There is Calcutta, and the Bengal School – Abanindranath Tagore and his heirs, turning away from British academic realism to look back at Mughal miniatures and Ajanta, building a nationalist art out of soft, atmospheric washes.

And there is Bombay, and the Progressive Artists’ Group of 1947 – Souza, Husain, Raza, Ara – turning the other way, toward Paris and European modernism, impatient with all that revivalist nostalgia and hungry to be contemporary and international.

Look back, or look west. Between those two poles, the entire canon of modern Indian art is usually drawn. And it leaves out most of the country.

I’ve felt the gap in that map for a long time, sitting in Bangalore, in the South that the story tends to skip. Because while Calcutta and Bombay were arguing about whether Indian art should face its past or face Europe, something was happening in Madras that took neither side – and asked a question I think is sharper than both.

A different question

The question the Bengal School and the Bombay Progressives were both, in their different ways, answering was: how do we relate to the West? Bengal answered by rejecting it and reaching for a pre-colonial past. Bombay answered by embracing it and joining a global modernism. But both let the West set the terms. The whole conversation still orbited Europe – as a thing to refuse or a thing to catch up with.

In Madras, K.C.S. Paniker asked something that stepped outside that orbit entirely. Not how do we look Indian, and not how do we look modern, but: what if those were never opposites in the first place? What if the materials of a genuinely modern art were already lying around in South India – in the temple, the script, the floor drawing – waiting to be seen as modern rather than as heritage?

To understand how Madras got to that question, you have to start with the man who broke the school open a generation earlier.

The Bengal seed

The Government School of Arts and Crafts in Madras was one of the colonial art schools – founded around 1850, built, like the others, to turn Indian craftsmen into industrial draftsmen for British trade. For its first seventy years it did roughly that.

Then, in 1929, it got its first Indian principal: Devi Prasad Roy Chowdhury. And here is a connection the standard telling misses. Roy Chowdhury was a Bengali, and he had trained under Abanindranath Tagore himself – his early paintings used the Japanese wash technique of the Bengal School, the very method behind Bharat Mata. The man who would drag Madras away from colonial academicism came directly out of the Bengal revival.

But he didn’t import Bengal to the South. He brought its ambition – the conviction that Indian artists could make serious, expressive, non-colonial art – and then pointed it somewhere new. Roy Chowdhury was a sculptor, and his instinct was toward weight, muscle, the human body under strain. His monumental bronzes – the Triumph of Labour, four men heaving against a rock, still standing on Chennai’s Marina Beach – replaced the delicate romance of the Bengal wash with something heavy, physical, and rooted in the labouring body. Over his nearly thirty years as principal, he turned a colonial industrial-arts factory into a studio of rugged, expressive fine art. He laid the ground. He also, incidentally, taught a student named Ramkinkar Baij at Santiniketan – but that is an episode for later.

Paniker and the script

The movement itself belongs to Roy Chowdhury’s successor. K.C.S. Paniker became principal in 1957, and under him what had been a change of temperature became a change of language.

Paniker’s own path to it is worth tracing, because it disproves the lazy idea that “authentic” Indian art means sealing yourself off from the world. In the late 1950s his work was moving toward abstraction, and he was looking, openly, at Paul Klee – the Swiss modernist who treated the line as a living, wandering thing and folded signs and symbols into his paintings.

Paniker took that permission and turned it homeward. If Klee could make a visual language of marks and symbols, Paniker could build one out of his own – and his own was extraordinarily rich.

The result was the Words and Symbols series, and it is one of the genuinely original bodies of work in modern Indian art. Paniker filled his canvases with Malayalam script, with tantric yantra diagrams, with fragments of mathematical and astrological notation – letters and symbols stripped of their literal meaning and set loose as pure visual rhythm.

You are not meant to read them. You are meant to feel the pulse of a writing system, the geometry of a ritual diagram, the density of inscription. He had found a way to make an art that was abstract and modern and unmistakably South Indian all at once, because its very alphabet was drawn from the region’s own hand.

This became the intellectual core of what is now called the Madras Art Movement: a deliberate turn toward what its artists called nativism – drawing modern art out of the immediate cultural environment. The Chola bronze and its flowing contour line. The carved geometry of the temple. The kolam that appears on a Tamil threshold at dawn and is gone by noon. Classical dance, local script, folk iconography. Not copied as decoration, but mined for the structural principles of a contemporary art. Line over mass. Rhythm over realism. Symbol over illustration.

The village that refused to wait

And then there is the part of the story that moves me most, because it is not about style at all. It is about power, and refusal.

The commercial art world of mid-century India ran through Bombay and Delhi. The galleries, the buyers, the critics, the money – all of it was in the North and West, and it largely ignored the South. A Madras artist in the 1960s could make the most original work of their life and watch it disappear into a void of indifference, because the map that decided what counted didn’t extend far enough down the coast.

Paniker’s response was not to lobby the galleries. It was to make them irrelevant.

In 1963, he and a group of artists from the school formed the Artists’ Handicrafts Association, and began making things with their hands to sell – batik textiles, which they were among the first in the country to produce, and terracotta, and metalwork.

The point was self-reliance: if art couldn’t pay, craft would, and craft would buy the freedom to make art. The proceeds from their batik built toward something concrete. In 1966, the money bought eight and a half acres of land outside Madras, and there they built Cholamandalam – a village named after the Chola dynasty, the old southern kings who had once been the region’s great patrons of art.

At Cholamandalam, artists lived together, made craft to survive, and made art to matter. No gallery granted them permission. No patron in Bombay decided whether they existed. They had, quite literally, bought themselves the ground to stand on. It became one of Asia’s first and most successful self-supporting artists’ communes, and – this is the astonishing part – it is still there, still running, nearly sixty years on.

There is a rhyme here that shouldn’t be missed. An earlier essay in this series traced how the colonial art schools split the “artist” from the “craftsman,” ranking the first above the second, turning living traditions into supply chains. Cholamandalam quietly undid that split. It put craft and art back in the same hands, in the same building, in the same life – batik in the morning to fund the canvas in the afternoon – and made that fusion the very engine of its independence. The thing colonialism had prised apart, Cholamandalam fused back together, and used the fusion to buy its freedom.

What the map left out

The Madras Movement doesn’t get its due in the standard story for a simple, slightly damning reason. It wasn’t doing what Calcutta was doing, and it wasn’t doing what Bombay was doing – and the map, drawn between those two poles, had no coordinate for a third position.

But the third position was arguably the most self-possessed of them all. It didn’t reject the West out of wounded nationalism, and it didn’t chase the West out of insecurity. It looked at Klee and took what was useful, looked at the Chola bronze and the kolam and the script and took what was true, and built something that owed no apology to anyone – and then built the institution to sustain it, on its own land, with its own hands.

Line, script, earth, and a village that refused to wait for permission. That is Madras. And it is only the first place the map forgot.

This is the first episode of The Unmapped Modernists, a sub-series on the regional Indian art movements the canon left off the map. Part of Look Again, on The Untrained Eye.

Sources: the account of the Madras Art Movement, K.C.S. Paniker, D.P. Roy Chowdhury, and Cholamandal draws on the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, DAG’s “Madras Modern: Regionalism and Identity,” the Cholamandal Centre for Contemporary Art, and standard reference sources.

The road built to last three years instead of twenty because nobody wanted to invest in the version that would actually hold. The consumer product that ships at sixty percent of its potential because close enough is fine and ‘the market won’t notice anyway’. That chalta hai reflex – that omnipresent ambient cultural permission to stop before the thing is finished – dressed up as pragmatism and passed down as wisdom.

I stand by all of that.

But something struck me recently, and I want to think through it out loud, because I think I have been looking at only half of the picture.

Jugaad may also be the most important cognitive skill in the AI economy. And the contradiction between that claim and everything I’ve said before is worth sitting with rather than resolving too quickly.

Two Things Are Wearing the Same Name

The problem begins with the word itself. Jugaad is being used to describe two completely different things, and the conflation of those two things has made it impossible to think clearly about either of them.

The first thing is jugaad as a finishing philosophy. You (or your client) are building something – a road, a product, a piece of creative work – and somewhere along the way you run out of time, money, patience, or all three. And instead of finding a way to finish properly, you stop at sixty percent and call it done. The road cracks. The product fails in three months. The problem you were solving comes back, sometimes worse than before. This is the jugaad I have been critiquing in this series. It is not resourcefulness. It is a cultural permission to underdeliver, dressed in the language of practicality.

The second thing is jugaad as cognitive flexibility. You are in a situation with no obvious solution, incomplete resources, a hard deadline, and no rulebook that covers this specific combination of circumstances. And you figure something out. Not a compromise that makes everyone slightly unhappy. Not a half-measure that kicks the problem forward. Something that actually works, assembled from whatever is available, in real time, under pressure.

These are not the same thing. They share a word and almost nothing else.

The first is a relationship to quality – an acceptance of the substandard as sufficient. The second is a relationship to constraint – a comfort with working from not-quite-enough. A person can be deeply committed to excellence and deeply comfortable with constraint simultaneously. In fact, some of the most interesting design and problem-solving in the world comes from exactly that combination: the insistence on a standard alongside the willingness to achieve it through unconventional means.

When I have been arguing against jugaad, I have been arguing against the first thing. I have not been arguing against the second. I should have been clearer about that distinction. This essay is an attempt to make it now.

Why the Second Thing Matters

AI is the ultimate specification machine.

Give it a clear brief – a defined problem, a known solution space, explicit parameters – and it will execute faster, cheaper, and with more consistency than any human team. This is not a distant prospect. It is the current state of a rapidly expanding set of tasks, and the set is growing every month.

The work that AI cannot do is the work that happens before the specification exists.

The messy, undefined situation that nobody has written a brief for yet. The problem that requires a human being to first figure out what the problem actually is before they can begin solving it. The moment when you are standing in a room – or in a market, or in a client relationship, or in a supply chain crisis – with insufficient resources, urgent pressure, and no rulebook that covers what is happening, and you have to figure something out from what is actually there.

That is the second kind of jugaad. And that specific cognitive capability – the comfort with ambiguity, the willingness to start moving before the full picture is available, the ability to assemble a workable solution from not-quite-enough – is precisely what cannot be automated.

AI can optimise a known solution space. It cannot define an unknown one. That requires a human being who is not paralysed by the absence of the correct tool or the correct process. A human being who looks at a constrained situation and thinks: what can I make from what I actually have?

India has been training this muscle for generations. Not intentionally, not as a designed educational programme, but as a consequence of operating for decades in conditions where the full picture was rarely available, the correct tool was rarely at hand, and waiting for optimal conditions was not an option. The jugaad instinct is the cognitive scar tissue of navigating genuine scarcity. It is uncomfortable and unglamorous and it developed in conditions nobody would choose.

It is also, it turns out, the one capability the post-AI economy needs most desperately. And we have been embarrassed about it.

The Embarrassment

For the last thirty years, as India has been integrating into global professional and commercial culture, jugaad has been repositioned. First it was romanticised – the frugal innovation literature of the 2000s turned it into a management philosophy, a design methodology, a competitive advantage that the West should learn from. Then it was used as an excuse – every piece of shoddy infrastructure, every failed product, every cut corner was retroactively labelled jugaad and therefore acceptable. And then, as Indian professionals became more exposed to the standards of global excellence, there was a reaction: jugaad is the reason we can’t have nice things. Jugaad is embarrassing. And then, the sneaking suspicion that jugaad could be what people say when they haven’t done the real work.

This reaction – my reaction, the reaction that caused me to write a series of pieces on, essentially, mediocrity – is correct about the finishing philosophy version. It is a significant overcorrection when applied to the cognitive flexibility version.

The professional Indian who has worked in a global context and felt the gap between Indian standards and international ones has often concluded: we need to be more rigorous, more process-driven, more systematic, more like the cultures that built the standards we are trying to meet. This is not wrong. But in the rush toward rigour and process and system, there is a real risk of losing the one thing that rigour and process and system cannot produce: the comfort with ambiguity that makes genuine innovation possible.

The most process-driven cultures in the world are also, often, the most brittle in genuinely novel situations. The situation that the process doesn’t cover. The problem that falls between the defined domains. The crisis that requires someone to make a decision without sufficient information and without time to acquire more. In those moments, the person who has been trained to wait for the correct process is paralysed. The person who learned to figure things out from what’s actually available is not.

The Irony

The scarcity that produced the second kind of jugaad is the condition India has spent perhaps seventy years trying to escape.

And we are succeeding, now. The generation growing up in Indian cities today has access to resources, processes, and professional infrastructure that their parents could not have imagined. This is unambiguously good. The scarcity was real and it caused real suffering and escaping it is a genuine achievement.

But cognitive capabilities are not just products of intention. They are also products of environment. The child who grows up in an environment where resources are reliable, processes are established, and the correct tool is always available develops a different relationship to constraint than the child who grew up without those things. They are, in many ways, better equipped for a structured professional environment. They may be less equipped for the moment when the structure fails.

