‘Learning From Jaisalmer’ and Professor Vinod Gupta in Talking Architecture 15

(Image Courtesy IIC)

Photo Credits: Vinod Gupta

‘Learning From Jaisalmer’ by Professor Vinod Gupta

Discussant: Professor Snehanshu Mukherjee 

28 March 2025

The data presented and analysed by Professor Gupta in his talk on Jaisalmer (based on his PhD study from IIT Delhi finished in 1984) explained how the architecture and planning of Jaisalmer respond to the constraints and contexts of its situation and location in the desert region— primarily from the point of view of thermal comfort but also from other, less tangible markers of comfort. It additionally busted certain ‘myths’ of urban development, and gave clear directions about how we can deal with the issues plaguing our cities — if we have the will to do so.

One of the key points (for me) that Professor Gupta underlined was that comfort is a state of mind, and it cannot be reduced to just thermal comfort. He related an anecdote about his student group in Jaisalmer working contentedly and energetically till they were informed what the temperature was — and then they suddenly started feeling listless and uncomfortable! Comfort is thus also related to whole-hearted engagement with what we are doing; to beauty, conviviality, the sense of being in tune with the rhythms of the natural world. In other words, an entire experience. 

From the point of view of thermal performance, Professor Gupta explained Jaisalmer’s architecture and planning in terms of :

1. Orientation: the siting and location of Jaisalmer fort, town, main streets 
2. Form: typology of dwellings
3. Scale: heights of buildings/ number of floors 
4. Material of construction: of walls, roofs 
5. Detail: chattris, chajjas, water-spouts, decoration.

The research methodology followed in his study was to survey representative samples of the commonly used typologies and dwelling forms in and immediately around the city of Jaisalmer. These were identified to be of four main types. Three of these were inside the city:

• the smallest/most basic version of a small single room with its courtyard and verandah; 
• a larger variation of this dwelling type with more rooms, more than one court and verandah; 
• the most elaborate version of this dwelling type with multiple courts, rooms, verandahs and with double/multiple storeys.

The fourth type was outside the city: the village dwelling (bunga). 

The data collected for all these types of dwellings, consisted of:

• measurement of dimensions of the dwelling, 
• measurement of temperatures and humidity during the day and night inside the dwelling (different rooms and courtyards), 
• measurement of temperatures and humidity levels during the day and night outside/adjacent to the dwelling; 
• water systems at the settlement and dwelling level. 

Temperature measurements were compared with the meteorological department’s temperatures, which are as a rule taken in the open area surrounding the city. In summer these ranged from 25 to 40 degrees centigrade, and in winters from 5 to 25 degrees centigrade.

According to the research findings:

1. The temperatures in the city of Jaisalmer were less than the meteorological department’s temperatures measured in the surrounding open area. 
2. Temperatures inside the dwellings and adjacent/immediately outside them were not very different and were mostly in sync — unlike houses today where the time lag is between 4 to 5 hours, so that peak heat inside our houses in our cities is felt 4 to 5 hours after the hottest temperature outside. This is why evenings and nights are very hot and unbearable today, and there is no respite from the heat even when the sun has gone down.
3. Temperatures in Jaisalmer even during the day were not too high. This was because of design elements such as: building orientation, width and location of streets; heights of buildings adjoining/flanking these streets; and the shade cast on the streets/on the buildings due to their placement and volume. 
4. There were planned provisions for air circulation at street, dwelling and city level through connected courtyards, ventilation-shafts and jalis, which helped to reduce temperatures.
5. The intricate jali-work and carving in traditional architecture of Jaisalmer was found to be not just decorative but to yield multiple benefits. It increased shadows on wall surfaces; reduced direct heat intake; allowed air passage and ventilation.
6. Thus, the two major principles followed in the architecture of Jaisalmer was to decrease heat-gain (by limiting exposure of buildings and streets to direct sunshine and by diffusing the sunlight, and thus reducing absorption/ radiation), and to facilitate heat-loss through evaporation, ventilation and increased reflection. Despite the fact that there was not too much greenery or shrubs in Jaisalmer, thermal comfort was achieved in an urban situation by adjusting and fine-tuning the density, detail, punctuation and placement of the urban mass. 

These findings refute standard notions of thermal comfort in urban dense areas, and standard methods and conceptions of city-and dwelling-form current today. The urban heat island effect that we experience in our cities at present, as enumerated by Professor Gupta, is primarily due to two reasons: automobiles and air-conditioners. Apart from the heat generated by automobiles and air-conditioners, in the case of individual dwellings there is a huge increase in radiant heat intake - as brought out in the discussions following the presentation - primarily caused by the materials and methods of construction: such as thin walls and roof slabs of industrially processed brick and concrete, large expanses of glass windows, etc. 

