In his 2016 e book, Now I Take a seat Me Down, the architect Witold Rybczynski writes: “The manner we do away with to sit down, and what we do away with to sit down on, says lots about us: our values, our tastes, the things we withhold expensive.”
The history of seats and chairs is a social history moderately than an evolutionary one. Neatly-liked records is that chairs are a European advent that used to be dropped at India by colonisers. Right here’s largely on narrative of the truth that mighty of enhancements in chair device in the last century alongside with Verner Panton’s Stacking Chair (1960), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona (1929), Le Corbusier’s Gargantuan Confort (1928), Arne Jacobsen’s Egg (1958) and Charles & Ray Eames’ Lounge & Ottoman and LCW (1956 & 1946), all came from Europe and The usa.
Surprisingly though, India has had a prosperous history of chair device that goes aid a complete bunch of years. It is just that this history had now now not been comprehensively documented up to now. Sarita Sundar, the Bengaluru-based completely graphic artist, researcher, clothier and founding father of device and heritage consultancy, Hanno, has sought to fetch the void alongside with her now now not too prolonged in the past released From the Frugal to the Ornate: Reviews of the Seat in India . The lavishly illustrated e book, which traces the cultural evolution of the seat in the country and is published in association with Godrej Archives, is the roughly tome that may maybe presumably hold to ideally be be taught seated on a grandly upholstered cruise chair, alongside with your toes up on an ottoman. It offers with a sprawling topic that encompasses everything from humble vernacular, and ceremonial, seats, and sizable thrones to colonial icons reminiscent of the Roorkhee Chair and furniture made of tubular steel by the likes of Godrej & Boyce that lined utter of job halls in the last century. Sundar makes use of art historian Jean-Francois Chevrier’s maxim, ‘Every object is a thing, while now now not everything is an object’ as a birth line for the be taught that went into the e book. “My ardour is totally to affirm at standard objects and form of unearth curiosities. And seats or chairs is one of them,” says Sundar, a felicitous author, geared up with the tenacity of a historian. A chair is, obviously, mighty better than a curiosity. Seats hold continuously signaled hierarchy, privilege, and energy. “Elevation, be it by process of a raised platform, a throne, and even a straightforward chair or stool, establishes special location and authority,” writes Sundar. The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s Takht-i-Taus or Jewelled Throne, which referenced King Solomon, used to be a pleasant example. “Its resplendence, its grandeur, and its elevation — lifting as it did the Emperor closer to heaven than earth — helped perpetuate the assumption that he ruled by virtue of divine simply,” writes Sundar. (Some 300 years later, Mahatma Gandhi would subvert this dynamic by making his European company sit on the bottom alongside him.)
While India’s colonisers, especially the British, who were as pushed by commerce as by their mission to civilise the savages, didn’t affirm mighty of the bottom-sitting culture prevalent in India, the colonial duration produced some memorable — and timeless — chairs. Most of us would be aware of the Planter’s Chair and the Roorkhee Chair, or no less than with their replicas, but Sundar’s e book additionally introduces to the lay reader, reminiscent of this author, to the rare and distinctive six-or-eight-legged Burgomaster, named after the Dutch burgemeester or head of a metropolis. As soon as found in the East Indies, South India, and Sri Lanka, the chair, writes Sundar, “presumably derived from hexagonal or circular thrones of the duration, but has additionally been attributed to a barber’s chair”. There’s one at the Asiatic Society in Mumbai, she tells me, and one of for the time being I conception to circulation there and verify it out. Till the first an extended time of the last century, chairs were bizarre in most households in Indian cities, says Sundar, but things modified with the upward thrust of tubular steel and its use in furniture device. “The early an extended time of the 20th century seen the arrival of Art work Deco, and also you additionally had this new, aspirational class who wanted chairs of their metropolis properties. That used to be when companies reminiscent of Godrej & Boyce came into the describe,” says Sundar. The company reimagined Hungarian-born clothier and architect Marcel Breuer’s iconic Cesca chair, which, says Sundar, broke a long way from the postulate of the four-legged chair.
The factories of companies reminiscent of Godrej & Boyce and Le Corbusier and his cousin and fellow architect Pierre Jeanneret’s Chandigarh accomplishing, which replied to the ambitions of a younger and impartial nation, represented, alongside with the Nationwide Institute of Earn (NID), the three citadels of modernism in India. “All three came into existence spherical the the same time in the mid-20th century based completely on a name from the newly formed impartial authorities in India to take part in fashioning a revolutionary secular Indian modernism,” writes Sundar.
Jeanneret, who used to be appointed Chief Architect of Chandigarh and designed several classes of authorities housing, is most known this day for the furniture he created for Le Corbusier’s “supreme metropolis”. Jeanneret’s desks, easy chairs, and library chairs, among others, which sold as scrap by the civic authorities, are in actual fact found in the properties of the prosperous and device-forward in different cities across the globe and accept excessive prices at auctions. “The ‘Chandigarh chair’ and furniture were a fusion between the western form of formal language Jeanneret epitomised and Indian architects and craftsmen. His proportions and angles were European, however the craftsmanship used to be Indian,” says Sundar.
The e book brings into point of curiosity the affect of the NID and of fellows reminiscent of Gajanan Upadhyay, “the father of Indian furniture device”, and his characteristic in introducing world modernist language to Indian furniture device. Sundar’s work additionally spotlights the likes of Bengaluru-based completely Sandeep Sangaru who, she says, is one of many designers who’re venturing out of the confines of Scandinavian elegant. “There may be a sense that modernist device is the final device, but a lot of designers in India, alongside with Sangaru, are attempting to create that mold.”
Photos: Sangaru, Chirodeep Chaudhuri
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