The new generation of Indian professionals, raised in relative abundance, may be less comfortable with ambiguity than the generation before them. More dependent on having the correct process in place before they start moving. Less willing to assemble something workable from insufficient parts. More likely to wait for optimal conditions that may not arrive.

We may be escaping the scarcity just in time to lose the superpower it gave us.

This is not an argument for keeping people poor. It is an argument for being deliberate about what we carry forward from the condition we are leaving behind. The scarcity itself was a cost. The cognitive flexibility it produced was a gain. The question is whether we can keep the gain without keeping the cost – whether we can choose jugaad as a practice rather than passively inheriting it as a necessity.

What Jugaad as a Design Methodology Actually Looks Like

The design tradition that most clearly embodies the second kind of jugaad is not Indian. It is associated most strongly with a Kenyan-American designer named Leyla Acaroglu, with the appropriate technology movement started by E.F. Schumacher, with the work of design schools like the Honey Bee Network in India itself, and with a broader tradition of constraint-driven design that has produced some of the most intelligent objects in the world.

The principle is simple: constraint is not the enemy of good design. It is often the condition that makes good design possible. When you cannot buy the expensive component, you have to understand the problem deeply enough to find a cheaper solution that works just as well. When you cannot follow the standard process, you have to understand the underlying logic well enough to achieve the same result through a different path. When you do not have enough, you have to think harder about what you actually need – which often turns out to be less than you assumed.

The tumbler and davra is this. Designed within the constraints of what was available – metal, local manufacturing, the specific conditions of South Indian coffee culture – it achieved something that no amount of additional resource has improved upon. The constraint was the condition that produced the clarity.

The question is not whether to do jugaad. The question is which kind. The kind that stops at sixty percent because the constraint is an excuse – or the kind that uses the constraint as a design condition and reaches one hundred percent through an unconventional path.

Both are called jugaad. Only one is a superpower.

India has already trained for it. Are we going to keep the training or leave it behind along with the scarcity that made it necessary?

The Monoculture Chronicles is the design and culture criticism series inside The Untrained Eye.

We’ll start with the medium itself, because that is where the myth collapses fastest.

Watercolour was never the victim

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long before the government art schools were formalised, Indian painters were already producing enormous quantities of work for British patrons. We know this style as Company Painting – a hybrid form made by Indian artists for East India Company officers, merchants, and their families. It documented flora, fauna, monuments, festivals, castes, and trades, rendered with European conventions of perspective and shading, made precisely to European taste.

To do this, Indian artists – traditionally accustomed to opaque gouache and mineral pigments applied on layered wasli (वासली) paper – were trained to use European transparent watercolours on imported paper.

So watercolour was not the suppressed native innocent waiting to be rescued. It was, if anything, one of the earliest tools of the colonial documentary project – the primary medium in which India was catalogued for British consumption. The story that casts watercolour as the murdered native medium gets the historical roles backward.

Which means the real change the schools brought was not about a pigment at all. It was about a hierarchy.

The schools and the ladder

The colonial art schools were formalised in quick succession – Madras in 1850 (governmentalised in 1854), Calcutta in 1854, Bombay in 1857, with Lahore following in 1875. They were modelled on the Royal Academy and the South Kensington design system, and they arrived carrying a single, quietly devastating proposition: that “real” art meant European academic art.

Oil on canvas sat at the very top of the ladder. Academic realism, illusionistic depth, correct Western anatomy, single-point perspective – these were installed as the definition of artistic seriousness, the universal standard against which everything was measured.

Measured against that standard, the whole of India's own visual inheritance came up short. The miniature, with its flat planes, hierarchical scale, and refusal of a fixed single-point viewpoint; the mural; the temple sculpture; the folk traditions – all of it was reclassified. Not as different systems of making with their own internal logic, but as decoration. As craft. As the charming, lesser output of a people who had not yet learned to render 3D space properly.

Nobody needed to issue an official decree banning watercolour or wasli painting. All they needed to do was decide, institutionally and with the full certifying authority of the state (as they did most of our social and cultural institutions that have nevertheless survived today) that the medium and manner of the coloniser were "Fine Art," and everything else was something beneath it. Once that ranking was in place, it enforced itself. An ambitious young Indian who wanted to be taken seriously as an artist learned oil and realism, because that was where legitimacy lived.

The part that's worse than the myth

Here is where the true history turns genuinely bleak, and it is a turn the "banned watercolour" story cannot make, because it requires giving up the comfort of a simple cartoon.

The British did not build these schools because they thought Indian art was inherently crude.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London – Henry Cole’s vast showcase of the world's industrial and artistic output – did not invent colonial art education, but it provided its ultimate economic rationale. When the India pavilion opened, European connoisseurs and industrial designers, confronting the finest examples of Indian textiles, metalwork, and craftsmanship, were not contemptuous. They were alarmed and impressed. Here was a decorative and material sophistication that, in many respects, outclassed what Britain’s own newly industrialised manufacturing could produce.

So the art schools were not a response to bad Indian art. They were a response to good Indian art – an attempt to capture it, standardise it, and turn it to British commercial advantage.

The four cities chosen for the schools – Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, Lahore – were major hubs of British trade, selected from an explicit perspective of British economic self-interest. The design was clear: goods would be produced using Indian labour and techniques, but students would be taught under British instruction to cater directly to the global British market.

And the social engineering underneath it was stated with startling clarity in contemporary records: the goal was to raise the school-trained artisan to "a creative status much above that of the bazaar craftsman."

Read that phrase carefully. The goal was to split the maker from the master – to create a new, British-certified class of "artist" and, in the same motion, to demote the hereditary craftsman, the karigar with generations of embedded knowledge, into a lower category of mere manual labour. The living tradition, transmitted through lineage and workshop, was broken open and reorganised into a supply chain feeding British trade.

The complication that makes it true

It is vital to resist cartoonish villainy, because the historical reality is far more revealing.

The British were not of one mind about colonial art policy. It was a genuine muddle of competing agendas. One faction, descending from the South Kensington design-reform movement, sincerely wanted to preserve Indian craft and protect it from industrial degradation. Another faction wanted to impose European fine art wholesale. The schools lurched between these impulses depending on who held the principalship.

The sharpest illustration of this internal conflict is E.B. Havell. Havell was British, and as the principal of the Government College of Art in Calcutta from 1896, he became one of the fiercest critics of the academic-realism orthodoxy his own countrymen had installed. He argued that Indian art had its own profound spiritual aesthetics, and he actively pushed his students away from European oil painting and back toward Mughal and Rajput miniatures. It was in Havell’s orbit, and in collaboration with him, that Abanindranath Tagore developed the wash technique and launched the Bengal School of Art.

But notice what even this hopeful thread reveals: the direction of Indian art was being set, argued over, and reversed inside a conversation between Englishmen – Havell against the academicians, one colonial faction against another. The fundamental fact of the colonial situation was not which side won a given decade. It was that the authority to decide what Indian art should be had been transferred out of Indian hands and into a committee of the coloniser's making.

That is the tyranny. Not the oil paint. Not a banned watercolour. The quiet expropriation of a civilisation's authority to define its own art – to say for itself what counted as beautiful, what counted as serious, what counted as art at all.

And, very frankly, we operate with the very same biases and prejudice today. Fine art is still elitist, exclusionist and gatekept. Other forms of indigenous art, while appreciated, are relegated to being “charming”, owed “appreciation” the “effort they take to make”, and otherwise largely ignored – only to be stolen by luxury fashion houses who saw a worth in their aesthetic that we, their own makers, couldn’t – but we’ve talked about this already.

A small story of taking it back

The reason this story does not end completely in despair is that the authority was eventually taken back – at least for a time – by some of the very students the system had trained.

Abanindranath Tagore, working alongside a dissenting British principal, reached past European academic realism entirely, drawing from Mughal, Rajput, and Japanese sources. His students carried it further. Santiniketan grew into a space where Indian art could be taught on its own terms.

The medium was never the tyranny. The paint was just paint. What they were attempting to take back was the power of self-definition – and the long, unfinished work of independence, in art and culture as much as in politics, has always been the work of taking that power back.

Part of Look Again, on The Untrained Eye.

Sources: the account of the colonial art schools and their economic logic draws on Banglapedia’s entry on colonial-era art education, Partha Mitter’s Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, and contemporary scholarship on the four schools; the E.B. Havell material is drawn from standard accounts of the Bengal School.

I was trying to figure out final solutions for storage in the kitchen. I’m a bit OCD about uniformity. And I like my oils, spices, pulses and every item of a specific category to live in containers that work and look beautiful and last.

So these bottles were beautiful - clean lines, natural material, the kind of object that photographs well and signals a certain considered relationship to the kitchen. As soon as they were delivered home, I washed and arranged them in the spice drawer, and for a few days my kitchen looked like it belonged on a design account I follow.

And then I cooked. Really cooked, the way we actually cook in Indian kitchens - both hands in the food, reaching for things quickly, the mustard seeds already popping in the pan, no time to wipe my hands before grabbing the jeera. The bamboo cap, exposed to steam and wet fingers over weeks, started gathering mould. I cleaned it. It came back. I cleaned it again. Eventually I moved the bottles to a shelf I don’t use and went back to the steel dabbas my mother gave me.

Here is what I want to tell you: I did not have a spice bottle problem.

I had a problem I never fully defined. And that is a completely different problem - one that no spice bottle, however beautiful, is ever going to solve.

The Failure Mode

Let me describe a staircase.

Someone builds an external staircase to access the upper floor of their home. The staircase is well-built. The steps are even, the railing is solid, the gradient is comfortable. Ish. The contractor finishes and leaves. The owner goes to open the door at the top of the staircase and discovers that the door swings outward - as all good external doors should, for safety and waterproofing reasons - directly into the landing. The landing is not wide enough to accommodate the door’s swing arc. The door can open approximately forty degrees before it hits the railing.

The staircase works. The door works. Together, they don’t.

Nobody stood at the top of the planned staircase, in their imagination, and opened the door. Nobody simulated the actual experience of using the thing before it was built. The problem that was solved - access to the upper floor - was solved correctly and completely. The problem that was not defined - what does the full experience of arriving at and entering the upper floor actually require - was never asked.

The door will open at forty degrees for the lifetime of that house. The family will turn sideways to enter. They will say: we’ll fix it eventually. They won’t. The cost and disruption of fixing a structural problem after the fact is almost always higher than the cost of thinking through the problem before the fact. So they adapt. The friction becomes invisible. The house works, in the sense that everyone gets upstairs. The house doesn’t work, in the sense that nobody designed it for the people who live in it.

This is not an unusual story. It is the most common story in Indian domestic construction, renovation, and product purchasing. We are, as a culture, extraordinarily good at solving the problem we can see. We are less practiced at defining the full problem - the problem over time, in actual use, by actual people in actual conditions - before we reach for the solution.

Why We Rush

The instinct to solve before defining is not stupidity. It is an inheritance.

Earlier in this series I diagnosed a scarcity loop – the psychology that Indian professional culture absorbed from the post-independence, pre-liberalisation era: solve it now, solve it fast, something is better than nothing. In a genuinely resource-scarce environment, where waiting to define the problem perfectly might mean having no solution at all, this instinct is rational. You build the staircase with the materials you have, in the time you have, and deal with the door later.

The problem is that later became a cultural reflex. The economy changed, the resources became available, the constraint that made rushing rational disappeared - and the rushing remained. We still solve before defining because solving feels productive and defining feels like delay. We still build before thinking because building is visible and thinking is not. We still buy before understanding because buying resolves the discomfort of the unresolved problem and understanding just makes it more complicated.

This is the short-termism of scarcity psychology applied to design. And its output is everywhere.

The tunnel dug to solve a traffic problem that needed an urban planner looking at the whole system, not a civil engineering contract solving one visible bottleneck. The product launched to capture a market before the market’s actual needs were researched, because by the time the research was done, the window might have closed. The renovation completed in three weeks when the design problem needed three months of living in the space to understand.

We build. We buy. We launch. And then we live with the consequences of not having defined the problem first - the door that opens forty degrees, the spice bottles in the drawer, the traffic backed up one intersection further than it was before.

The Corruption of the Quality Signal

Here is the specific way this failure mode is made worse in the Indian consumer market.

The quality signal - the information a consumer uses to determine whether a product will actually solve their problem - has been corrupted. The bamboo cap spice bottle looks considered. It signals: someone thought about this. The packaging is beautiful. The brand story is coherent. The design aesthetic communicates care.

None of these things tell you whether the cap will gather mould in your specific kitchen with your specific cooking habits. The quality signal - beautiful, considered, expensive-feeling - is real. It’s just measuring the wrong thing. It’s measuring the product’s relationship to an imagined kitchen in a photograph, not its relationship to your actual kitchen with actual cooking.

