Anniversary issue: Laila Tyabji

Journeying through craft, culture and social history with the renowned custodian of the country’s craftsmanship

22 Jan 2026

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! 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-mache 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.

It is important to realise that design is not just about making things look good, but a way to examine, understand and reshape our lifestyles, our society and ourselves. A look out of our windows at the jumble of concrete, electric wires, tangled traffic and mutilated green spaces for instance and the confusion and angst of those who live in it, shows how bad contemporary India has been at designing its urban spaces and safeguarding its environment and heritage. Our spaces reflect ourselves and we still seem to be searching for the identity of that 21st century Indian. It is often an uneasy Bollywood amalgam of the past mixed with what we think is trendy in the West. What is the key to India finding itself an exciting and unique new 21st-century identity — both aesthetically and culturally?

A country’s identity is reflected in its visual aesthetic — be it architecture, clothes, domestic interiors or artefacts. Recently, over the last decade or two, India (and with it the world) has woken up to the fact that traditional crafts and textiles are not just a picturesque part of our past, but can be a fantastic part of our future: enhancing our lives, homes, clothes and identity. Adding something uniquely different — Indian but also contemporary.

A patchwork quilt from India; Dmitry Rukhlenko, Dreamstime

Tradition and innovation are not two separate, mutually exclusive processes. But melding the two needs sensitivity. Whether in interiors or fashion, what fashion designer Tarun Tahiliani appropriately calls India Modern need not be a déjà vu replica of past splendours — it can be something both fresh but still distinctively our own. Using India’s multiple skill-sets and materials, its motif directories, its costumes and cuts as inspiration, not carbon copies. The past should ideally be a spring board, not a cage.

Japan in the 1960s amazed me with the distinctive aesthetic and beauty of Japanese homes. Even the most modest interior had the simple understated elegance of pale sand-coloured tatami mat flooring, the sliding shoji paper doors, the pale wood, the low seating, a single alcove with a calligraphic scroll and spare ikebana flower arrangement — just a stem, a flower and a leaf, sometimes a small stone was exquisite. Then you went into their proudly named Western room and it was garish and overdone: heavy plush sofas with lace antimacassars on the back and arms, elaborately draped velvet curtains with gilded ties and tassels, a gaudy pile carpet. Unbelievably, even a big bouquet of artificial flowers in a cut glass vase on the embroidered doily decorated table! That unerring Japanese eye for style was totally lost. In those days, before Hanae Mori and Issey Miyake, even their dress sense, as most of them were abandoning their stunning kimonos and adopting Western clothing, was equally fussy and unflattering. It seemed the crippling defeat to the Western powers in World War II had destroyed their self-confidence in their own taste and aesthetic. It took almost half a century before they rediscovered and then successfully contemporised it. Now Japanese artists, architects and designers are conquering the world.

In India too, two centuries of British colonialism wrecked havoc on our confidence and style. Art, clothing (especially menswear), jewellery, furniture, interior decor, adopted the idioms and visual vocabulary of the West. Imagine abandoning a white jamdani muslin angarkha for a stifling black dinner jacket and tie! Or wall-to- wall carpeting instead of marble floors. Even sarees were worn with puff- sleeved blouses and big lace collars. Sometimes the East-West amalgam worked well, as in the architecture of Lutyens Delhi, most times it was terribly incongruous! But gradually, India worked its magic and absorbed and integrated the West into its own unique eclectic aesthetic, as it had done with influences from the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, China and Europe in the past. Art Deco superimposed over Mughal architecture, a mirror- work embroidered top worn with Levi’s jeans, T-shirts with Mandala motifs. Refreshingly, interiors began to reflect the Indian climate and lifestyles with bamboo and wicker instead of carved and overstuffed sofas, slatted chik blinds instead of elaborately swagged and gold fringed curtains, terracotta planters instead of cut-glass crystal vases, handmade paper lamps instead of chandeliers. All this with low seating, chattais, durries and — most excitingly — the unselfconscious use of indigenous arts, crafts and textiles as both decor and accessories.

