Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
The inside story of Mumbai’s indoor art deco
MUMBAI: In another life, dowagers would make for great conservators. So many of their homes already look like an archive. American historian Abigail McGowan says, “I’ve interviewed a lot of elderly women, and they’re the best preservers of old furniture. Them, and property disputes. Most of us don’t leave our furniture in the exact place it was put in 1940. The best way is when there are property disputes. The Mafatlal House on Altamount Road is a great example. They’ve been fighting over who owns that house for years. So, they can’t change anything.”
A professor of history at the University of Vermont, McGowan “explores consumer and material culture from the lens of trends, movements, and the ways in which objects interact with and shape the way we live”. On Saturday, she gave a talk on ‘indoor deco’, the style of Bombay’s interiors from the 1920s to 1940s, at Asiatic Society. It was a period when the inside mirrored the outside, when art deco buildings housed art deco 4BHKs.
Even as awareness of art deco buildings has increased, art deco furniture continues to be a hot topic only in Chor Bazaar and select antique stores. “We’ve thought about the buildings in isolation,” says McGowan. Art deco buildings are introverts: the façades are calm, the drama is inside. They are characterised by clean lines, curves, bands, and window grilles, with simple geometric doodles such as chevrons, zigzags, waves, and ziggurats (the tiered, ascending roof of Eros Cinema). The furniture shares a similar gene. “Classically, it’s sunburst motifs, oceanic themes that evoke movement or mobility, and an industrial aesthetic, which is a reduction in ornament. It is rounded edges, smooth surfaces, and swooping lines. The earlier furniture style in Bombay was detailed, carved and intricate. Just cleaning that stuff was a dusty nightmare.”
We meet McGowan at Kamdar, the storied name for art deco furniture in the 1930s, outside Churchgate station. She is in a blonde bob, light-grey tunic, and black everything else. She first visited India in 1991, when she was an exchange student at Fergusson College in Pune. Since then, she has visited so often that she’s lost count. With a big, easy laugh and a PPT presentation, she takes us through the last century of Mumbai’s design history.
According to her, art deco aspired to tackle the whole interior. “It was a whole new design approach. It wasn’t just furniture, but flooring, lighting, wall colour, wall treatment, mirrors. That seems so normal now. A designer comes in, tells you everything you have is crap, and that you should start over. And then, they bring it all together in a unified whole. At the time, it was very new: this idea that you start from scratch. It was always done in the palaces, but the mercantile class started doing it in their new bungalows.”
Teak, terrazzo, tube lights
Most of the wooden furniture was teak. “Kamdar famously used only teak for years and years. In patterned stuff, maybe rosewood or some other tropical hardwood that you might do in a thin veneer and layer on top of teak. There was a real willingness to experiment with new materials: glass, steel, veneer, masonite, which was essentially plywood.” The groundwork was laid in terrazzo, in beautiful geometric patterns, with inlaid marble in higher-end places.
In 2019, art gallery Chatterjee & Lal had hosted an exhibition by Bharat Floorings & Tiles on its iconic tiles. “Since that exhibition, I’ve been obsessed with floors,” she says. “I just visited an art deco flat, built with these incredibly colourful tiles. It determined and shaped the aesthetic of the interior. It thought about how you arranged space and moved through it. And, it centred the room in certain ways.” Art deco was also the first style built around electricity, with elevators getting lovely deco elements. At the time, Dhanraj Mahal at Apollo Bunder was advertised for being equipped with ceiling fans and refrigerators. “Electricity came into the city in the early part of the 20th century, and it started to expand into use. But, they were the first ones to say, ‘Okay, let’s design these electrical fittings.’ Kamdar would design their own lights, because they weren’t available. And to make this aesthetic work, you wanted to have the full story of it.”
Mass media helped popularise this style. From 1938-39, films such as ‘The Secretary’, ‘The Gramophone Player’, ‘Bhabhi’, and ‘Civil Marriage’ featured art deco furniture. And, local stores such as John Roberts, Army & Navy Stores, Sajan, McKenzies, William Jacks and Dewjee Canjee profited from it. “There were a whole bunch of Indian-owned furniture companies making fabulous art deco furniture. The furniture was never imported.” Even though the designers, at times, were. “Kamdar partnered with EF Messerschmidt, a German designer. He came to India to work on Manik Bagh in Indore, a famous art deco palace built in the early 1930s. He was on site for three years, and then moved to Bombay to set up shop as an interior designer. Similarly, Eros, Regal and the other movie theatres had global designers. It was built in conversation with global styles. But, it was always interpreted and implemented by local hands.”
Like everything else here, art deco meant business. “It was commerce, it was retail, it was an industry. At the time of Independence, there were 200 licensed architects in all of India; a 100 of them practised in Bombay. This tells a different kind of story about Bombay, about the development of a production centred in the city around new interests and needs. This moment was the emergence of a new visual culture for Bombay.”
As our interview winds up, we head out to Oval Maidan to photograph McGowan against an art deco backdrop. Atul Kumar, founder of Art Deco Mumbai Trust, had arranged for our entry into the premises of Swastik Court. When we arrive, an elderly resident shouts from her curved balcony to her chowkidar to let us in. Inside is a terrazzo floor in four colours — black, pale yellow, terracotta and deep emerald — placed like a Mondrian artwork. One can’t help but think, if not for the dowagers holding their ground, all this would have been long gone.