This is not accidental. As the Performative Quality essay in this series argued, Indian D2C brands have become extremely sophisticated at producing the signals of quality without investing in the substance of it. The packaging cost more than the product. The brand story did the work that product testing should have done. And the consumer, lacking any other reliable signal, used aesthetics and brand narrative as quality proxies - and bought the mouldy spice bottle.

The maintenance culture gap compounds this further. We do not have a strong culture of evaluating products over time, in use, and reporting back. The review ecosystem in India is young, the return culture is still developing, and the social feedback mechanisms that would punish a product that fails in real conditions are not yet functioning as efficiently as they should. So the bad product - the one that works in the showroom and fails in the kitchen - survives in the market longer than it should, generating repeat sales from consumers who chalk up the failure to bad luck or their own misuse rather than to a design that was never tested against actual use.

A Note on Minimalism

The minimalism conversation is adjacent to this and worth addressing directly.

When I made a reel on this topic, the most common pushback was: minimalism isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about using less, having less, consuming only what you need. And those people are completely right. The problem is they stopped one step too early.

Having fewer things does not help you if what you have doesn’t work. The person who owns a minimal kitchen where the spice storage system gathers mould is not better served by their minimalism than the person with a cluttered kitchen and a steel dabba that has worked perfectly for twenty years. The quantity of objects is not the variable that matters. The quality of the problem definition that produced each object is the variable that matters.

The goal was never fewer things. The goal was things that actually solve the problem you actually have. In actual use. With wet hands. In a humid kitchen. At seven in the morning when you are half awake and you need the jeera immediately.

When you buy that way - when you define the problem completely before you purchase the solution - you naturally end up with fewer things. Not because you set a numerical limit on your possessions but because each thing you own is actually earning its place. The overconsumption problem solves itself when you solve the problem-definition problem first. Minimalism, in the truest sense, is not an aesthetic goal. It is a byproduct of rigorous problem definition.

The Tumbler and Davra

There is a design object in South Indian homes that has never needed to be reinvented. Never been disrupted. Never required a version two, a new colourway, a collaboration with a Scandinavian design firm, or a rebrand to appeal to millennials.

The tumbler and davra.

Consider what this object actually does. The tumbler is tall and narrow, which means the coffee cools slowly from the bottom but relatively quickly at the top, giving you a natural gradient of temperature to work with. The metal conducts heat to your lips before the coffee reaches them, so you know when it is safe to drink without burning yourself. The davra - the wide, shallow saucer - is not merely decorative. It catches the overflow when you pour from height to cool the coffee, which is exactly how filter coffee is traditionally served and consumed. It gives you a surface to rest the tumbler on without burning the table. It allows you to drink from the davra itself when the coffee is still too hot for the tumbler.

Every single decision in this object is a correct answer to a question about actual use. What liquid? How hot? How do you know when to drink? What happens when you cool it? What does the surface need? What does the hand need? What happens when you spill?

Every answer is in the object. Nothing extra was added because nothing extra was needed. The system is minimal not because someone decided to design a minimal object but because someone understood the problem so completely that nothing unnecessary survived.

You cannot improve on the tumbler and davra because it was thought through completely the first time. That is what happens when design thinking actually happens - when the question what is the whole problem, in actual use, for actual people, over actual time is asked before the solution is built.

It is not a coincidence that this object has existed for generations without modification. It is evidence. Evidence that complete problem definition produces solutions that do not need to be repeatedly replaced, repurchased, or rethought. The most sustainable object is the one that was designed correctly the first time.

The Maintenance Gap

One more dimension of this problem worth naming.

We do not build to last because we do not plan to maintain. And we do not plan to maintain because maintaining is invisible in a way that building is not.

Building has a beginning and an end. There is a moment of completion - the staircase is finished, the product is launched, the renovation is done. Maintenance has no such moment. It is ongoing, unglamorous, and produces no visible output that can be pointed to as evidence of work done. There is no ribbon-cutting ceremony for the road that was re-sealed before it cracked. There is no launch event every year for the spice bottle that was designed to last a decade.

So we invest in building and underinvest in maintaining. And when the thing fails - when the staircase cracks, when the spice bottle moulds, when the tunnel creates a new bottleneck one intersection further along - we build again rather than understanding why the previous solution failed and designing differently.

This is the maintenance culture gap. And it operates at every scale - from the domestic object to the civic infrastructure. The tunnel that is dug without a systems-level understanding of the traffic pattern it is supposed to solve is the staircase that blocks the door at urban scale. The visible problem is solved. The full problem - what does this intervention do to the whole system, over time, in actual use - was never defined.

What Good Design Actually Is

Good design is not conspicuous. It does not announce itself. It does not require you to adapt your behaviour to accommodate it. It shows up in your life and works - in actual conditions, with wet hands, at seven in the morning, for decades - without requiring attention.

The bamboo cap spice bottle is not bad design because it looks wrong. It looks right. It is bad design because someone designed it for a kitchen they have never cooked in. They designed it for the imagined kitchen - clean, photogenic, occupied by a person who cooks gently and dries their hands before reaching for the spices.

The tumbler is not good design because it looks right - it looks like what it is, a metal cup. It is good design because someone designed it for the actual kitchen. The hot kitchen. The fast kitchen. The kitchen where the coffee needs to be ready before the morning is over and both hands are already occupied.

The gap between designing for the imagined user and designing for the actual one is the gap that produces every door that opens forty degrees, every spice bottle that ends up in a drawer, every tunnel that moves the traffic problem one intersection forward.

Think before you buy. Define before you build. Ask: what is the whole problem, in actual use, for actual people, over actual time?

The amount of thought you put into the problem first decides whether you ever have to solve it again.

The Monoculture Chronicles is the design and culture criticism series inside The Untrained Eye. We are now examining the world the monoculture produces.

My talk was about how organisations in this country systematically crush the creative capacity of the people inside them, and what that costs the organisation. Not a soft argument. I had numbers.

When I finished, someone asked a question. It was sincere, asked in good faith, and I want to say at the outset that I don’t think badly of the person who asked it. It’s a question I’ve heard in some form at nearly every event I’ve spoken at, from people who are genuinely trying.

The question was: how do we handle this generation.

One caveat before the list, and it matters more than looks it.

None of this is generational, exactly. It’s Indian corporate culture, and it was installed long before either of us arrived. I have done many of of these things. I’ve caught my peers doing several of them over the years. My generation runs the same operating system with a friendlier interface, and where we’ve changed anything, we’ve mostly changed the vocabulary.

So this isn’t a list of your failings. It’s a list of instruments that have stopped working – including in our hands – and the reason they’ve stopped is worth understanding whoever is holding them.

I want you to sit with that verb for a moment.

You handle equipment. You handle complaints. You handle livestock, and heavy machinery, and materials that might cut you if approached wrong. Handling is what you do to a thing that has properties but not intentions – something that must be managed around rather than spoken to.

Nobody has ever asked me how to handle a peer.

That’s the first thing the question tells you. But it isn’t the interesting thing.

The interesting thing is what happened structurally in that room. I had just spent forty minutes describing a systems failure – the way our companies are built to extract output while suppressing judgement, and how that produces work nobody is proud of and people who leave. And the room converted it, in real time, into a staffing problem.

Not: what are we doing that generates this response.

But: what is wrong with them, and what technique will let me manage around it.

That conversion is the entire subject of this letter. It’s the same move as asking a doctor how to handle a fever without asking what’s causing it. And it’s the reason the list below exists, because if you’re going to ask me how to handle us, I should probably answer.

Here is the answer. These are the instruments you – and a large chunk of us – were trained in. They no longer function, and I’ll tell you why each one has stopped.

1. Name dropping

I want to be careful here, because I’m about to say something about networks in an essay that opens with a keynote invitation.

Networks are fine. Everyone has them, or should, most work comes through them, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise in an essay that opens with a keynote invitation.

What I mean is narrower. It’s the reflex of establishing your standing in a room through proximity to someone more important than you. The names in the first four minutes. The client from 2011, raised in a meeting about something else.

Yes, we can look you up. That’s the boring reason it fails.

The real reason is that competence is audible, and it cannot be performed.

Someone who has actually done the work is someone of few – and painfully apt – words. Or they don’t describe a process, they describe the third round of amends where the client’s legal team got involved and everything had to be rebuilt. They know the failure modes, which is the thing that separates having done something from having read about it – anyone can tell you how it works, only a practitioner can tell you the four ways it goes wrong and which one gets you. They retrieve rather than construct – and you can physically see it happening.

They say ‘I don’t know’ quickly and without cost, because their standing doesn’t depend on total coverage.

And they’re specific about the unglamorous parts. Budgets, timelines, the constraint that ruined the good idea. People who weren’t there speak in outcomes.

None of this can be rehearsed, because it isn’t a manner. It’s the residue of having been present, and it shows up in your sentences whether you intend it to or not. You can hear it in the first two minutes of a conversation, and every person under forty in that room is listening for it, whether or not they’d know to say so.

Which brings me to the part I’d want you to sit with.

Name-dropping isn’t a strategy. It’s a symptom, and it surfaces at a very precise location – exactly where your demonstrable knowledge runs out.

We can hear where that boundary is. It’s the point where the specifics stop and the names begin.

And my generation industrialised this. We put it in the bio. Ex-this, formerly-that, worked-with logos arranged in a row on a website. An entire personal-brand economy built on precisely the thing I’ve just described, except automated and permanently on display.

But, as a strategy? It doesn’t work anymore.

Passive aggression

Say the thing.

Because indirection is expensive and someone else always pays.

Every unsaid thing becomes a misunderstanding. Every misunderstanding becomes a revision. Every revision lands on the most junior person available, usually at seven in the evening, usually with an apology attached that isn’t yours to give. I’ve now spent roughly two decades watching this specific transaction – a senior person’s unwillingness to say a clear sentence in the morning converted, by nightfall, into someone else’s ruined evening.

The cost was never absorbed by the senior person who chose not to speak. That’s what made it sustainable.

Generations younger than you didn’t stop this, by the way. We migrated. It’s in Slack now, better formatted – the message ending in a full stop, the thumbs-up on something that plainly needed a sentence, the comment at eleven at night that reads only “thoughts?”

If anything ours is worse, because yours at least required you to be in the room.

Shifting blame

We know it was you.

I want to be frank about how thoroughly we know. It isn’t that we suspect. It’s that in any organisation of more than five people, the actual sequence of events is common knowledge within about a day, distributed through channels you are not in. The redirection doesn’t conceal anything. It just adds a second fact to the first one.

And here’s the part that seems genuinely not to have been understood by the generation above me: locating what went wrong is not about punishment. It’s the only mechanism by which anything gets repaired. If the cause is fictional, the fix is fictional, and the thing recurs.

Your reputation survives a mistake. Ours have, repeatedly. It does not survive the redirection, because the redirection is a statement about your character rather than your judgement, and those are repaired on completely different timescales.

The retroactive ‘I-told-you-so’s

I want to separate this from something valuable, because it’s important: A blameless review after a failure is good practice. Debriefs are necessary. Feedback is necessary. We are not claiming to know better and we’ll take hard criticism about work we got wrong – most of us would rather have it than not.

What I’m objecting to is the other thing. The meeting six weeks after a project collapsed where a senior person establishes, at length, that they saw it coming.

If you saw it and didn’t convince anyone, and the outcome didn’t change, then you didn’t know it in any way that mattered. Influence you failed to exercise is not foresight. It’s commentary. Prediction without persuasion has no value to anyone except your own standing, and everybody in the room can tell that’s what it’s for.

What we’d rather know is: why couldn’t you convince us. That’s the useful question, and it’s the one that never gets asked, because it puts you inside the failure rather than above it.

We do this too, just earlier. The pre-emptive version – the documented reservation, the email sent so there's a record, the objection lodged with no intention of fighting for it. Same function. It builds the alibi in advance instead of assembling it afterwards.

It does not help matters one. Bit.

Lectures without demonstrations

Show us examples.

Not the principle. The instance. A specific occasion when the thing you’re insisting on actually worked, with the conditions it worked under, and preferably the time it didn’t.

Twenty-five years of experience is not an argument. It’s a duration. It tells me you were present. It doesn’t tell me you were correct, and it certainly doesn’t tell me that a market from 2003 resembles this one.

This is the item I have the most sympathy for, because in the world you came up in, tenure genuinely was information. Institutions changed slowly enough that having been somewhere for two decades meant you had seen the full cycle. That stopped being true and nobody announced it.

And we replaced tenure with something flimsier. The framework with a name. The talk given by someone whose entire body of work talks about the work.

Twenty-five years of experience is at least twenty-five years of something – but. It doesn’t actually move the needle – unless you show us what you mean, so we can apply it in context.

Moralising

When a personal preference is dressed as a principle, we can see the seam.

We can see it because we were raised by people who did this. The dress code that was about respect. The working hours that were about commitment. The objection to something that was really an objection to newness, given a moral shape so it couldn’t be argued with.