As opposed to the modernist notion of bare,’clean’, unadorned walls that we have adopted as the progressive way to build, the function of decoration in providing both places of beauty and reduced heat intake, is amply clear in the havelis of Jaisalmer. This aspect is very significant; it provides yet another instance of a lakshana or distinguishing characteristic of the tradition of Indian design where the functional, structural and the decorative aspects are integrated seamlessly in any artefact or piece of architecture. I have written about this at length in my blogposts (https://anishashekhar.blogspot.com/2013/06/national-and-regional-identity-in.html) as well as in the book on Attributing Design Identity; Identifying Design Attributes (https://ambiknowledgeresources.wordpress.com/2017/01/06/forthcoming-attributing-design-identities-identifying-design-attributes/)

Professor Gupta also dwelt at length on the role of courtyards. Courtyards give light/sun/air to individual homes; at the same time, their effectiveness in cooling at an urban level is due to the continuous wind-flow and movement possible because the multiple courtyards in the dwellings and in the city work in tandem. Their benefits span six broad categories: granting light, ventilation, social space, varying levels of privacy, spillover area from built rooms, connections to circadian rhythms.

This is a feature of other traditional cities of the subcontinent. The proliferation of courtyards can be seen as a group of perforations in the urban mass; singly they would not be able to achieve the wind movement, evaporative cooling or level of thermal comfort that they do as a connected series of perforations. This is visible in urban large complexes such as the Red Fort too; the provision of multiple courtyards and verandahs in the original design of the Fort does not just work at the level of providing social space, maximising efficiency, and granting flexibility of functions. It also works to ensure ventilation and comfort throughout the Fort — working like a lattice at a plan level, what I call the ‘jali effect’. 

As I write in a blogpost ‘The City as a Place of Learning and Healing’ describing the design of Shahjahanabad and the Red Fort: (https://anishashekhar.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-city-as-place-of-learning-and.html) 

‘Like an Escher painting, as you zoom in and out of the city and Fort, different variations and scales of this interlinked pattern reveal themselves, simultaneously simple and complex. Tried and tested in the Indian subcontinent from Harappan times, this pattern was composed of sequences of walled courtyards-verandahs-halls-pavilions: a fluid building typology with some of its finest examples visible within the Fort, as analysed and described at length in The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad. 

Professor Gupta’s point about the perception of the experience of comfort — and therefore, the formulation of architecture to foster such an experience — is, I believe, an intrinsic part of the Indian world-view. In ‘The Concept of Beauty in Indian Tradition’, Rajendra Chettiarthodi’s notes that: ‘[w]hile western aestheticians equated beauty with symmetry and similar mathematical properties, Indian thinkers did not try to locate it in such clearly defined objective factors. Their concept of beauty had always some reference to the experience generated by the beautiful’. 

I found it extremely interesting that the principles of the architecture of Jaisalmer, as revealed in the talk, seemed to reinforce some observations made in a paper I presented on the theme on ‘Beauty in Architecture -- and Design’ at the Kurula Varkey Design Forum 2023 at CEPT, Ahmedabad. I’ll quote briefly from it:

‘Thus, the concept of beauty in the Indian tradition centres on experience. What sort of experience? That which grants us a sense of knowledge and blissful discovery. In architecture, such experience ought to be determined by function. Fundamentally, there is no contradiction between pragmatic needs and aesthetic concerns of creating space. Architecture needs to do both. It did so in the main, before the artificial split between function and beauty, which is the outcome of compartmentalising life into separate categories of work vs leisure, quantity vs quality, mundane vs spiritual. If we consider function in its complete sense: social, technical, ecological; and empathetic and satisfying all the senses, we would automatically provide for aesthetic qualities of light, texture, proportion, detail and spatial comfort.’

Unfortunately, habitable space is now designed as sealed containers in a thoughtless imitation of western ideas, without any provision for correct orientation and ventilation at the dwelling and city level. Wide tarred roads and extensive stretches of concrete /hard infra-structure absorb and radiate back heat during the day and night, adding to a ‘man-made’ increase in temperatures, and decreasing the ability of built-mass to quickly lose heat through evaporative cooling. 

Even in Jaisalmer so many years ago, as Professor Snehanshu Mukherjee recollected in the discussion following Professor Gupta’s presentation, when he along with the other students accompanying Professor Gupta on the field-study stayed at the ‘modern’ RTDC Tourist Hostel, it was so unbearably hot that all of them dragged out their mattresses every night and slept over the roof of the portico, rather than inside their rooms! The fact that such unsuitable architecture was made in Jaisalmer despite the evidence of the exemplary traditional architecture all around, is a testimony to the extent of brain-washing perpetuated in the name of being progressive and modern.

Professor Gupta's study and analysis of Jaisalmer is as relevant today as it was forty years ago. Perhaps even more so, given the extreme challenges of climate change that face us today, exacerbated by our architectural and urban responses which cause such acute discomfort and danger that reverses the very notion and meaning of shelter. We must realise that if the planning and architecture of cities can cause such unsustainable and severe implications on health, society and environment, the solutions must also lie in tackling it at these levels. In other words, at the interlinked macro and micro scales; at overall planning and regulations as also architectural forms, materials and detail.

