Pukka Indian: Desi designs that define

My sister and I were devouring our Diwali breakfast of special karanja – my mother’s recipe mastered by my sister – potato chivda and chakli, when this is how the conversation went:

“I could have this all year long.”

“Me too. (Pause) I wonder what our doctor would say to that.”
End of conversation.

Is it the food that we prefer defines us, I wonder. Or is it our clothes, our music or our art? That evening, call it serendipity or destiny, I come across Pukka Indian. Instead of defining Indian-ness in these categories, the author Jahnvi Lakhota Nandan has conjured up 100 objects that are part of our everyday life, but we never spare a thought about. Has anyone spent one second thinking of the lota or the belan? Nandan has taken such objects and gone into their history, origin and above all, design, since that’s her area of specialisation.

Nandan links Indian culture and attitudes and habits with everyday utilitarian objects. She writes about the Ambassador and Royal Enfield, even the auto rickshaw meter, which stubbornly refuses to move away from the old flag system where the rickshaw driver puts it down on securing a fare. The design of these metres may not be great, says Nandan, but the flag that is down is like the gunshot that starts a race, a rush of adrenalin that push buttons can never give!

Design, she says “is the DNA of society and unique to every culture... what distinguishes one group of people, one society, from another.” It was while studying in Japan that she realised how “a few contemporary cultures have as close a relationship with objects that were designed 7000 years ago as India does.” For instance, the chimta-tava is the oldest of kitchen utensil, and is traceable to the 2nd century BC.   

This fact will cheer up the cook, I think, as she goes through the daily grind of making rotis. “Do you know the chimta-tava is hundreds of years old?” She looks at the tava, then at me. “You must get me a new tava,” she says.  

But Nandan doesn’t just present facts, she adds her own two bits to each section. For instance, she tells us that the chimta-tava is made from a single piece of iron, by hand even now, and that its flawless design needs no further improvement. But no before she narrates a story by Premchand, in which a poor orphan goes to a fair and spends his money on a chimta for his grandmother who’s been burning her fingers making chapatis.

Each page of this book is a delightful discovery. For instance, an agarbatti is the oldest and purest form of perfume (700 CE) and was believed to forge a connection with God as the perfumed smoke is ‘heavenbound’. Cow dung (origin 5500 BCE) is now being recommended worldwide for fuel. The ghungroo was designed for its sound whereas the Nehru jacket was designed by the first Prime Minister. Few objects in the book, such as the mangalsutra, are not functional, but symbolic. Shivani Gupta’s photographs capture the intrinsic texture and feel of the objects; such as the cord of the charpai or the metal surface of the betel-nut crusher. 

I developed a bond with seemingly ordinary household objects  after looking them up in this book.