A preference stated as a preference is completely acceptable. I’d like it done this way, and here’s why. Nobody minds. It’s the conversion into ethics that produces the eye-roll, because it removes the possibility of disagreement, and removing the possibility of disagreement is the point of the conversion.

Ours is the same move in a therapeutic register. The preference restated as a value, the disagreement reclassified as harm. We didn't stop making arguments unanswerable. We just found a vocabulary that makes it ruder to try.

Guilt-tripping/ Emotional blackmail

The oldest tool in the collection, and the one that has stopped working most completely.

You should know that this one has a peculiar afterlife. It worked so well, for so long, on so many of us, that a large number of people my age went and paid professionals to help them dismantle its effects. Whole practices exist for it. Everyone I know can name the mechanism now, and once you can name it, it stops operating.

A request delivered as an emotional debt is still a request. After the guilt has been processed and understood and worked through, the request is still there, and it’s still fine, and we’d just rather you asked.

Now I owe you something, because a list like this is cheap without it.

I know. You didn’t invent any of these. Every one of them is a rational adaptation to a structure where being direct was genuinely unsafe.

I’ve written before about the Ma-Baap arrangement – the colonial administrative habit that turned the employer into a parent, and turned the worker’s relationship to their own job into one of dependency. Inside that structure, dissent reads as ingratitude. Transparency reads as insubordination. Anything honest you say about a problem can and will be retrieved two years later during a difficult conversation about your increment.

If that’s your environment, then indirection isn’t a character flaw. It’s competence. You develop a repertoire for delivering information without being identifiable as its source, and the repertoire keeps you employed.

It worked. I’m not being sarcastic. It worked for thirty years.

The difficulty is that you’re now using it on people who are not standing inside that structure, or who are standing inside it with one foot already out, and from where we are it doesn’t look like sophistication. It looks like evasion. The signal you’re sending is legible only to people who learned the same code, and increasingly the room doesn’t contain any.

And my generation is not clean here, which I should say before someone says it for me.

We swapped your repertoire for a newer one and then congratulated ourselves for the upgrade.

So the honest version of this letter isn’t that we’re better. It’s that the code is now illegible to the people arriving after us, and it’s going to be illegible in exactly the same way when they’re describing my generation.

The tools didn’t fail morally. They failed downward. Everyone above a certain age is still holding them, and we are part of that situation with everyone else.

I went to a rage room twice last week.

For anyone who hasn’t encountered one: you pay a company, they put you in protective gear and hand you some hammers, and you get twenty minutes in a room with a box of glass bottles and old ceramic and maybe a dead TV. When you’re done you leave, and somebody sweeps up.

They’re in Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune. It’s been pitched on Shark Tank. The company whose room I went to says more than a million people have been through their doors, and their own marketing describes the customer as “emotionally constipated”, which struck me as unusually honest advertising.

Standing there in the jumpsuit, I couldn’t stop thinking about the business model.

Because what’s being sold isn’t anger. Anger is free and universally available. What you’re paying for is a room where you are finally permitted to be “direct” – twenty minutes in which the thing inside you can come out at full volume without any professional consequence at all.

And once you see it that way, you notice how many of these rooms we now pay for. The therapist’s office. The anonymous confession account. The one friend, in the one bar, who has to hear it because there’s nowhere else it can go.

Have we have privatised honesty? It’s become a service, purchased by the ticket, by people whose workplaces and families offer nowhere to put a true sentence.

That is a strange thing for a country to need at this scale, and it should probably worry us more than the resignation rate does.

So: how do you handle this generation?

You don’t. That’s the honest answer and I’ve already given it flatly, without any pleasure in it, to the person who asked me in Coimbatore.

There isn’t a technique. There’s no framework, no workshop, no set of five things that will make a twenty-six-year-old respond correctly to the instruments described above. They’ve stopped working the way a key stops working after the lock is changed, and no amount of jimmying it in is going to help.

What’s left is the thing that was always available and always more expensive. (Biometric locks. I’m kidding.)

Say what you mean. Go first. Absorb what it costs you when the room isn’t ready for it, and do it again the following week.

We’ll match you. That’s the part nobody believes, and it’s the only part I’m actually certain of.

It is a night lamp I ordered from the United States because nothing like it exists in India (at an affordable price). It is made of soft silicone - baby-safe, squeezable, gentle to touch. It is shaped roughly like an egg. To turn it off, you flip it upside down. To turn it on, you flip it right side up. It remembers the brightness you left it at and wakes at exactly that setting. Press the top and it moves through its light spectrum - from warm amber at the lowest brightness to cool white at the highest. To switch it off completely in the morning, you long-press three times. The charger is USB-C, so potentially any charger you use for your other electronics will work. The battery life is generous. The entire object communicates a single coherent design intention: someone thought very carefully about what you need when you are half-asleep in the dark.

I found it because I follow a mother overseas who showed how it worked. I ordered it immediately. It arrived and changed my nights completely. As a breastfeeding mother, I needed a light that would not disturb the baby, would not jar me into wakefulness, would be operable without thought at 3am in the dark. This lamp does all of that. It is not technologically complex. It does not require advanced manufacturing. It requires only that the person designing it started from the user’s actual experience - the exhausted mother in the dark - and worked backward to the object.

This product does not exist in India.

Let’s sit with that for a moment - because my reel had so many comments asking why such a niche product would exist in India - there’s no market for it. India has more mothers than almost any country on earth. The manufacturing capability to produce this object exists here. The materials exist here. The technology exists here. The market - every mother who has fumbled for a switch at 3am - is enormous and completely unaddressed.

And nobody thought the Indian mother’s experience at 3am was worth a design brief?

That is what this essay is about.

Dear Pre-Millennials

You built a professional culture whose central operating principle is chalta hai.

It will do. Close enough. Good enough for now. Move on to the next thing.

I want to be careful here, because I have been careful in this series before. I understand why this happened. Post-liberalisation India needed speed. The economy had just opened, competition was arriving from everywhere, the consumer market was hungry for any product and growing too fast to be choosy. Get to market, grow fast, capture the customer, worry about quality later. Chalta hai was the correct operating principle for that specific historical moment. It was pragmatism for a real set of pressures.

But later never came.

The economy grew. The consumer became more sophisticated. The infrastructure of global comparison — the internet, the import market, the foreign-educated returning professional — made the quality gap visible in a way it hadn’t been before. And the operating principle didn’t update. Chalta hai remained. Not as a crisis response to genuine scarcity, but as a cultural default. A professional reflex. The first resort rather than the last.

Speed became the value. Quality became optional. And we normalised this so completely that the person who insists on finishing something properly is now the difficult one. The unrealistic one. The one who doesn’t understand how things work here.

This is the inheritance you passed down. Not as a conscious choice - I want to be clear about that. But as the water we all swim in, so thoroughly that most of us stopped noticing it was water at all.

What Chalta Hai Actually Is

Before I go further, I want to make a distinction that the conversation about Indian mediocrity almost never makes.

Chalta hai is not laziness. The Indian professional is not lazy. The Indian manufacturer is not lazy. The Indian builder is not lazy. The hours worked, the pressures absorbed, the impossible timelines met - none of this is evidence of a culture that doesn’t work hard. If anything, Indian professional culture works too hard, in the wrong direction.

Chalta hai is a rational response to a system that does not price excellence.

Consider the contractor building a road. The contract went to the lowest bidder. The lowest bidder survives on margin. Margin requires cutting corners. The quality inspection is either captured or inadequate. The road that is built to last three years requires a new contract in three years. The road built to last twenty years does not. Who does the system reward?

Consider the brand manager approving a campaign. The market research says consumers cannot distinguish the good version from the adequate version. The adequate version costs less and delivers faster. The bonus is tied to quarterly metrics, not to brand equity built over five years. Who does the system reward?

Consider the creative professional sitting across from a client who says chalta hai. The client is not wrong that the market will absorb the mediocre version. The client is not wrong that there is no mechanism to punish the mediocre version and reward the excellent one. The client is making a rational economic calculation. The calculation is correct. The system that makes it correct is the problem.

We have built incentive structures that make mediocrity the rational choice at every level - procurement, production, approval, consumption. And then we have identified the output of those incentive structures as a cultural character trait. We don’t finish things because that’s just how we are. We accept poor quality because Indians don’t know better. We say chalta hai because we lack pride.

None of this is true. All of it is a story the system tells about itself to avoid being examined.

The Rushing

Here is the paradox that sits at the centre of this argument: Indian professional culture is simultaneously extremely fast and extremely unfinished.

Everyone is always rushing. The deadline was yesterday. The turnaround is impossible. The client needed it last week. The brief arrived this morning and the delivery is tomorrow. This is not exaggeration - it is the texture of professional life in every creative industry in this country, as the Adobe Assembly Line essay diagnosed in detail.

But the rushing is not producing efficiency. It is producing volume. High volume of mediocre output delivered at speed. We are moving very fast toward destinations that are not worth arriving at.

The rushing and the mediocrity are not in tension. They produce each other. You rush because finishing properly takes time. You accept mediocrity because rushing makes finishing properly impossible. The chalta hai client who demands it faster is the engine of the mediocrity they then accept. The creative professional who is too exhausted to fight for the work is the deskilled version of themselves that the Production Line created. The road that needs to be rebuilt every monsoon is the output of a procurement process optimised for speed and lowest cost.

Everything is connected. Everything is the same closed loop. We are rushing, collectively, at great speed, toward a standard we have already decided in advance will be insufficient.

What It Costs the Professional - creative or otherwise

I have spent fifteen years as a professional illustrator and brand identity designer. I am not going to name a specific incident because the specificity is not the point. The point is that the experience I am about to describe is universal enough that every creative professional - and, with some empathy, every consumer - reading this will recognise it immediately.

The chalta hai moment in a client relationship is not one moment - it is a cumulative architecture. The brief that arrives with half the information needed to do the work properly. The timeline that makes considered decisions impossible. The feedback that comes from someone without the visual vocabulary to say what they actually want. The revision cycle that grinds until the illustrator or designer stops fighting for the integrity of the work and gives the client whatever they asked for - however wrong - just to end the ordeal and get paid.

What this costs the individual professional - creative or not - is not just time or energy. It is the slow atrophying of the capacity for excellence. You cannot maintain a high standard for your own work when every professional relationship you have is structured to prevent you from meeting it. The judgment that distinguishes good from excellent - the faculty that takes years to build and requires sustained exercise to maintain - degrades in an environment that consistently tells you the distinction is unnecessary.

The psychological cost of spending a career being told that your best effort is more than the situation requires is not incidental. It is structural. It is a cost applied to the creative psyche over a lifetime. The chalta hai client is not just asking for a lower quality of work on this specific project. They are, cumulatively, asking the creative professional to become a lower quality version of themselves.

And most professionals - not just the creative ones, but all of us - at some point, comply. Not because they have stopped caring. Because the system makes caring expensive and unrewarded.

What It Costs The Consumer

The consumer who ordered the night lamp from the United States did not do so because she preferred foreign products. She did so because the Indian equivalent does not exist at that quality. The design attention that would have produced it was never applied.

This is what the absence of design ambition costs the consumer: not just inferior products but entire categories of products that simply do not exist because nobody thought the Indian user’s experience was worth a brief. The bag light - a simple, small light I can drop into my bag that will help me find things when I’m walking home from the metro in the dark - I have to import. So many postpartum products (like breast pumps) designed for Indian bodies and Indian contexts and Indian climates that doesn’t exist because the design culture that would create it hasn’t been built. The experience of daily life that is harder than it needs to be because the objects and systems designed to make it easier were designed somewhere else, for someone else, and imperfectly adapted - or not adapted at all.

The high-end cafe or restaurant where the waiter cannot pronounce the menu is not an isolated failure of training. It is evidence of a particular kind of gap that Indian hospitality culture reproduces consistently: the gap between the aspiration and the investment required to actually deliver it. The menu was imported. The ambience was designed. The price point was set. And then someone in the chain decided that training the staff to actually deliver the experience that the price point promises was not worth doing. The aspiration stops at the visible surface. The invisible interior - the experience of actually being in the room - is where the chalta hai lives.

The road that floods every monsoon because the drainage wasn’t designed properly. The footpath that ends without warning. The public space built to be passed through rather than inhabited. These are not failures of capability. Indian engineers are capable of building roads that don’t flood. The capability exists. The decision that it was worth doing - that the person who walks on that footpath deserves a footpath that works - was not made.

The Number Nobody Is Calculating

I want to close on cost, because cost is the only thing that makes people actually sit up.

We do not have a number for what chalta hai costs. Nobody has tried to calculate the aggregate, across a culture, over decades, of the gap between what was possible and what was delivered. The road rebuilt every three years instead of lasting twenty. The product that fails in eighteen months and must be replaced. The campaign that didn’t build the brand equity it could have built and required twice the marketing spend to compensate. The creative professional who produced mediocre-adjacent work for fifteen years and never developed the practice they were capable of (me). The mother who didn’t sleep properly for two years because nobody thought her 3am was worth designing for.