Traditional Kutch hand embroidery from Rudramata village. Photograph courtesy Aadyam Handwoven

A Kalamkari painting depicting gods Rama and Sita; Photograph by Ramchandanni, Dreamstime

I began my career as a designer in the 1970s. I was fortunate to work with some of those early pioneers — Shona Ray, Prabha Shah, Riten Mazumdar, Minnie Boga, Gogo Prakash, Ravi Sikri, Martand Singh, the brilliant Ratna Fabri and Elisabeth Kerkar… Design as a discipline or profession was very new. One moved freely between graphics, garments, public installations, theatre sets and costumes, exhibition display and wedding design. Initially, most clients who could afford an interior designer wanted the aesthetic to be Western, be it streamlined Scandinavian or a faux-Versailles style. Those of us using Indian crafts were fighting against this mindset; sourcing antique pieces, inspired by village or courtly interiors, trying to find practitioners ready to use age-old skills in contemporary new ways. The wealth of Indian skills and natural resources used were a revelation to many. They included pietra dura, Patachitra, Molela terracotta, rammed earth and lime plaster, a wealth of traditional masonry techniques using grain husks, turmeric, reclaimed jute, Dhokra lost wax casting, Athangudi ceramic tiles. Madur reed mats, Sabai grass, Sarkanda moodas, coir and screw pine, Bidri, Mysore wood marquetry, Channapatna turned lacquer, Sanjhi paper cuts, metal embossing, engraving, inlay and etching, bamboo, wicker and cane, Bastar iron craft, glass blowing, mirror thikri work, papier mache, lippan, leather puppetry, the myriad schools and styles of Indian traditional painting from Thangka to Pichwai iconography to Kalamkari and tribal Bhil and Gond art, textile weaves, embroideries and appliqués across India and so much more. We are so fortunate to still have these living hand skills, traditions and practitioners.

Why don’t more architects and designers use our extraordinary range of skillsets, techniques and materials? Why are public buildings in India so arid, institutional and predictable, so lacking in colour, vision and indigenous identity? Partly the lack of easily available information, partly deadlines that preclude including craftspeople painstakingly working by hand. However, much is owing to lack of imagination and knowledge. It is a knee-jerk reaction that contemporary buildings need to be modern and that modernity implies anonymous blandness! Craftspeople too and those who work with them, need to be open to trying new things, to thinking big, to experimenting with new materials, ideas and techniques. To mindlessly replicate the past.

Master artisans working on wood carving on the Mascot Houseboat, Srinagar; Photographs by Michael Thomas

Pietra dura at the Agra Fort. The historical Mughal structure was where emperor Humayun was crowned in 1530. It was later renovated by Akbar in 1565 and the present-day structure was completed in 1573; Photograph by Vaibhav Passi

Our finish, design and reliability also need to be upgraded if we are to compete effectively against industrially produced merchandise. Contemporary Indian design reflects India’s great diversity, but also many common features. Chief among them colour and ornamentation — often layer upon layer of both. Seen cumulatively they reflect something very Indian — the way we take the past and our heritage so casually and so much for granted. Our good fortune as well at still having so many living arts, crafts and traditions.

As a result, we keep adding our own contemporary tweaks to tradition rather than preserving it as a sacrosanct relic or a tourist trap as so many countries do. This gives the Indian experience some authenticity, though sometimes it also destroys in the process. At its best, Indian design is a journey through our culture, social history and mores as we meld East and West, modernity and tradition, past and present. Colour and chaos predominate in this unselfconscious crowded mix. There is hardly a quiet moment, or a subtle understated interior. India does have its serene calm spaces however and maybe we need to rediscover them in our spaces! The world is crowded and chaotic enough. I think that is the challenge ahead — to find the confidence to edit, to pare down — to let one exquisite Paisley buti speak for itself on a stole, rather than repeated all over. To make a wedding lehenga that flows subtly, rather than standing stiffly upright under the weight of its sequinned ornamentation. To place one beautiful Bal Krishna on a perfectly proportioned rosewood surface, rather than a motley collection of two dozen miscellaneous silver objects. How I hate that clutter of brass faux betelnut-cutters, never actually used, that was considered so ethnic and chic on a coffee table in the 80s! My own consumerist instincts were tempered by my mother’s dictum that one should never accumulate anything one didn’t use, but everything one used should be beautiful. Declutter is the mantra of the moment — it’s a good one for us acquisitive, extravagantly over-the-top Indians to adopt! But let us not abandon our flair for motif and texture, contrast and colour and the vivid pizzazz with which we include the past in our present. India has the self-confidence to eschew the chic but soulless blacks, whites, taupes and greiges that dominate the West.