JOURNEYING THROUGH CRAFT, CULTURE AND SOCIAL HISTORY

Less is more is not part of the Indian aesthetic. Every element, whether colour, imagery or embellishment, is used to the full. Every surface filled to the maximum. Unlike the Japanese or Swedes, we don't do minimal!

- LAILA TYABJI PORTRAIT BY URVASHI KUMARI SINGH

Negative space, an important part of design elsewhere, is not a part of the Indian tradition. When a master carver encounters a grain of rice, he engraves an entire Taj Mahal, or the text of the Hanuman Chalisa! Given a temple wall in Khajuraho or Thanjavur, he fills it with hundreds of figures – a whole social history of its times. The Madurai Meenakshi Temple reportedly has 33,000 images! A Kashmiri papier-mâché screen or Jamewar shawl will blossom into a garden of flowers, each intricately delineated and imagined. At its best this approach is multilayered and magnificent, at its worst it is cluttered and overdone. It worked well in India's vast palaces under the blazing sun, each royal court trying to outdo the other in splendour and show. Like everything, in the 21st century it needs reinvention. Ornately embossed silver furniture that looked magnificent in marble-floored halls with towering ceilings seems inappropriate in a three-bedroom Bandra apartment in Mumbai. Just as the gargantuan 10 course dinners of our ancestors don't work for our 21st century digestions! In India, the term design is often confused with ornamentation. Form, function and finish play second fiddle. The idea of design is used like an aerosol spray in a smelly bathroom. To pretend that obsolete, stale things are fresh! It's no coincidence that when I first started working with interior designer Shona Ray in the early 1970s, people thought an interior designer and an interior decorator were one and the same: the person who applied fresh paint on walls.