By learning from Jaislamer, we can extract the principles at macro and micro scales, for tackling the unsustainable and miserable conditions we have created in our cities today. And instead generate places of comfort and beauty for all our citizens, while sharing our learnings with the people of Jaisalmer. This was clearly brought out in the discussions following the talk, with Professor Snehanshu Mukherjee and members of the distinguished audience that included the architects Professor Ujan Ghosh, Professor Basavi Dasgupta, Professor Kawas Kapadia, Peeyush Sekhsaria, Rohit Gulati and many others from different professions as well.

The first principle is that of correct orientation of buildings to reduce heat gain: something we were taught in college, but regrettably do not practice. The other principle that we are not taught sufficiently in college, is correct orientation of the town itself, including its main streets as well as its main buildings. Thus, as Professor Gupta noted, the Jaislamer Fort performs a protective function for the town, not just in terms of security but also in terms of climate, by protecting the rest of the town from hot dusty winds. This is an important principle to learn from and incorporate when we build monumental buildings and large institutional complexes in our cities and towns. Such planning would certainly reduce to some extent the necessity of artificially cooling our buildings through air-conditioners — which themselves add to heat-emission.

The second principle is the importance of sufficient open spaces of the correct scale and dimensions. Very large open spaces exacerbate climate problems apart from leading to social problems. In Jaislamer, it is the frequency, placement and size of the courtyards that helps to create overall air movement, while providing shared spaces for outdoor living that reduce the amount of built-up area and lead to healthier, convivial ways of living.

The third principle is to reduce the autocracy of the automobile — at an urban level as well as at an individual dwelling. By locating neighbourhood services that are walkable; by planning and providing for pedestrians; by encouraging non-heat emitting transport such as cycles and cycle-rickshaws; and by ensuring sufficient environment friendly public-transport. North Calcutta is a good example of this. It was devised with shaded internal walking and rickshaw routes that went past house fronts and public parks in the residential areas. These routes tied up with wider public roads and market-streets where trams, buses and taxis were easily available. While greatly reducing the need for automobile transport, this design promoted healthy and pleasant ways to navigate the neighbourhood and also caused less urban heating.

The fourth principle is to be mindful of the materials we use in construction, as well as the way in which we use these materials. Industrial materials are convenient and easily available but they are not the miracle materials they are touted to be. Natural and local materials when used with skill and knowledge, can prove long-lasting and more appropriate for our climate. It is the responsibility of the building profession, of which architects are a vital component, to disseminate information about how to do so.

And finally, the fifth principle is to understand the value, place and function of decoration. We need to analyse the validity of the anti-decoration modernist aesthetic which advocates bare, unadorned surfaces. Decoration has many aspects, from rendering beauty to expressing identity to communicating the characteristics of materials — and as we saw in Jaisalmer — to also reducing heat absorption.

Link to the recording of the talk:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mMbP1i6OH_rdMepdBZJbb5tPgTF_-BU5/view?usp=sharing

Link to all the sessions of Talking Architecture:

https://anishashekhar.blogspot.com/p/talking-architecture-at-iic.html

Podcast: On Design, Reading and Writing - and the Connections between them

A wonderful afternoon of conversation initiated by Sonya Dutta Choudhury with Anisha Shekhar Mukherji, Snehanshu Mukherjee, Professor Narendra Dengle, Subhadip Choudhury, Anubha Kakroo, Partho Dutta, and lots of other fellow readers, writers and designers:

To listen in, click below!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jnWBB10uMKcIx9B5-qUdRbUPMQyZ8htm/view?usp=drive_web

On Becoming A Reader

Anisha Shekhar Mukherji & Snehanshu Mukherjee, Architect-Author-Readers chat to Sonya Dutta Choudhury on how they became readers, the best books to gift & their favourite books on design

SDC : What helped you as a child, become a reader ?

ASM : I think the fact that we moved so often – practically every year. There was no continuity of neighbours, neighbourhoods or even cities. The only continuity was the presence of at least some books in the Army libraries. But if I were to cite a single incident that made me become a reader, it was a fat bundle of books jointly given to me as a 6th birthday present by all the officers of my father’s battalion. I don’t know where they managed to get these books since we were far away from any town, and there were only fields and orange orchards around for miles. But it was an eclectic and fascinating mix, and I was hooked as soon as I went through them!

SM : I was gifted books. And I bought books from the many bookshops that existed in Connaught Place. And of course, borrowed books every afternoon from the British Council Library, above which was our home!