These are all costs. They are paid in small instalments, distributed across millions of people and thousands of decisions, invisible in any single transaction and enormous in aggregate.

I think we would be horrified by the number. I think it would reframe the entire conversation about what Indian pragmatism actually costs. I think chalta hai, priced correctly, is one of the most expensive things in this country.

We have been told that demanding better is elitist. That insisting on finishing properly is impractical. That the person who asks for the work to be done correctly is the unrealistic one in the room. We have been told that this is our culture - that Indians are “like this only”, that this is just how things work here, that you learn to manage your expectations.

None of that is culture. All of it is a structural output that was allowed to become culture because examining the structure was inconvenient for the people who built it.

Chalta hai is not who we are. It is what the system made rational. The question is whether we are willing to make something else rational instead.

The Monoculture Chronicles is the design and culture criticism series inside The Untrained Eye.

Last year, I signed a publishing contract for a children’s picture book I was illustrating. I am a senior creative professional with fifteen years of experience in the design and visual arts industry. I have worked with global brands, leading publishers, and major cultural institutions. I understand contracts better than most illustrators I know.

And yet, I still had to personally catch that the termination clause in this agreement was structured to disadvantage me – treating my advance fee as an offset against a pro-rata calculation rather than a retained guarantee. I had to personally catch that the payment schedule was back-loaded in ways that placed almost the entire financial risk onto my shoulders. I had to personally catch that the promotional credit clauses specified only three contexts – the cover, the title page, and the copyright page – leaving the rest of the book’s marketing life entirely uncovered. Attribution for my own work, in any other context, was not guaranteed.

I caught these issues because I knew where to look. But I found them alone. There was no professional in my corner, because the professional infrastructure built to handle this work in every major global illustration market does not exist in India.

India has no illustration agents.

The Distinction Nobody Is Making

When Indian illustrators, publishers, or brands hear the phrase illustration agency, they almost always think of studios – design houses that execute illustration projects for corporate clients.

These studios exist in abundance. They operate as production houses: a client brings them a brief, the studio assigns an illustrator from their staff or freelance roster, and the work is delivered. The studio owns the client relationship, sets the commercial terms, and takes the margin. The illustrator is a service provider to the studio.

This is categorically different from what an illustration agent does.

An illustration agent represents the artist, not the client. They pitch your portfolio to publishing houses, creative directors, and global brands you couldn’t access on your own. They negotiate your fees, manage timelines, structure usage rights, and chase unpaid invoices. Their commission – typically 25 to 40 per cent – is earned only when the illustrator gets paid. This creates a direct alignment of financial interest: when you earn more, your agent earns more. They have a structural incentive to fight for your rates, safeguard your IP, and protect your time.

The most consequential thing they know is the difference between a work-for-hire agreement – where you permanently surrender your intellectual property to the client – and a licensing agreement, where you retain copyright ownership and collect extension fees every time the client reuses your work. A good agent will push for the licensing structure on the vast majority of projects. As Clara Marcus, managing agent at Jacky Winter Group, describes it: you might create illustrations for a three-month campaign that becomes a huge success. If the client extends that campaign for a further twelve months, you charge a fee. Negotiating licence extensions is one of the most rewarding parts of the job – letting an illustrator know they will receive an additional fee for work they delivered months or years ago is always a great feeling.

India has zero agencies operating on this model.

What We Have Instead

Look closely at what appears when you search for illustration agencies in India.

Design studios. White-label production agencies. Local landing pages for international representatives. IllustrationX operates a Mumbai URL – but their contact number is a UK line, their roster is their global catalogue of primarily Western illustrators, and their India presence exists to serve Indian buyers looking for illustration work, not to represent Indian illustrators to the world. They serve the client side of the transaction, not the maker side.

Beyond that, Indian illustrators are left with generic freelancing portals, informal art collectives, and the Indian Reprographic Rights Organisation – whose mandate is limited to the copyright of literary works, not visual art.

A UNESCO handbook assessing artist rights globally makes the structural vacuum explicit: in India, while there has been a growing number of societies, collectives and alternative spaces promoting art and young artists, there are still few specialised bodies to defend visual artists’ social and economic rights, to help them read a contract, or to report complaints in cases of threat on their freedom of expression or harassment within the workplace.

This is not a fringe observation. It is an institutional assessment of the Indian cultural infrastructure for visual artists. The minimum viable protection – someone who can read the contract before you sign it – largely does not exist.

The Art Director Gap

The absence of illustration agents compounds with a second structural absence that goes almost entirely undiscussed: most independent publishers in or from India do not hire art directors.

In a functioning publishing workflow, the art director is the professional bridge between the editorial team and the illustrator. They speak the visual language. They understand pacing, colour, layout geometry, and print production. They translate vague editorial notes into coherent creative direction and insulate the illustrator from the chaos that results when non-visual professionals try to direct visual work.

In India, most independent publishing houses skip this role entirely. Editors or authors – frequently without the vocabulary to articulate what they want visually – interface directly with the illustrator. The result is predictable and devastating.

Without an agent enforcing contractual boundaries or an art director guiding the visual narrative, the illustrator gets swallowed by scope creep. Projects devolve into endless, directionless revision cycles driven by clients who don’t know what they want until they see it – and sometimes not even then.

Eventually, the illustrator reaches exhaustion. To escape the revision loop and secure whatever fraction of the payment remains, they stop fighting for the integrity of the work. They give the client exactly what they asked for – however visually disastrous – just to end the ordeal and get paid.

Publishers: I want to hear from you on this specifically. Is the absence of the art director role a deliberate cost decision? A resource constraint? Something else entirely? What does the editorial-to-illustrator communication chain actually look like from your side of the table? Comment below – I am genuinely asking, not accusing.

What This Costs

Publishers who believe exploiting this gap saves them money are making a short-term calculation with long-term consequences.

When you isolate, underpay, and overwhelm an illustrator, you do not get exceptional art. You get survival responses. Financially anxious illustrators produce timid, derivative, uninspiring work. In picture books, the illustration is not decoration for the text. It is the story. A child’s first experience of visual narrative is shaped by what the illustrator chose to put on the page – or was too exhausted to fight for. When you squeeze the artist, the quality of the book collapses. The perceived savings disappear the moment the book hits the market and fails to engage an audience – or keep the audience.

The costs to the illustrators themselves are structural and compounding. Without agents establishing market benchmarks, baseline rates across the industry stay wherever the client wants them. Without someone in the room who knows the difference between work-for-hire and licensing, illustrators routinely sign away entire copyright portfolios via boilerplate templates they don’t fully understand – templates which will govern work that may be used for years or decades. And without anyone handling the business side of the profession, illustrators are forced to simultaneously operate as a full legal, financial, administrative, and business development team while trying to produce high-level creative work. The exhaustion this produces is not incidental. It is structural. It is the cost of the absence.

If you are an illustrator reading this: has any of this happened to you? A contract you signed without fully understanding it. A revision cycle that broke the work. A payment that never came. I am building a picture of what this actually looks like in practice across the industry, and individual testimony is the only way to do that accurately. Share it in the comments – anonymously if you prefer. Your experience is evidence.

The Law – What I Know and What I Don’t

I want to be careful here. The legal situation is more complicated than the version currently circulating in Indian creative circles, and I am not the right person to resolve the complication definitively.

The general principle is well established: under Section 17 of the Indian Copyright Act 1957, the author of a work is the first owner of copyright. But Section 17 immediately qualifies this with a series of provisos that cover most professional illustration scenarios.

Proviso (b) is the one that matters most for commissioned visual art. It states: in the case of a photograph taken, or a painting or portrait drawn, or an engraving made for valuable consideration at the instance of any person, the commissioner – not the creator – is the first owner of copyright, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary.

Read that again. For commissioned paintings and similar artistic works, the client who paid for the work may own the copyright by default. Not the illustrator.

Whether picture book illustration counts as a “painting” under Section 17(b) is a genuine legal grey area. It may. If it does, the publisher who commissioned your work for payment is the default copyright owner unless your contract explicitly says otherwise. The law may not start on your side. For commissioned visual art, it may start on the client’s side.

This is exactly why the contract is not a formality. It is the document that determines which way the law runs. An explicit licensing agreement – one that specifies you retain copyright and grant the publisher a defined licence for defined uses over a defined term – overrides the Section 17(b) default in either direction. A contract that is silent on copyright, or that uses work-for-hire language, may be affirming a default position that was already against you.

This is where I need qualified people to step in. If you are a copyright lawyer working in Indian creative IP, I have a specific question: does picture book illustration fall within Section 17(b)’s definition of a “painting or portrait drawn for valuable consideration”? The grey area is real and the answer matters for every working illustrator in this country. I do not know the answer with certainty, and I would rather say so than get it wrong in a published essay. Please comment below, or write to me directly. If you are a publisher or a commissioning editor who has a view on how Section 17 applies to your standard contracts, I want to hear that too.

What I can say plainly, without legal qualification, is this: the law is more complicated than anyone in Indian creative circles is currently explaining, which is one more reason that the professional infrastructure to navigate it – the agent, the specialist contract reviewer – needs to exist.

Three Things Worth Fighting For Before You Sign

In the absence of that infrastructure, here is the minimum you should understand and negotiate.

The IP clause first. Is this work-for-hire or licensed? If it is work-for-hire, you are permanently signing away ownership of the work. Push for a licensing agreement with a defined use, medium, and term – so that any extension of use requires a new fee. This single clause will determine whether you earn from this work once or potentially many times.

The termination clause second. If the project ends early, what happens to the fee you have already earned? The signing fee should be yours to keep regardless of what happens after. If the contract treats it as counting toward a pro-rata calculation rather than being retained on top of any further payments, that clause disadvantages you. Get it changed.

The credit clause third. Where and how will your name appear? The cover, the title page, and the copyright page are the minimum. Any promotional use – social posts, press releases, award submissions, website features – should carry your name. If it is not written into the contract, it is not guaranteed.

Publishers and clients present boilerplate contracts as if they were unalterable legal mandates. They are not. They are opening offers in a commercial negotiation. Most publishers, when asked, will change reasonable clauses. The ones who won’t tell you something important about what the rest of the working relationship will be.

If you have successfully negotiated better terms than the boilerplate (whether on these three clauses or others) I want to know what worked. Not theoretically. What you actually said, what they agreed to, what they pushed back on. That knowledge should be shared publicly and it isn’t, because nobody has created the space for it. Consider this that space.

What Needs to Be Built

The minimum viable version of the infrastructure that should exist is not a full-service representation agency. It is two things.

A professional who understands illustration contracts and IP law and can review agreements on behalf of illustrators for a reasonable fee. Not an agent – a specialist. Someone whose job is to read what is being put in front of illustrators and tell them what it means and what to push back on. This exists in some form in legal clinics and arts councils in other countries. It does not exist here.

A publicly available, India-specific rate guide for illustration work – broken down by project type, usage rights, and market. The rate guides that Indian illustrators currently use, when they use any, are Western ones that bear no relationship to the Indian market reality. Someone has to build the India version.

If you are building either of these things, or know someone who is, I want to hear about it. If you are a lawyer or policy researcher who has thought about what the institutional architecture for visual artist protection could look like in India – write to me or comment below. This essay is not meant to be the end of the conversation. It is meant to start one that should have started years ago.

Common Ground is the design and culture criticism series inside The Untrained Eye.

The next essay is a departure – not a diagnosis but a reorientation. If this piece is about the structural weight that Indian illustrators carry alone, the next one is about what to do with yourself while that structure remains unbuilt. It's about Karma Yoga, the actual Japanese concept of Ikigai (not the Venn diagram), and what both have to say to the multifaceted creative who keeps being told to pick one thing and build a brand around it. Coming soon.

You expect something monumental. A vast canvas, a towering figure, the kind of grand nationalist statement that gets hung behind a podium. What Abanindranath Tagore actually painted in 1905 is roughly twenty-seven centimetres by fifteen – intimate, quiet, closer to a page from an illuminated manuscript than to a battle standard. It was made small on purpose. This was an image built to be copied, printed cheaply, folded into a pocket, and carried through a crowd. A painting designed from the start to travel.

And to make the most Indian image anyone had yet attempted, Tagore did something that sounds, at first, like a contradiction. He borrowed from Japan.

The war he was fighting

To understand why that mattered, you have to remember what an Indian artist was up against in 1905.

For half a century, the British colonial art schools – Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, Lahore – had been teaching a single lesson: real art was European art. Oil paint. Naturalism. Linear perspective. The plaster casts of Greek statues to copy. An earlier essay in this series traced how that system worked, and what it did to Indian making – how it took a civilisation with its own deep visual grammar and taught it to measure itself against a foreign yardstick. By the turn of the century, the message had sunk in. To be a ‘serious artist’ in India was to paint like a Victorian.

Tagore said no. But his refusal was cleverer than simple rejection, and that cleverness is the whole point.

He could have retreated into pure revival – just copy the old Mughal and Rajput miniatures, wall off the tradition, pretend the last century hadn’t happened. He didn’t. Instead he went looking for allies, and he found them by looking east.

