come from flattening everything into one visual shorthand, but from recognising and articulating strong regional design identities, each with its own history, logic and contribution to the present.

Among these, Tamil Nadu and the broader Dravidian region stand out as a design civilisation hiding in plain sight. Yet, in Indian design schools, in industry presentations and in everyday conversations, the names that roll off our tongues are often Scandinavian chairs, German appliances, Italian cars or Japanese minimalism. We casually praise "Nordic clarity", "German engineering" or "Italian styling". There is nothing wrong in learning from these traditions. The problem is that we have internalised a colonial hierarchy of taste, where European or East Asian design identities are aspirational, while our own remain either folklorised or ignored.

This blind spot is particularly striking when we look at what archaeology and history have been telling us.