SDC : How do you choose which books to read ?
ASM : Well, earlier, it was whatever I could get, and the fatter the better! Now, it is probably the reverse. I am very choosy about what I read now, wary of volume, sceptical of ‘the top-of-the pops’, and I look for economy in writing. The Book Shop in Jor Bagh is one of our favourite places for browsing and picking up unusual books. Of course, we also decide what to read based on conversations with friends and book-lovers, including the owners and staff of The Book-shop.

SM : I survey what’s available and read bits to figure out if they’re worth buying.

SDC : Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you ?

ASM : Sometimes books cause heated discussions. Rajiv Malhotra’s Being Different is one such.

SM : Hundred Years of Solitude, which spawned many discussions.

SDC : What is the best book you received as a gift ?

ASM : Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, I think. Also Tey’s Brat Farrar.

SM : Ha Ja ba ra la by Sukumar Ray gifted by Samir Majumdar from Bohuruppee, a famous theatre group. And My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin, gifted by Tapas Sen, the lighting designer who was my father’s guru.

SDC : How have your reading tastes changed over time?

ASM : Earlier it was almost entirely fiction, and a lot of poetry too. Now it is an almost equal amount of non-fiction. Lot of reading by Indian authors, generally in translation but some in Bangla too, especially children’s literature and poetry. And some in Sanskrit now, such as the Mayamatam – slow going when compared to my reading speed in English! But it’s quite fascinating to read in different languages, because they are like windows to different worlds. I’m reading a lot of stuff on Indian Philosophy, which is something that has happened over the last few years. But some reading habits haven’t changed – so crime fiction and humour are genres I fall back on all the time.

SM : From fiction to non-fiction.

SDC : What book do you most often give as a gift ?
ASM : We give children’s books often, Chotte chacha ab aapke shahr mein is a favourite and so is Mathematwist, Mathematics tales from around the world.

SM : Murder mysteries are generally a safe bet, so I often gift these.

SDC : What are the books on your bed side right now?

ASM : Kalidasa, The Loom of Time – Chandra Rajan’s translation; Nicholas Blake’s Thou Shell of Death; Murder in the Crooked House by Soji Shimada; An English translation of Patumma’s Goat by Vaikom Muhammad Basheer; Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice; Dharampal’s Collected Works on Civil Disobedience in Indian Tradition; Dharma by Chaturvedi Badrinath; Bruno Dagen’s translation of Mayamatam, and Monkey See, Monkey Do by Venita Coelho.

SM : Stephen Leacock on Kindle, and Pluriverse edited by Ashish Kothari

SDC : Lastly what are your favourite books on design?
ASM : The Appearance of the Form by John Habraken; A K Coomaraswamy’s The Indian Craftsman, Mayamatam, S Balaram’s Thinking Design, KG Subramanyan The Magic of Making, Malcolm Millais’s Exploring the Myths of Modern Architecture. And of course, Goscinny and Uderzo’s Obelix and Co, which is an unusual and engaging take on the motivations of mainstream modern design.

SM : Palladio’s Children by John Habraken.

To hear the discussion, click here:
Voice Recording of Juhu Book Club Discussion

Talk on The Sari at KRVIA, Mumbai

Why we should explore the 'Design of The Sari' by Anisha Shekhar Mukherji and 'Unplanning the City' by Snehanshu Mukherjee at The Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDoOPTe--UI

National and Regional Identity in Design:- Part IV

Part IV – At Home in The World

Ghore Bhaire (translated as At Home and Outside/ The Home and The World) is the title of a novel written in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore almost a century ago Considered a classic in world literature, the English translation of this novel is widely available, and is part of the recommended list of readings in the curriculum of Delhi University.[1] A recently published critical edition of this novel has the benefit of being annotated and edited by Professor Dilip Basu who taught English at Delhi University for many years, and who is passionate about the written, and the spoken and performed word, not just in English but also in Hindi and particularly in his own language, Bengali. When Dilip Kaka, a close family friend, asked Snehanshu to design the cover of this book, Snehanshu chose a photograph of a portico – a space both part of the house and the outside. The house was a large mansion in Birnagar in Nadia district, one of the ancestral homes of Snehanshu’s zamindar family in the days of the British Raj. The detail of the Corinthian columns in the classical colonial mould favoured by many of the richer families of Bengal, was used by Snehanshu in his cover-design of Ghore Bhaire. I found it interesting how a colonial form of building had enmeshed itself so deeply in the landed families of Bengal, that it forms the definitive image to portray a certain time and ethos of this region.

Snehanshu’s grandmother, whose beautiful Banarasi sari I wrote about in the first part of this four-part essay, forms another link in the journey of understanding the role of home and the world in shaping and re-shaping us. She persuaded her husband to move out of the quieter zamindar life in Birnagar to the bustling city of Kolkata, capital of the British Empire, where she ensured that her children received a different view of the world, equipped with higher education in medicine and engineering. The choice of the columns framing the interior of their house – one of the many such mansions the family had in Birnagar – is thus particularly relevant to the theme of Ghore Bhaire. The novel relates the differing perceptions of national and individual identity and independence within and across the boundaries of home, in the days before freedom from British rule came to India. I had seen the film adaptation of the novel by Satyajit Ray, but never read the novel in detail, either in the original or in translation. It was only when I set this as a reading for my post-graduate students in Industrial Design, that I read it and the critical essays that accompanied the book, with concentrated attention.