The Japanese brush

Around 1902, Tagore met Okakura Kakuzō, the Japanese art thinker and champion of a pan-Asian cultural revival – the man who would famously open his Book of Tea with the line that Asia was one. Okakura’s ideas landed on fertile ground in Calcutta, and the connection became practical: two Japanese painters, Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunsō, came to the city, and from them Tagore learned the Japanese wash technique.

If you have seen his Bharat Mata, you have seen what the wash does. There are no hard outlines. The figure seems to surface out of a soft, luminous haze, built up from many thin layers of diluted ink and colour, light dissolving at the edges into atmosphere. It is the opposite of the sharp, illusionistic, hard-edged realism the British academies drilled into their students. It is quiet where their style was emphatic, atmospheric where theirs was anatomical.

So look at what Tagore actually assembled. An Indian subject. Compositional DNA from Mughal, Rajasthani, and Pahari miniatures. A method learned from Japan. Three of Asia’s great visual traditions, deliberately braided together – and Europe, pointedly, left out of the weave. The technique was itself the argument: You did not need the coloniser’s grammar to make serious art. There was a whole continent to borrow from first.

What she carries

The figure herself is a goddess, four-armed, haloed. But look at what she holds; every object is a sentence.

The absence of weapons is deliberate and it matters. In her four hands she carries sheaves of paddy, a book, a length of white cloth, and a garland of beads. Food. Learning. Cloth. Spirituality. These are the four foundations of a nation that can stand on its own feet, and each one is a plank of the Swadeshi platform – the movement then sweeping Bengal, in which Indians vowed to boycott British goods and use only what India produced herself.

The white cloth is the sharpest of the four. Homespun Indian cotton was the beating heart of Swadeshi, the everyday act of resistance you could wear on your body – the same logic that would later put the spinning wheel at the centre of Gandhi’s movement and onto the flag itself. Tagore’s Mother India is not a war goddess demanding blood. She is a self-reliant country, offering the things a free people make for themselves.

The origin nobody expects

Here is where the story becomes almost too good to be true, and where it says the most.

She did not begin as Mother India. Tagore first conceived the figure as Banga Mata – Mother Bengal – and he did it in direct response to a specific act of colonial cruelty: the 1905 Partition of Bengal. Lord Curzon had split the province in two, carving it along religious lines, separating the largely Muslim east from the largely Hindu west, in a textbook exercise of divide and rule. The division was designed to weaken Bengal by fracturing it. What it did instead was detonate the Swadeshi movement and pour fuel on the whole independence struggle.

So the founding image of national unity was born, precisely, from an act of national division. That is not an irony to smooth over. It is the meaning. The response to being split was to paint something whole.

And the name that made her universal came from an unexpected hand. It was Sister Nivedita – born Margaret Noble, in Ireland, a disciple of Swami Vivekananda – who saw the little painting and gave it the larger identity of Bharat Mata, Mother India. She championed it, and the image spread: reproduced in magazines, copied by other artists, carried in processions.

Now hold the whole thing in your head at once. The definitive image of Mother India was painted by a Bengali, using a technique taught by Japanese artists, drawing on Mughal and Rajput traditions, named by an Irishwoman, in response to a British attempt to divide the country. Every single thread in it comes from somewhere the empire did not control – and several come from the empire’s other subjects and critics, reaching across borders to one another.

That is what pan-Asianism and anti-colonial solidarity actually looked like, rendered in gouache on a sheet you could hold in one hand.

The honest footnote

As is usual with me and with this series, I want to resist the tidy version.

Abanindranath Tagore was not a propagandist, and Bharat Mata was not a poster he cranked out for a cause. He was a painter working through a genuine aesthetic problem – how to make Indian art that was modern without being colonised – and the truth is that Swadeshi swept him up for a while and then let him go. The art historian R. Siva Kumar has argued that this one painting has drawn more attention than it strictly deserves within Tagore’s own body of work, precisely because of its political afterlife; that Abanindranath, once the first euphoria of the movement passed, returned to his own quieter artistic quest and never really painted in this overtly nationalist register again.

I think this complication rather deepens than weakens the story. The image became a weapon of the freedom struggle not because its maker set out to forge a weapon, but because a movement recognised what he had made and took it up. The painting was the seed; the people made it a flag. Which is, when you think about it, a fairly exact description of how a lot of freedom actually gets won – not by single authors with grand intentions, but by many hands seizing the right thing at the right moment and carrying it further than its maker ever meant it to go.

What visual freedom means

We tend to remember independence as a story of speeches, marches, prisons, and negotiations. It was all of those. But it was also fought in pictures – in the decision about what India would be permitted to look like, and who got to decide.

Tagore’s answer, in 1905, was to look at the entire world, borrow generously from everyone except the people occupying his country, and assemble from it something unmistakably, confidently his own. He proved you could be modern without being a copy. He proved the coloniser’s grammar was optional. He proved that the way you make an image is itself a political act.

On a day for remembering how freedom was won, that little painting is worth standing in front of. It won a small, early battle in a war that took another forty-two years – and it won it not with a weapon in any of its four hands, but with a brush that had learned from half a continent.

Happy Independence Day.

Part of Look Again, on The Untrained Eye. Bharat Mata (1905) hangs in the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata.

Sources: the painting’s history draws on Smarthistory, the MAP Academy, and the art-historical writing of R. Siva Kumar. The account of the wash technique and the Okakura–Taikan–Hishida connection is drawn from standard accounts of the Bengal School and the Indian Society of Oriental Art.

Every week, someone writes to me on behalf of a young person. Usually a parent. Sometimes a grandparent, which I find unexpectedly moving. The message is always warm and always structured the same way: they have seen the work, they have read the writing, their child wants to do “art”, and could I please tell them where I studied.

What they want is the address of the place that produced the outcome: me.

I understand the impulse. It comes from love and from fear in roughly equal measure, and I don’t think less of anyone for it. But I have to tell you that the question is unanswerable, and that its unanswerability is the actual lesson.

Here is the history, since you asked for it.

After my tenth, I wanted to study neuroscience. I loved biology and I was fascinated by the brain in a way I still am. My mother steered me away from it. Her reasoning was profound in way I’m not sure many parents made time to be back then – she said I should I should do “what made me happy when I was sad.” There was only one true answer at the time. And that was art. But I did PCMB in eleventh and twelfth anyway in my ISC school (because I had the brains for it, so I wasn’t going to do commerce, which was for people who couldn’t get the marks that you needed for science, or worse - arts - which was for people who couldn’t even get the marks to get into commerce. How ironic, looking back, that all my life I had been moving inexorably towards the latter, but no one told me), moving through a science I was no longer heading toward, which is its own particular kind of exhaustion.

By the time I finished I was frightened. This was 2008. The creative economy in India was a fraction of what it is now – fewer than half the opportunities, and almost none of the legitimacy. So I made a defensive decision. I would not spend three years emerging with only a Chitrakala Parishath degree and nothing to protect me – financially. I took permission to enrol in two courses at once: CKP, and a character animation diploma at Takshaa at Hope Farm Circle in Whitefield. The distance between them is 25 kilometres, approximately. Back then it took me 45 mins to cross the city between schools. Today it would take you 2.5 hours, if you’re lucky. This decision was unprecedented and the Principal of neither college could understand what drove me to make it.

I quit CKP in three months. The teaching was abysmal and I could not justify the time. I finished my diploma in Character Animation, and roughly within a year of my “graduation” Takshaa no longer existed.

Then I went into animation, which in India at that point was a BPO operation wearing a creative – or at least IT-adjacent – costume. We executed frames for studios abroad and were never named in anything. The recession arrived, the foreign money left, and four companies I worked at folded within months of my joining. I was nineteen. I sincerely believed I was cursed.

The conditions were what you would expect from an industry with no leverage. Work started at nine in the morning. If you were late by half a hour they would cut half a day’s pay. Log in was by keycard. There was no receptionist or HR to beg leniency from. Fifteen minutes for a break – brutally policed. An hour, theoretically, for lunch. Weekends absorbed without discussion, overtime absorbed without payment, home at ten-thirty at night almost every day.

It took five years of that before I concluded I was worth more than what I was being paid for.

Somewhere in the middle of it, in 2010, my mother panicked about the absence of a degree. So I did one – English literature, IGNOU, by distance, at night, while working. Then, eventually, I made the terrifying decision to apply to LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore, affiliated to Goldsmiths. I graduated with honours. I arrived there at twenty-two, four years older than everyone in my cohort, and the only thing I could see was the distance between us.

Now tell me which part of that you could have – or in all honesty would have – planned for your child.

I want to be very precise here about the thing people are actually asking me about, because they usually mistake it for education.

There’s a phrase I came across recently – literary agility. Expressive and intellectual fluency that moves across forms and disciplines without losing its coherence. The capacity to think in one register and speak in another without the argument falling apart in transit. That is the quality people write to me about, even when they call it something else.

It did not come from a degree.

I have been obsessed with reading since I was five years old. I used to read at every meal. Getting my head out of a book was a household negotiation. There was a lending library in Bangalore called Eloor, and we went every fortnight, and I would come home with fourteen books – one for each day – and finish every one of them – sometimes two a day. That was the education. Nearly two decades of undirected, unsupervised, almost entirely self-selected reading with no examination at the end of it. I studied in Frank Anthony’s, which being an Anglo-Indian school, made no bones about the fact that english was our mother tongue, and effectively rendered me useless in any regional language (I am aware of the irony of this, considering what I champion today – but I console myself that most of the average educated populace of this country is in the same boat). So having graduated from Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Ruskin Bond, Rudyard Kipling and the like in my childhood, my teenage years were a blur of both erudite and mass fiction, philosophy, biography and poetry – Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilde, Gibran, Tagore, R. K Narayan, Kalki, Arundhati Roy, P. G. Wodehouse, Harper Lee, Fitzgerald, Marquez, Rushdie, Rowling, Asimov, Melville, Shelley, Frost, Salinger, Tolstoy, Heller, Eliot, du Maurier, Dumas, Rand, Sun-Tzu, Cervantes… no pattern, as you can see.

So the literature degree formalised something that had been assembling itself since I was a child. It gave shape to material that was already there. It did not produce the material.

This is the part that makes the question so hard to answer honestly. The institution didn’t build the practice. The practice made the institution worth attending. When I got to LASALLE at twenty-two, I was ready for it in a way I would not have been at nineteen – not because I had gained credentials in the interim, but because I had spent five years being ground down and had come out of it still curious. That was the entire asset. Curiosity that survived contact with an industry designed to extinguish it.

You cannot enrol a child in that.

So where does the question come from? Why does an entire generation of Indian parents believe that a specific institution, entered at a specific age, produces a specific life?

Because for a brief and unrepresentative window, it looked true.

The colonial education system was built to produce clerks. That was not an accident of curriculum design, it was the design – an administrative class, trained to execute reliably within a structure someone else had drawn. The path was legible because the outcomes were pre-decided. You studied the thing, you got the position, you stayed in the position. Certification was the whole mechanism.

Then 1991 happened, and for roughly two decades the mechanism appeared to work again in a new register. Engineering seat, campus placement, IT job, dollar salary, house. It was not a myth. Many of you watched it happen to people you knew, and some of you lived it. The formula delivered, at scale, in front of you.

What you could not have known is that you were watching a one-time event. A specific economy, absorbing a specific kind of trained labour, at a specific moment when global demand outstripped supply. That window has closed. The industries it produced are being restructured by the same forces that built them.

You are handing down a map of terrain that has since been re-landscaped.

I should implicate my own generation here, because we have not been honest either.

Millennials talk constantly about non-linear careers – but now we present them backwards, cleaned up, with the causation inserted afterwards – beautifully, on LinkedIn. Every profile, every talk, every post about the winding road is written from the far side of it, where the wandering resolves into a shape. I have done this. It is very difficult not to – narrative needs a spine, after all, and it nearly always gives you one whether or not the events had it.

The result is that we have replaced your formula with a more seductive one. Follow your curiosity and it will assemble into a career. Trust the process.

But we tell it from the endpoint. We rarely say that the middle was ten years of being questioned by your family about what you were actually doing with your life, while having no answer, because you genuinely did not know either. That the questioning did not clarify anything. That it just added a layer of shame to a period that was already frightening enough.

I moved from animation to fine art to graphic design and back to fine art. Nobody in my family understood the trajectory. I want to be clear that I didn’t either. I now work in a space that holds all of it at once – illustration, brand identity, writing, cultural criticism – and I can tell you that this is not a failure of focus. It is the only honest map of how this kind of practice develops. But I could not have shown you that map in 2011. There was nothing to show. There was only a young woman making a series of decisions that looked, from outside, like drift.

I understand the need to get it right. You want to make one correct decision that secures your child for the next forty years, and you want someone to tell you which decision it is.

There is no such decision.

