Digital cover: Chairs that changed India’s history

The most commonly found entity in our homes has its own story to tell, we find at a new exhibition by House of Mahendra Doshi

28 Feb 2026

Pratishtha Rana

This writer sits on an enamel-finish black wrought iron chair by a sun-dappled, breezy window side, consuming encyclopaedic volumes of text and imagery on the evolution of the many varieties and shapes of chairs around the world, especially India. But why are we talking about chairs? Last night in Mumbai, we walked through the preview of a fascinating exhibition titled A History of India Through Chairs by House of Mahendra Doshi. Their warehouse and showroom in Wadala has turned into a stage for hundreds of chairs that span eras, geographies, evolving political regimes and changing socio-economical hierarchies. We’re told, these antique chairs, mighty and poised in demeanour, in their olden lifetimes have seen pre-colonial India, while some were built in the colonial era, and others birthed post-Independence and Mid-Century Modernist movement. Detailed restoration of each chair remains at the core of the exhibition designed by Supriya Gandhi of the workshop architects with detailed art direction by Vivek Gandhi. The industrial-esque site in Wadala opens with kursis, khaats and bajots, evoking the groundedness of traditional Indian living. Leading indoors, an ensemble of Art Deco, Mid-Century and Arts & Crafts chairs emerges, before one moves back into the open air, where campaign loungers and period-style benches invite you to take a seat like living sentinels of history amidst a green landscape. The progression from intimate floor-level seating to formal, elevated chairs is an important marker of how societies adapt and evolve across time and place.

Back on my screen, as I write and probe the internet, sources suggest that wrought iron was already a popular material in Middle Age Europe for its utilitarian craft. However, it was during the Industrial Revolution in the Victorian 19th century when iron’s true weight peaked. Loosely termed as the Garden Furniture movement, outdoor seaters were seen across households in lawns and patios. In India, though, the subcontinent’s relationship with seaters trusted proximity to the floor itself like woven charpais stretched with rope, carved wooden patlas and reed mats arranged for community-friendly, conversational gatherings.

I wonder, is the ubiquity of chairs its most powerful trait? Like the unassuming plastic chairs that exist in many households like permanent family members — always functional, partly unavoidable. But in the other pockets of urban India where collecting and collectibles are a serious business, material is the king, and so is the object’s rarity; the good kind of oddity that affords it a special, decorative status.

Before an antique chair becomes a collectible, it is the process of restoration for weeks and months that brings a dilapidated frame to a renewed life. Supriya and Vivek depict this through a large display section that narrates a chair’s life from decay to decorative. I find that one is a French Louis XV Gilt Bergere Armchair; opulently upholstered.

At the preview, I spot an intriguing time stamp. September 1893, Raj of Dhrangadra. This was the inscription behind the back of the chair from Dhrangadhra, once a 13-gun salute princely state in the Kathiawar region, Gujarat, which the House of Mahendra Doshi retained while restoration. While the stamp of provenance in matters of art is debatable, for new-age collectors, who are increasingly becoming house-proud, the relevance of recording furniture across eras lies in its originality, regionality and craftsmanship. As Supriya and Vivek assert, each chair in the exhibition has been meticulously restored and presented not as a decorative artifact, but as a bearer of cultural memory.

The exhibition births from the personal archives of Mahendra Doshi sourced from different regions of India spanning decades. “Both Anand and I believe that furniture chooses the homes it goes to,” asserts Chiki Doshi, who grew up learning the art of collectibles from the virtuoso of modern Indian antiques, the late Mahendra Doshi.

But how many chairs must one expect at the exhibition?

While a number they tell me is difficult to assign, the chairs will, “be of all the eras and styles: chairs of authority, a courtroom chair, a priest’s chair, a chair for relaxing, there’s a chair for everything. We have chairs from Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Surat and U.P to parts of South India, Chandigarh and even Calcutta,” Chiki and Anand explain. From 1974, when Mahendra Doshi established the brand till today, an umpteen collection of chairs has been collected and restored. “From then to now, we’ve seen cultures and designs change from British colonial and French to Goan, Portuguese, Art Deco, Mid-Century and now modern styles too,” Chiki adds.

The exhibition is a natural extension of what their archives hold. Around 1,500 to 2,000 chairs, cabinets and other pieces are kept like sculptures in their opposite godown in Wadala and Walkeshwar; beautifully raw and awkwardly stacked atop each other. Sourcing in the past used to be synonymous to exploration. A trip of seven to ten days around India in the 80s and 90s has now moved online, thanks to our smartphones. “WhatsApp has made this whole thing very unromantic,” sighs Chiki. “Mahendra and Anand would sometimes buy wood like a pack of cards. Then six months later, it would come out to be a fabulous chair, a cabinet or something like that.” Chiki, who says the team works with third and fourth-generation artisans, goes on to share, “We have the eye for buying the best. And the best doesn’t have to be wow or ornate. We look at the wood, the construction, the period and the beauty.”

On our visit to the Wadala showroom a month ago, we peeked into the in-progress exhibition setup. First, the eye caught a green-toned Art Deco triangular sofa that mirrored the quintessential Bombay Deco-style. On the other end was a Carolean chair evoking the era of King Charles II, alongside the mystique-filled Ebony and Gothic chairs inexactly kept close to a Portuguese Grandfather chair. Among the artisanal masses of chairs, the longest time was spent on restoring the Moti chair.

“The craftswoman is a 78-year-old lady in Barwala, Gujarat, who does it all by hand. She doesn’t wear glasses and puts the dora through the millimetre-small beads,” explains Vivek. The before and after photos of the Moti chair are inexplicably thrilling; the restored frame now covered head to toe in colourful bead work. The exhibition eloquently debates the shift of the often-Westernised perspective on furniture design back to India. Think the evolution of raj-asana, charpai, patla and jhoola to more structured and formal emblems of seating, influenced through the ruling shadows of Mughal, British, Dutch and Portuguese. Then there were palanquins, colloquially known as palki in pre-partition Bengal, whose antique version we see on display at the exhibition, intact in its ancient shell. “They are a form of seating. If you see the colours, they’re not painted but carry the original vegetable dye,” inform Anand and Chiki.

Straight-lined or sinuous, high or low; seats across centuries were clad in hierarchical roleplay. But there was a parallel wave of transcultural design that defined the Indian subcontinent, blending western traits with regional intelligence like the Anglo-Indian styles, Lockwood chair, Bauhaus tubular chair and largely the Arts and Crafts movement.

The magic of antique chairs is that, “a beautiful piece might be sitting for six months and all of a sudden, somebody will say, arre this is what I’ve been looking for,” Anand chimes in, revealing that he once bunked college for over a month as an 18-year-old to accompany Doshi for his first exhibition on antique furniture in 1978 inside the Springfield building he’d constructed in Gamdevi. A defining lesson that Chiki and Anand carry within them is what Doshi once told them. “Don’t worry about what people want. Everything is transitional.” When they joined Doshi to work in the 90s, the British colonial and Mid-Century styles were in vogue, with people discarding Art Deco pieces indifferently. “And that’s when Doshi would continue to buy and collect Art Deco. Lo and behold, after a decade, Art Deco was back in fashion.” The chairs at the current exhibition among other antique furniture is the reason why the House of Mahendra Doshi feels more like a passion-driven hobby than business to Chiki, Anand and the family members of Doshi, who guard his legacy of over 50 years with sustained joy and equal authority.