 The contrast in the ‘atmokatha’, literally ‘own stories’ of its three main characters, all extraordinary in their own way – Bimala, Nikhil and Sandeep – tellingly portrays how fundamentally our decisions in life are shaped by our awareness of and our search for our identities. The novel, which is recorded to have evoked varied responses and provoked more ‘vituperative criticism’[2] than any of Tagore’s other works when it was first published, also evokes varying responses on repeated readings. On re-reading the text, I felt that the novel is essentially the story of Bimala, and through her the story of the tempestuous journey that her land and her country make, in negotiating the differences between the codified confines of the past, and the imagined freedom of the future. Bimala, uneducated in the western system, brought up in the seclusion of the inner apartments, is patiently drawn out by her husband, Nikhil, from the physical and mental view circumscribed by, and within, these apartments. He exposes her to non-traditional music, books and company. He is eager that Bimala may be more aware of the world outside the compass of the space that she is traditionally restricted to, and in doing so also discover her own latent qualities, and accompany her husband as an equal partner in life.

This ‘drawing out’ of Bimala, brought up on traditional notions of space, form and propriety in her maternal home, results in events which both she and Nikhil are unprepared for. Bimala is honest enough in assessing her own actions as well as her liberal husband’s notions and actions, while yet according to him the elevated status of Hindu husbands. Yet, despite her decided individuality and intelligence, and her husband’s staunch support and love, she is inherently perhaps, insecure about her own identity. She sees herself through the eyes of others. Though, like the other women of her family, Bimala too is protected from the gaze of the outside world, she is self-conscious about how her house and her furniture, and therefore how she by association, appears to those who are deemed important and influential. In the India of that time, this denoted particularly the Europeans. She observes:

My husband still sharpens his Indian-made pencils with his Indian-made knife, does his writing with reed pens, drinks his water out of a bell-metal vessel, and works at night by the light of an old-fashioned castor lamp. But this dull, milk-and-water Swadeshi never appealed to me. Rather, we had always felt ashamed of the inelegant, unfashionable furniture of his reception rooms, especially when he had the magistrate, or some other European, as his guest.[3]

Dismissive about her husband’s long-expressed preference for home-made and regional objects and artefacts, when Bimala encounters the more emotional and militant form of the Swadeshi movement to reclaim Swa - one’s own - desh, it strikes a chord in her own fiery nature. Not only does she now countenance the rejection of all English people, including her kind music-teacher, Miss Gilby, but she also energetically espouses the cult of the home-grown, the swadeshi. Her perception of her own self and the world around her, is transformed even more dramatically by Nikhil’s charismatic friend and political leader, Sandip. His exhortation to protect the nation portrayed as a Mother-goddess, is different from her husband’s ‘dull, milk-and-water swadeshi’. She now clamours even more insistently to burn all her foreign-made clothes, and is convinced that everyone must do the same, even if that means starvation for the peasantry.

Openly pitted against her husband, she feels ashamed that ‘from his estates alone foreign sugar and salt and cloths had not been banished’. Like the others in her village, ‘old and young alike’ who had hitherto thought the use of country-made articles was a folly, she admits: ‘When Swadeshi had not yet become a boast, we had despised it with all our hearts.’ [4]

Sandip, on the other hand, moulds his identity for entirely selfish reasons. So, while he publicly deifies the nation, he corners all its resources and is happy to sacrifice other people’s comfort and even their lives, for it - justifying this predatory attitude as ‘the rule of nature’. Bimala realises his hollowness despite her fascination, but only after she has compromised her marriage, her happiness and even her identity. The reason for this is that Bimala, though certainly not a meekly acquiescent person, is yet still susceptible to the image that Nikhil or Sandip would like to mould her into. She is unprepared to unstintingly question or understand - which is the true purpose of education, and of freedom. Looking back at that time in Bengal and in India, where women for the most part, had come to be confined both mentally and physically into restricted domesticity, it is perhaps only natural that Bimala falls short.

While the novel is an exploration of many pertinent issues – about nationhood, the role of women in the domestic and the larger arena, the relationship between caste, community, region and religion – one can also find in and through its main characters, interesting parallels between the roles of design and identity. Though the novel demonstrates that you cannot categorise people into standard, unchanging black-and-white images, yet it does this through highlighting some definite ‘types’ of different individuals. A great many of us are like Bimala, conscientious and dynamic in our motivations but insecure about our own value. Swayed by the power of rhetoric and superficial qualities of design, we are confused about our identities as well as what national and individual freedom mean. Instead of developing our own personalities and skills based on our needs and abilities, we cast ourselves in ready-made moulds of others’ making, ‘ashamed’ to be ‘inelegant or unfashionable’. This is, of course, something that assails us not merely as designers or consumers, but in every aspect of our lives, particularly our persons. The most telling evidence of this, are the print, television and radio advertisements that have been incessantly promoting fairness creams for years. This has, since the past decade, been accompanied by more and more Indians streaking and bleaching their hair blonde in a desperate imitation of the predominant notion of beauty and fashion imported from primarily European and American cultures.

