Lounge
Why handmade is the new luxury
Summary
In a world where mass-produced and uniformly perfect products are a dime a dozen, unique handmade design becomes the embodiment of luxury
I am writing while sipping a shot of mezcal from a tiny metal tumbler handpainted by Kashmiri artisans on enamel. The little cup has a deep indigo background with a bright pink dahlia painted on it. The petals are edged with white borders and the flower sits in a halo of green leaves and stem. It cost me precisely ₹300, but it has the grace of an object touched by “thinking hands"—to borrow a phrase from the architect-author Juhani Pallasmaa.
This past fortnight I’ve thought a lot about how we decorate and accessorise our homes and the role of accessibility. Why do we buy what we buy? Convenience? Price? Desirability? Durability? Reasonably speaking, it is a combination of all those things, and perhaps for the first time since forever, we now have better access to variously made and designed products—the only catch is that we have to choose wisely. In my estimation, most of the population is still quite a way away from being able to easily access great quality simple designs at a reasonable price, but it does feel like the long march to that destination is just a little bit shorter.
I was in Mumbai for India Design (ID) at the end of September, and some 10 days later in Bengaluru at the 15th edition of the Hundred Hands fair. Two very different presentations of products and design in the country. Hundred Hands is described as “the festival of the handmade". While ID, the country’s oldest design fair, an initiative by Ogaan Media, made its debut in Mumbai. It brought together more than 120 brands from around the world and the country. This was the second exhibition of its genre to take place in the city in less than a fortnight, which had several people referring to it as Mumbai’s “design week".
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On the other hand, at Hundred Hands, there were 200 Indian artisans spotlighting the legacy of craft traditions like a live exhibit of Aditi Ranjan and M.P. Ranjan’s sweeping encyclopaedic work, Handmade in India. And yet there were many intersections between these wildly different types of exhibitions. At the India Design event, during a panel discussion titled “Tastemakers", Bengaluru-based interior design Vinita Chaitanya said she was only visiting booths of Indian brands. I later asked her why and Chaitanya’s reply was that for her, the Indian brands felt more interesting, “to touch, to feel and discover".
What Chaitanya said seems quite catchy because many people echoed the same thought. One visitor told me that the international brands felt the same but the Indian ones were showcasing things that seemed far more unique. It was particularly true because many of them, such as The Vernacular Modern studio’s presentation, explored indigenous materials and practices, of which we literally have thousands in India. ID Mumbai was particularly focused on smaller studios and products rather than large luxury design statements, so there was much more of an opportunity for innovative projects to present their works—projects like Jesh Krishnamurthy’s “Advanced Nature", which makes products from recycled construction waste.
The Pune-based company offers design solutions for people interested in buying things that come with the story of sustainability and reducing waste. It had a large eye-catching glass box space right beside some of the gates of Jio World Garden, where the exhibition was taking place. With its quirky prod- uct range, several people made a bee- line for it. Atelier Ashiesh Shah’s Swayam collection was a family of products that represented long traditions of handiwork reimagined for contemporary interiors. Karnataka’s Channapatna techniques produced chunks of beaded necklaces that studded artworks, Chhattisgarh’s dhokra traditions produced a seemingly light metal chandelier that looked like a cubic pile-up protecting a small egg bulb in its centre.
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To appreciate the wonder of these products you have to understand the com- plexity of innovating in old traditions and getting viable pieces out of such interventions. For instance, Channapatna, best known for its toy-making capabilities, is rarely used to produce objects of such large scale. Similarly dhokra, commonly interpreted as figurines, is a metal casting process that is difficult to manipulate and it would have been a laborious and long iterative process to make that light.
One of my other favourites was the presentation by Ravi Vazirani Studio— its creations, families of tables and lighting, of deceptively simple rugged forms. Stone, brass and papier-mâché were designed into products that were, dare I say, sexy. With the pieces that were born of traditional materials and practices, each one was a reflection of the contemporary possibilities of a design intervention. Of course, design at that level of the market is expensive, as they would be, when you consider just how time and resource intensive it is to introduce innovation within certain craft sectors and produce works from such collaborations.
If a designer is willing to share the benefits of high-selling prices with makers down the chain, everyone wins. For those who prefer to deal directly and pay right into the pocket of makers, platforms like Hundred Hands are perfect. If you’re in the market for new glassware, plates, mats, artwork or pretty much any category besides heavy furniture, you’re likely to find a maker at this fair. Many of the artisans I met were happy to take on commissions and dispatch work from their home towns to wherever it was required. Which brings me to that question of accessibility and how we buy things. Buying something from a craftsperson may take slightly more time, may even have imperfections, but it is likely to be more economical and certainly more special.
We’ve come to admire the uniform perfection of industrial products, but it is such a dull way of looking at objects. The handmade is the very essence of luxury in a world where mass-produced products are a dime a dozen. I’m decorating my office at the moment, and I was looking for floor mats. I’ve already got a few from Forest Post, which sells kannadipaya, loosely translated as “mirror mats" because of the repetitive mirrored patterns, hand- made by Adivasi women collectives working in Kerala’s Western Ghats.
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And then at Hundred Hands, I met Suman Dam from Assam; his family grows and harvests the cane that they then weave into sital pati mats. Sital means cool in Bengali and pati means mat. What I particularly love about these mats is that they’re so soft that you can fold a 7x5ft mat into a small roll, maybe 6 inches wide and then unfurl it again back to its original size without hurting the integrity of the weave. It is smooth and exquisitely detailed, costs less than ₹4,000, and I can trace its provenance back to a single family in Assam. As a person working at the intersections of craft, design and media, I’m singing from the ringside here. Raising a shot of mezcal to that.
Manju Sara Rajan is an editor, arts manager and author who divides her time between Kottayam and Bengaluru.