That is not a failure of parenting or of information. It is a description of the conditions. The industries your children will work in do not exist yet in their final form, and several of the ones they train for will be unrecognisable within a decade. No institution can insure against that, and the ones that claim to are selling you something.

What you can do is different, and harder, and much less satisfying to plan.

Prepare them for failure. Not as a lecture but as a competency – what to do – no, how to think – when the company folds, when the industry contracts, when the thing they trained for stops being a thing. Teach them how to be broke without being humiliated. Teach them that a collapse is information about an economy, not a verdict on a person. I spent at least five years at the start of my career convinced I was personally jinxing companies, because nobody had told me that entire sectors can fail around you for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

The goal is not a life without failure. The goal is a person who does not lose hope when it arrives.

And stop treating portfolio careers as a fallback for people who couldn’t commit to anything. That framing is doing enormous damage to young people who are, in fact, describing the future accurately to you. Multiple income streams, overlapping disciplines, work that shifts shape every few years – this is the emerging structure of creative professional life, not evidence of a character flaw.

One last thing, since we are being honest about where things come from.

The opinions I hold now – the ones that get me written to, the arguments made deliberately sharp – those did not come from LASALLE. They came from fifteen years in graphic design, working under people who did not understand design and were too frightened to protect the designers who did.

None of that was rewarded anywhere I worked. Being opinionated inside a company is not an asset. You are told to keep your head down and keep producing, and the reasoning offered is that the organisation is larger than any individual. I won’t be naive about it – it isn’t even that. It’s simpler and less noble. We know this now. You know this. Your children need to know this. And then they need to know that they will make it anyway.

But here is what fifteen years taught me: if your individuality gets stunted inside an organisation, you will not make work worth anything. Creative people need time, autonomy, and protection in order to be any good. That is not a benefit. It is the operating condition of the work itself.

Why the corporate machine is uninterested in that is a separate argument, and I’ve made it elsewhere in this series.

What I’ll leave you with is this. Every parent writing to me is asking for a website. There isn’t one. What produced this was a child who read fourteen books a fortnight, an industry that broke her, and a stubbornness about staying curious that no institution taught and no institution could have taken away.

Ask your child what they read when nobody is watching. Start there.

Episode IX, Dear Pre-Millennials, within Monoculture Chronicles on The Untrained Eye.

He recorded that the sculptures were extremely indecent. Reaching for something, anything, that might explain how a civilisation could have produced such things, he landed on the weather. Only the “down-right warmth of the climate,” he wrote, could apologise for such excess.

Hold that thought, because the whole essay lives inside it. Here is a man standing in front of one of the most sophisticated buildings on earth. It was carved by master sculptors working inside a philosophy of desire older and more rigorous than anything his own civilisation had produced. And his conclusion is that the artists got too hot.

He was the surveyor with no framework. What he did to Khajuraho in his journal, an empire would shortly do to a subcontinent in its law books.

The comfort of the outside villain

I have to be honest about the shape of the argument before I make it, because this is the third essay in a sequence, and the second one cut in a direction that complicates everything I’m about to say. That essay was about the machinery of shame we built ourselves – the fusion of caste and gender control that policed the female body in India centuries before any European ship dropped anchor.

So let me be clear about what this is not.

This is not the story of a free, sensuous civilisation ruined by prudish foreigners. That version is a comfort. It is also false. Reverence for desire and the apparatus to control it had always coexisted here, in the same centuries, sometimes in the same texts.

What the British brought wasn’t control. We had that. What they brought was a particular new flavour of it: shame. The specific conviction that the body is itself a moral problem, that desire is a kind of dirt, that the boldest thing our art ever attempted was a thing to apologise for. That conviction was foreign. And it fell on ground we had already tilled to receive it.

What Burt was actually looking at

Burt could not read what was in front of him. It’s worth being precise about the thing he couldn’t read.

The erotic sculpture at Khajuraho isn’t decoration, and it certainly isn’t titillation. It occupies a precise place in the architecture – a stage in a sequence. The outer walls teem with the full spectrum of worldly life, desire included. Move inward and the surfaces quiet down, plainer and plainer, until you arrive at the bare, dark sanctum at the centre where there is nothing at all. The building is making an argument about consciousness. It says you pass through the world of the senses and out the other side; you don’t pretend it was never there. Desire sits on the outside wall because desire is where a human life starts. Nobody was hiding it. They were sequencing it.

To read that building you need the framework that built it – rasa, the ranking of shringara as the summit of art, the whole apparatus the first essay laid out. Burt arrived with none of it. What he carried instead was a Victorian moral universe where sacred and erotic were opposites by definition, plus a colonial pseudo-science that explained brown sensuality as a symptom of latitude – tropical cultures were said to be morally lax, undone by the sheer heat they had to endure. This wasn’t a stray prejudice. It was one of the mechanisms the empire used to justify its own expansion, and to erase the cultures it expanded into. Shown a civilisation that had reasoned its way to precisely the opposite conclusion, he didn’t pause to wonder whether his categories were too small. He decided the temple was wrong.

How a private disgust becomes a public law

One embarrassed engineer changes nothing on his own. Burt’s journal matters only because the disgust it records was about to be manufactured at scale.

The instrument was law. Britain had passed the Obscene Publications Act in 1857 – Lord Campbell’s Act – its first real machinery for suppressing obscene material. Eleven years later, a courtroom handed that machinery a definition. In Regina v. Hicklin, the Lord Chief Justice ruled that the test of obscenity was whether a work tended “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” Read that carefully. The standard wasn’t the average adult, or the intended reader. It was the single most corruptible mind into whose hands the thing might ever conceivably fall. The most fragile person imaginable became the measure for everyone.

That test travelled to India. Obscenity provisions were written into the Indian Penal Code and consolidated as Section 292 by the Obscene Publications Act of 1925, itself passed to satisfy a 1923 League of Nations convention. So the civilisation that gave the world the Kama Sutra and created Khajuraho now carried, on its statute books, a definition of obscenity tuned to the nerves of a Victorian magistrate.

And then comes the detail that should unsettle anyone who files this under “history.” The Hicklin test didn’t sail home when the British did. Indian courts kept applying it. In 1964, in the Ranjit Udeshi case – a Bombay bookseller prosecuted for stocking Lady Chatterley’s Lover – the Supreme Court of India formally adopted the Hicklin standard as national law. It stayed the operative test until 2014, when the Court finally set it aside for a community-standards approach.

Do the math on that. A definition of the obscene, built in an English court, calibrated to the Victorian nervous system, governed what Indians could write and paint and film and read for sixty-seven years after the Empire sailed away. The shame wasn’t just inherited. We kept it on the books, by our own hand, for the better part of a century after we were free to burn it.

The part that is ours

Which is the uncomfortable heart of this whole thing.

The worst damage the British did was never the law. Laws get repealed – this one eventually was. The worst damage was that we came to agree with them.

Picture the position our reformers were in. Their rulers looked at Indian temples and saw obscenity, looked at Indian tradition and saw backwardness. A large strand of nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian reform answered that contempt not by defending the sophistication of what we had, but by scrambling to prove we could be just as respectable as the people who despised us. In practice that meant out-pruding the British. It meant the movements that stripped the eroticism out of classical dance and rebranded it as chaste devotion. It meant a rising middle-class respectability that found its own inherited culture mortifying – too bodily, too sensual, too much – and set to work sanitising it. It meant learning to stand at Khajuraho, look through Burt’s eyes, and feel his exact flush of embarrassment on behalf of the people who built the place.

That’s the real inheritance. Not shame imposed from outside by force. Shame absorbed so completely that we became its most dependable enforcers. We turned into the surveyor. We learned to look at our own civilisation’s boldest work and go quiet with apology. Worse, we handed that reflex to our children and called it “Indian values”, when it was the near-exact inversion of Indian values – a borrowed anxiety wearing our own clothes.

Three layers of concrete

So here’s the full picture, three essays deep.

At the bottom: a civilisation that treated desire as the highest reach of art, that put shringara on its temple walls in broad daylight and crowned it the king of the flavours. Reverence. That was the first layer.

Over it, poured slowly across centuries by our own hands: a machine for controlling the body. Caste welded to patriarchy, the female body turned into the boundary you had to police to keep the whole hierarchy standing. Control. The second layer.

Then the empire, pouring a third layer over both – shame, the belief that the body is a moral failure, set in law and, far worse and done willingly, held in place long after the hand that mixed it was gone. That was the layer that taught us to be embarrassed by the first.

Three layers of concrete over something that used to be sacred.

But concrete isn’t bedrock. It can be cracked. And the thing underneath it was never destroyed, only buried. The Natyashastra sits in the library still. Khajuraho still stands in its field, still making its argument to anyone who walks up with the framework to follow it. The reverence is recoverable, for the simple reason that the texts holding it were never burned – just shelved, and forgotten, and left alone.

What the recovery asks of us is almost embarrassingly simple. Stop apologising for our ancestors. Look at what they made and understand that they were not too hot, not too primitive, not waiting on a Victorian to correct them. They knew exactly what they were doing.

We’re the ones who forgot.

That’s where the series goes next.

Part of Look Again, on The Untrained Eye. This completes the three-part arc on desire, control, and the body. What we do with it – how we read the reverence back out from under the concrete – moves to Common Ground and Dear Pre-Millennials.

The historical account draws on Captain T.S. Burt’s 1839 report to the Asiatic Society of Bengal; Regina v. Hicklin (1868); the Obscene Publications Act, 1925; and Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra (1964). The reading of caste and gender as one system is drawn from Uma Chakravarti and B.R. Ambedkar, cited in full in Part 2.

So the obvious question is the one this essay is about. How did we get from there to here - from a culture that treated desire as the closest thing to the divine, to one that polices what women wear, punishes what women want, and treats the female body as a thing to be covered, corrected, and controlled?

The comfortable answer is the British. And they did arrive with a specific cargo of shame - that’s the next essay. But the comfortable answer is always a way of not looking at the harder one.

Because we didn’t fall from grace. There was no single golden age of freedom that a foreign empire came and spoiled. The same civilisation that elevated desire also built, at the very same time, in many of the same texts, a brutal and precise machinery for controlling it. We are human - always simultaneously capable of the highest virtue, and the greatest vice. So the reverence and the machinery were always here together, and Savitri’s story and Manu’s laws are contemporaries. What happened over the centuries is not that we fell - it’s that we kept amplifying the machinery and let the reverence get buried, until we arrived at a present that has held on to the weapon and forgotten the wisdom.

This essay is about the machinery. And the first thing to understand about it is that it was never two separate systems - one for caste, one for women. It was one machine. And it ran on the female body.

The one machine

I want to start with the mechanism, because everything follows from it, and because it’s colder and more logical than the language of “tradition” ever lets on.

Caste identity, in classical Hindu law, passes down through the father - it is patrilineal. That matters and it pre-empts a common objection. A patrilineal line can only stay “pure” if you control the one variable that can corrupt it: who the women reproduce with. A man’s caste passes to his children only if the mother is the right kind of woman. Which means the entire structure of caste depends, at its root, on controlling women’s sexuality.

This is the argument the anti-caste tradition has made for over a century. B.R. Ambedkar, in his 1916 essay Castes in India, located the essence of caste not in ideas of purity and pollution but in endogamy - marriage strictly within the group - and pointed out that endogamy is impossible to maintain without controlling women. The feminist historian Uma Chakravarti later gave the whole system its name: Brahmanical patriarchy - the argument, in her words, that caste hierarchy and gender hierarchy are so closely tied that treating them as two discrete systems is a failure of our scholarship, because as systems they are inextricably tied and almost impossible to disentangle.

You can see the machine most clearly in how the texts treat inter-caste unions. The rules are not symmetrical, and the asymmetry is the entire tell. A union between an upper-caste man and a lower-caste woman - anuloma - was tolerated in the classical codes, the children assigned some intermediate rank. But a union between a lower-caste man and an upper-caste woman - pratiloma - was condemned, and the offspring cast to the very bottom of the order; this is the textual origin story assigned to the most degraded outcaste status.

This asymmetry is the whole argument in miniature: A man who married beneath him did not break his lineage. A woman who married beneath her broke everything. Which is precisely why the woman, and not the man, had to be guarded, watched, married off early, kept indoors, and made ashamed of her own body. She was, in Chakravarti’s exact word, the gateway - the point of entry to the caste system, the door through which purity was either preserved or lost. Controlling her was not a side-effect of caste. It was the method of caste.

The codifying text that says it all

If you want to see caste-control and woman-control written in a single breath, read the Manusmriti - the classical Brahminical law code, composed somewhere between 200 BCE and 200 CE.

It is not a text about women’s subordination sitting beside a separate text about caste. It codifies both together, as one order. Its most quoted verse on women is 9.3: pitā rakṣati kaumāre bhartā rakṣati yauvane / rakṣanti sthavire putrā na strī svātantryam arhati - the father guards her in childhood, the husband in youth, the sons in old age; a woman is not fit for independence. Defenders point out that the verb is “guard” or “protect,” and read the verse as protective rather than controlling. But even on that reading, the conclusion is unambiguous: at no stage of her life does the text grant her autonomy. The protection is the custody. Cradle to grave, always in someone’s keeping.