The fact that today, more and more Indians want to look like the West, is not a phenomenon confined to the present form of our cities, habitats, or political boundaries; nor a whimsy limited to some individuals. The reason for our deep discomfort with our appearance, an intrinsic aspect of our perceived self-identities, to a large extent has its roots in our colonial experience. In the very beginning of Ghore Bhaire, Bimala recollects her resentment about her dark features. She believes she is not beautiful, and that others do not consider her so because of this reason. Contrast this with the assurance that we earlier had of ourselves. Thus, in the Mahabharata, Drupad’s daughter, the princess Draupadi, famed as the most beautiful of all women, has eyes like the petals of the lotus, long and lustrous hair, and dark-skin – one of her names is Krishnaa, the dark one.[5] And to Amir Khusro Dehlawi the colour of the Indian skin is ‘like nectar’.[6]

The book Talking India, records a series of conversations between the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo and the multifaceted Indian Ashis Nandy, trained as a clinical psychologist and sociologist. In the book, Nandy, whose work has been described as an exploration of ‘human potentialities and destructiveness’, speaks about the reinterpretation of the Orient by the West, where: ‘Not only has the West forged this construct of the Orient, they have sold the Orient this construct. So that a sizeable section of the Orient itself has begun to look at its own past through the eyes of the West. Because that, they think, is the more modern, progressive, scientific, and universal outlook.’[7]

Like Bimala and Sandip, not only do we aspire to garb our individual femininity and masculinity in notions and garments that have little to do with the realities of our climate and contexts, but also we transpose these borrowed and ill-understood notions on others. We get enamoured of the idea of a great, powerful nation, but are impatient with the small, vulnerable people who actually make up this nation. Invariably, we are also impatient with the creations of such people and their histories. This is why Indian society for the past many decades has marginalised craftspeople and their worlds. We would instead like to link ourselves with dominant, powerful nations or cultures. The designs or products of such cultures are linked with attributes deemed progressive and fashionable by most of us. This is also why we unquestioningly cough up lakhs of rupees to buy industrially produced ‘branded’ products, but find crafts ‘too expensive’. To us, this realisation was brought home through a master-craftsman from Tamil Nadu, a weaver of reed chattais, so delicate and strong that they could be rolled up into tiny cylinders and literally wrung without spoiling their weave. As we encountered these at a crafts fair eleven years ago and debated whether to buy one at 1100 Rupees, he asked us a question that brought the debate to a close. Did we, he questioned simply, think so much too before buying branded shirts at the same or higher cost, produced in a factory, and identical with many others?

Some of us can, of course, be likened to Sandip – willing to don or discard a regional or national garb at will in order to exploit an assumed identity for personal gain. The important thing for many designers is to sell enough and get a name. ‘Sustainable’, ‘liberal’, or ‘Indian’ become mere labels grafted on as passing trends, to grab the market for another season. Contrasted with Bimala-like people who have been denied choices, but are unprepared to reasonably understand the link between their local, regional, national and therefore their individual identities, when they do have the choice; or Sandips, who deliberately use their regional or national affiliations for personal profit, there is another very important category of people. This is personified in Ghore Bhaire by Panchu, an impoverished peasant, at the mercy of regional or political lords, and unaware of, or unable to access any choice in his life.

Nikhil actively cares about the plight of Panchu and his like. He understands that a nation is not a deified abstract image. A nation is its people. This feeling was also a very important part of Rabindranath Tagore’s concerns, in his life and in his work. But for most of us today, the Panchus of the world do not form part of our imagination or our efforts. So, for instance, in the summary of Ghore Bhaire that the students of Industrial Design were asked to submit, only one out of twenty mentioned Panchu at all. This is perhaps a manifestation of the attitude of the ‘modern’ Indian designer and also of the fact that most designers, similar to most people, rarely exhibit the empathy akin to Nikhil, neither at home nor outside.

Even when we do have positive reasons catalysing our actions, we resemble Amulya, a pivotal character in the story, rather than Nikhil. Amulya is so moved by his idea of the nation, that he sacrifices his life, as well as the ideals of good behaviour and honesty that he otherwise holds, for what he believes is the good of the nation. He swears unquestioning loyalty to Sandip, as we often do to our leaders, whether of design or otherwise – without considering whether what they profess to further as a quest for good design or good practice, is actually so. Idealistic, brave and impressionable, Amulya represents in a way, a younger and therefore more headstrong version of Nikhil, without Nikhil’s qualities of critical thinking, or forbearance.

These qualities are equally manifest in Nikhil’s understanding of Bimala’s misery at the disastrous effects of her alignment and entanglement with Sandip, despite his own pain at her open defection. Amulya dies with a bullet through his heart, like so many scores of young men and women in British India. We do not know if Nikhil will recover from the serious wound in his head, as he is brought back from his efforts to stop the raging violence that has erupted between and around his people.

Freedom can mean different things to different people, is what we understand through the characters in Ghore Bhaire. But the unbridled individual quest for happiness, at the cost of the happiness of others, cannot ever be freedom. As Bimala realises: ‘But he, whose kin are there, yet no longer near, who has dropped out of all the varied companionship of a full home-the starry universe itself seems to bristle to look on him in his darkness’. [8]

Ghore Bhaire, like many of Tagore’s works, which have outlasted his life by many years, shows that great creative work is the output of talent applied in the quest for self-knowledge bolstered by an understanding of our immediate world, and activated by concern and compassion for our homes as well as the larger world. That regional and national and even universal concerns affect design, as they do any other activity in life, is evident.

As a nation and a people, we seem to have lost those qualities of compassion, choosing brutality for the fulfilment of perceived individual, regional or national reasons. Land, which evokes such complex emotional and philosophical attachments, is now being often forcibly acquired, from the very people who are most deeply linked to it – farmers, villagers, adivasis. This dispossession of the country’s most vulnerable people is happening at, as Amit Bhaduri explains at length, a huge scale by our governments for three major purposes: mining, industry and special economic zones – all large-scale industrial activities that concentrate power and money in the hands of a very few at the expense of very many.[9] Zealously enforced by government agencies,[10] it is explained away, Sandip-like, as a necessary sacrifice in the name of development, by often the country’s most powerful minds.

In an open letter to Dr. K. Kasturirangan recently published in The Hindu, Madhav Gadgil, Chairman of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, notes his surprise and dismay at Dr Kasturirangan’s being party to the report of the High Level Working Group on Western Ghats. This report, Gadgil writes, partitions the ecologically sensitive ghats into ‘natural landscapes’, one-third of which are to be ‘safeguarded by guns and guards’, and ‘two-thirds of so-called cultural landscapes’ to be thrown open to large-scale and exploitative development, while ‘remarking that local communities can have no role in economic decisions’. Such development, Gadgil writes, as shown clearly in the case study by the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel of Lote Chemical Industry Complex in Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra, has caused pollution beyond all legal limits so that 20,000 people have been rendered jobless while only 11,0000 have obtained industrial employment. In this context, Gadgil observes that it ‘would appear that we are now more British than the British’, reminding us of Francis Buchanan, ‘an avowed agent of British imperialism, who wrote in 1801 that India’s sacred groves were merely a contrivance to prevent the East India Company from claiming its rightful property’.[11]

The disturbing scale of land grabbing in the name of national development can be observed today all across free India. It is explained away as ‘inevitable’. So, the forcible takeover of agricultural, forest and common lands by governments and real-estate agencies for SEZs and industrial uses, despite sustained people’s protests, continues to be a rising phenomenon.[12] Statistics analysed by P. Sainath (described as ‘the only rural affairs editor in India’) show that ‘at least 270,940 Indian farmers have taken their lives since 1995, which translates into around 46 farmers’ suicides each day, on average. Or nearly one every half-hour since 2001.’[13] This means that by the time you have read this essay, at least one more farmer has taken his own life. Yet, despite the rise in suicide rates of Indian framers, this chilling phenomenon rarely gets any mention in our media or provision in our political planning.

As Ashis Nandy notes, ‘Ultimately, modern oppression, as opposed to the traditional oppression, is not an encounter between the self and the enemy, the rulers and the ruled, or the gods and the demons. It is a battle between dehumanized self and the objectified enemy, the technologized bureaucrat and his reified victim, pseudo-rulers and their fearsome other selves projected on to their 'subjects'.[14] We are all party to this oppression and will indeed continue to be so, till we are secure with our own individual and regional identities, and share a concern beyond ourselves.

One cannot become a global citizen by renouncing local resources or by renouncing one’s local links and responsibilities. The journey has to be individual and from within. As the example of Ghore Bhaire shows, true freedom and identity stem from having and realising the choice to inhabit both your inner and outer worlds – not an either/or situation. It is only then that we can question conventional dominant notions, even when we are suddenly confronted with choices, and can explore and adapt – instead of abandoning – our own inherited values or designs in the light of increased awareness of the values or knowledge-systems of other cultures. It is not one or the other, or the individual pitted against a region or a nation, but all these together which will create confident, creative individuals and nations. Just as, to Nikhil, and to Tagore, political freedom is nothing if it results from coercion of individuals, especially those who are poor or deprived, similarly independence means nothing if we cannot exercise it to achieve not just channels for our own creative self-expression with dignity, but also for that of others who are destitute of such opportunities.

What Sri Aurobindo said so many years ago is even more relevant today:

A reshaping of the forms of our spirit will have to take place; but it is the spirit itself behind past forms that we have to disengage and preserve and to give to it new and powerful thought-significances, culture-values, a new instrumentation, greater figure. And so long as we recognize these essential things and are faithful to their spirit, it will not hurt us to make even the most drastic mental or physical adaptations and the most extreme cultural and social changes. But these changes themselves must be cast in the spirit and mould of India and not in any other, not in the spirit of America or Europe, not in the mould of Japan or Russia…Our means must be as great as our ends and the strength to discover and use the means so as to attain the end can only be found by seeking the eternal source of strength in ourselves.[15]

And so we come back to the image and function of the sari, and the qualities it embodies – where the functional and the decorative may be part of the same whole; where resources can be used optimally but frugally; where an artefact can be simultaneously functional and decorative; where infinite variety and complexity are possible within an idea of striking simplicity; where work, despite being a necessary means of survival can also be part of a daily decentralised, individual quest for creative expression; where a rigorous knowledge and appreciation of aesthetics can enable the creation of distinctive design within a shared language and structure.

As individuals and as groups, as designers and as consumers, we can consciously decide to eschew materials, processes, and designs that depend on their production or existence on centralised, dehumanising and exploitative practices. In the choice of what we wear and use in our daily lives; what and how we design; and who we design for; we can seek to further the possibilities of human freedom and creativity, while seeing how we can improve living and working conditions for everyone – especially those who actually create things for us, using their hands. And for those who still crave novelty and endless variety, they can still patronize the sari, which can be draped in 108 recorded ways. So I would like to end, as I began, with the image of a sari. Not one woven a hundred years ago, but a beautiful Kerala cotton sari woven in today’s time. At Rs. 650, it is less expensive and far more valuable than the industrially produced plastic watches that are now the trend, and that Snehanshu had originally intended to buy for me. We are fortunate that we still have such a choice. But we may not for long.

Images © Anisha Shekhar Mukherji; Text © Anisha Shekhar Mukherji

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[1]  The Home and The World (At Home and Outside), Rabindranath Tagore, English translation by Surendranath Tagore; ‘Bimala’s Story’, Critical Edition edited by Dilip Kumar Basu and Debjani Sengupta, WorldView Publications, Delhi 2011

[2] Tanika Sarkar, ‘Many Faces of Love: Country, Woman and God in the Home and The World’, p.265, as reproduced in The Home and the World, At Home and Outside, Critical Essays p.265.-84.

[3] The Home and the World, At Home and Outside, Critical Edition; ‘Bimala’s Story’, p.99. It is interesting in this context to recollect the furniture that Tagore chose to use in the colonial spaces of his family home at Jorasanko. Not only is furniture sparely used, low in scale and well-crafted in the Indian tradition, but also internal objects such as the evocative light fittings made of sea shells, apparently by Tagore himself, combine the traditional Indian features of practical and decorative use, utilising local materials.

[4] Ibid.

[5]  Mahabharata, Kamla Subramaniam, p. 98, Bharthi Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai, 1^st Edition, 1965, 16^th Edition, 2011

[6] Amir Khusro, Dr Parmanand Panchal, p. 14, Hindi Book Centre, New Delhi,

[7] Talking India, Ashis Nandy in Conversation with Ramin Jahnabegloo, ‘Looking in the Mirror of the East’, p. 27, OUP 2006

[8] The Home and the World, At Home and Outside, Critical Edition; ‘Bimala’s Story’, p. 205

[9] The Face You Were Afraid to See, Essays on the Indian Economy, ‘A Failed World View’, p.36-7, Penguin Books, 2009

[10] The documentary film, Earth Witness, Reflections on the Times and the Timeless, directed by Akanksha Joshi, 2011, shows how farmers, shepherds, adivasis in different parts of India are being mercilessly pushed off their land by decisions taken by national agencies

[11] ‘Shocking Betrayal on Western Ghats’, Madhav Gadgil, p. 13, Op-Ed, The Hindu, May 18 2013

[12] See http://discuss.landgrab.info, a forum for readings and discussions on such issues.

[13]  P. Sainath, The Hindu, May 18, 2013, ‘Farmers’ Suicide rates soar above the rest’; for more writings by Sainath, see also https://www.facebook.com/pages/P-Sainath/313138165368369

[14] Ashis Nandy, ‘The Psychology of Colonialism, Sex, Age and Ideology in British India’, p. 16, The Intimate Enemy, Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Delhi, Oxford University Press 1983

[15] The Right Object of Education – And India’s National Education, Words of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, http://www.esamskriti.com/essay-chapters/Education-~-words-of-Sri-Aurobindo-ad-Mother-1.aspx