And here the caste-gender fusion becomes literal. The Manusmriti denies women the Vedic sacraments - the same sacraments it denies to shudras, the lowest of the four varnas. From this, scholars including Ambedkar and Chakravarti draw the reading that the text places women, of every caste, at the ritual status of the shudra. Being female was, in effect, itself a caste position. A Brahmin woman and a shudra man met at the same rung, because the machine ranked womanhood the way it ranked caste - and for the same reason.

One honest caveat, because I think it protects the argument rather than weakening it: the Manusmriti was a prescriptive text, addressed primarily to Brahmins and Kshatriyas, not a documentary record of how every household across the subcontinent actually behaved. It is the code, not the census. But codes tell you what a civilisation aspired to enforce. And this one aspired to fuse the control of caste and the control of women into a single legal architecture. One question follows me constantly: although this fusion didn’t actually happen, could it be a reason why the idea of the free woman both repulses and enamours us? Certainly it is an uncanny mirror of the contrast between the codes set down in the Manusmriti and the Natyashastra.

The machine also edits our memories

The machine didn’t only write laws. It edited stories - and you can catch it in the act, because one of its edits survives as a phrase every Indian still uses.

“Sati-Savitri.” We use it, half-mockingly, for a certain kind of woman: demure, proper, chaste, obedient, no fun at a party. One academic study of how Indians describe the ideal woman distilled the phrase to three values - modesty, marriageability, and silence. To be called a Sati-Savitri today is to be called pleasant, pliable, and slightly pitiable.

Now let’s go back to the actual Savitri, in the Vana Parva of the Mahabharata, and see what was done to her.

She is born to King Ashvapati, and she is described as so radiant, so formidable, that no prince dares to ask for her hand. Her father does not arrange her marriage - he hands her a chariot and sends her out across kingdoms to choose her own husband. She chooses Satyavan. She is then told, by the sage Narada, that the man she has chosen is fated to die in exactly one year. She marries him anyway, with full knowledge of the ending. And when Yama, the god of death, comes to take Satyavan’s soul, Savitri follows him - not weeping, not begging, but arguing. She debates dharma with Death himself, so impressively that he offers her boons in admiration. And she springs the trap: she asks for a hundred sons, Yama grants it, and she points out that he cannot fulfil his own boon without returning the husband he is carrying away. The text says the Lord of Death could find no way out of her reasoning. She wins her husband back with her mind.

That is the woman whose name we now use to mean a silent, obedient wife.

This is the machine working on memory rather than law. It kept the one attribute that served the household - her devotion, the loyal wife who saves her husband - and it buried everything else: the woman who overruled her father’s role, who chose in full knowledge, who out-argued death by the authority of her own intelligence. The vrat rituals performed in her name across India each year commemorate the fidelity and the fasting, not the defiance and the reasoning. One writer put it exactly right: the distorting lens turned a rebel into a grieving widow. We took the whole woman, kept the part that obeyed and buried the rest.

Where the mask comes off

All of this - the endogamy logic, the legal custody, the edited myth - can feel abstract, like a structure diagrammed on paper. So let me take you to a place where the machine dropped its mask entirely; where caste was enforced directly on women’s skin.

It was nineteenth-century Travancore, in what is now Kerala. There, the law dictated which women were permitted to cover their upper bodies - and it decided it by caste. Lower-caste women, including the Nadars and Ezhavas, were forbidden the upper cloth. The bare chest was not a matter of climate or custom; it was enforced as a visible badge of caste inferiority, worn on the body, in public, at all times. To cover yourself above your station was to claim a dignity the order did not permit you.

And it was graded in both directions, which is the detail that kills any “it was about modesty” defence. Lower-caste women uncovered before the higher; but Nair women, in turn, uncovered before Nambudiri Brahmins and inside temples. Everyone bared their body to someone above them. If this had been about decency, the highest-status women would have been the most covered. They weren’t. Exposure tracked rank, and nothing else. The body was a caste register, worn on the skin.

When Nadar women - many of them having converted to Christianity, supported by missionaries - began wearing the upper cloth anyway, the response was not debate. It was decades of violence. Through the Channar Lahala, the upper-cloth agitation that ran from roughly 1813 to 1859, upper-caste mobs assaulted these women in public markets, tore the cloth from their bodies, and burned their homes and their schools. The state sided, repeatedly, with the mob - permitting a jacket here, forbidding the Nair-style cloth there, reaffirming the ban outright in 1829 - until an 1859 royal proclamation, issued under pressure from the Madras administration, finally granted these women the right to cover, though still not in the manner of the castes above them. There were nearly fifty years of organised violence over whether a lower-caste woman could wear a blouse.

That is the machine with its mask off. Not caste operating alone. Not patriarchy operating alone. Caste written directly onto the female body and enforced with fabric, fists, and fire. The clearest evidence we have that these were never two systems.

The cage inside the cage

And here is the part that refuses every comfortable ending, including the anti-colonial one.

The Nadar women won. That matters, and it should not be minimised - it was a genuine, hard-fought emancipation, five decades in the making. But look closely at what they won, and inside what framework they won it.

They won the right to cover - inside a new idea the missionaries had brought with them: that a covered body is a decent body, and an uncovered one is shameful. They escaped a system that enforced exposure as caste degradation by entering a system that enforced covering as moral virtue. The exit from the first cage was the entrance to the second. And this is precisely why the imported Victorian shame took such deep and lasting root here: it did not arrive as pure oppression. It arrived attached to a real liberation. When the thing that frees your grandmother also teaches her that her body is shameful, you do not get to cleanly reject the shame. You inherit both, fused, and you pass both down.

Which is the honest shape of this whole story. Not a free past ruined by foreigners. Not a shameful past redeemed by them either. Two systems of control - one homegrown and fused to caste, one imported and fused to Christianity’s body-anxiety - meeting in the body of a woman who just wanted to wear a blouse, and leaving her descendants carrying the residue of both.

What we kept

So: where did our policing of desire come from?

Not from any single villain. It came from a machine that was always running alongside our reverence for desire - a machine that treated the control of women as the mechanism for the control of caste, that wrote both into the same law codes, that edited our most formidable women down into models of obedience, and that in places like Travancore enforced its logic on the naked body with open violence. The British did not build that machine. They arrived, later, and added a second layer of shame on top of it - and we’ll turn to them next.

But the machine was ours. Older, deeper, and still legible in a great deal of what we now call “tradition” - in the policing of what women wear, in the anxiety about who they love, in the reflex that treats a woman’s body as public property to be regulated. We did not lose an age of freedom. We kept the machinery of control and let the reverence for desire get buried underneath it.

The reverence, though, is not gone. It’s buried, which is not the same as destroyed. The Natyashastra is still in the library. Shringara as the highest of the flavours is still there in the text, in theatre, in dance, in film, in art. Waiting. Which raises the only question worth ending on, and it is the one this whole series is building toward: if we could see clearly enough to bury it, we can see clearly enough to dig it back out.

That’s later. Next, the empire that arrived to teach us shame.

Part 2.5 of Look Again, on The Untrained Eye. This is the second essay in the series on desire, control, and the body. Part 3 turns to the British.

The framework of Brahmanical patriarchy is drawn from Uma Chakravarti, “Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India” (Economic and Political Weekly, 1993) and Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens (2003), building on B.R. Ambedkar, Castes in India (1916). Readers who want to follow the argument to its source should start there.

Six episodes of a hand not taken. A conversation that ends one sentence early. Two people in a car, and the whole scene is about whether one of them will say the thing, and they don’t, and the episode ends. The comment sections have a word for it. The “yearning”.

It is being hailed as a sort of discovery – a corrective to a few decades of content that mistook explicitness for intensity. As something re/discovered by accident. Almost as if an industry that stumbled onto restraint suddenly found it worked. The fabled restraint of the Far East has, of course, served only to lend credence to this perspective.

It is not a discovery. There is a manual, it is about two thousand years old, and it was written in India.

What the manual really is

Sometime between 200 BCE and 200 CE, a treatise on the performing arts was compiled on this subcontinent. It is widely attributed to Bharata Muni, though the text accreted across centuries, in many hands, and the attribution is more a convention rather than a claim.

The Natyashastra runs to thousands of verses. It covers stage construction, the training of performers, music, the categories of gesture, the obligations of an audience. It is a highly technical manual, and is not a work of philosophy in the way the later commentaries are. It reads a document written by practitioners, for practitioners, about how to make a thing work.

At its centre is rasa – the proposition that art produces a limited, definable set of distilled emotional states in the person receiving it. Mind you – it is not about depicting the feelings the artist has. It focuses, instead, on the states the work produces. The distinction matters, and it is the reason the whole framework is engineering rather than expression.

The text enumerates eight. Love and desire. The comic. Grief. Fury. Heroism. Fear. Disgust. Wonder. A ninth – shanta, tranquillity – was added later and argued over for centuries.

Shringara, the aesthetic experience of love and desire, is listed first. And the tradition that grew up around the text was direct about what that placement meant. Later aestheticians even called it the Rasa-Raja: the king of the rasas, the state from which the others are said to derive.

Why desire and not grief

The instinct is to read this as a culture with complicated attitudes toward sex - either disapproving or relaxed, which is both patronising and wrong. The reason shringāra sits at the top is technical, and it is the most useful idea in the entire framework.

Rasa cannot be asserted. This is the load-bearing principle. You do not produce an emotional state in a viewer by depicting that emotional state – (as we do today) you produce it by assembling components, and the text describes the components in detail.

There are vibhavas: the situation, the setting, the object of the feeling. The determinants.

There are anubhavas: the visible physical consequences. The glance that goes somewhere and comes back. The shift of weight. The change in breath. The involuntary response that the body produces before the mind has authorised it.

And there are vyabhicari bhāvas: the transient states that pass across a performer and complicate the dominant emotion without replacing it. Like notes of a perfume, if you will. Anxiety. Impatience. Recollection. Shame. Weariness. Agitation. Thirty-three of them – each named and enumerated.

Rasa arises when these assemble. The formula in the text is compact and famous: from the conjunction of vibhava, anubhava, and vyabhicari bhāva, rasa is produced. Assembly takes time. It cannot be rushed and it cannot be announced.

And this is why shringāra is the hardest thing on the list.

Grief can be produced quickly. A body on the ground does most of the work. Fear needs a sound and a held breath. Fury needs almost nothing – a raised voice and a viewer will supply the rest.

Desire is built almost entirely out of the transients – the vyabhicari bhāvas. As a dancer, I have experienced the “making” of it – it lives in the hesitation, the recollection, the thing almost said and then withdrawn, the approach that only means something because of the withdrawal that preceded it. Strip those out and you don’t get a faster, more “efficient” desire. You get nothing at all. You get information about attraction, or worse, facts about what actually happened during an encounter, rather than the experience of it – which is precisely the failure mode of every explicit scene that leaves a viewer cold.

There is no shortcut. That is the whole reason it was ranked first. It is supremely difficult to get right.

What happened to the framework

This vocabulary did not just stay in the theatre.

The bhakti movements took this language of erotic longing and made it the primary tenor for the relationship between a person and the divine. Andal, a Tamil poet writing in the eighth or ninth century, composes as a girl who fully intends to marry Vishnu and is not being metaphorical about it. Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, in the twelfth, narrates Krishna and Radha in terms that I’m not sure anyone can ever successfully describe as chaste.

The logic is coherent, and worth following. If the most intense – and complex – human experience of longing is erotic, then erotic language is the most accurate instrument available for describing longing after God. Reaching for a lesser register would not be more reverent. It would be less precise. It may even describe the thing badly.

You can see the same confidence in the objects we’ve created through the centuries. A Chola bronze standing in tribhanga – three bends through the body, weight thrown onto one hip, the figure caught mid-breath and entirely unapologetic about occupying space. Nothing in the modelling suggests the maker thought the body was a problem to be managed.

The building as an argument

The strongest evidence, however, in my humble opinion, is not any single sculpture. It is the architecture.

Take Khajuraho. The exterior walls are dense – layered bands of carving running around the whole structure, crowded with the full spectrum of earthly existence. War. Music. Court life. Animals. Deities. And, among all of it, the explicit erotic sculpture that the site is now known for, positioned on the outer walls almost at eye level, in full public view, where every worshipper does their pradakshina - circumnambulation - on the way in.

Then you go inside.

And the ornament thins. You cross into the mandapa and there is less. You move further and there is less again. The light drops. The scale contracts. And at the centre you reach the garbhagriha – the womb-chamber – and it is bare. Dark, small, silent, undecorated. Nothing on the walls around the deity at all.

I’m not sure what you’ve been told, but guess what. The building is not a container for sculpture. The building is an argument, and the sequence is the argument.

It says: you do not arrive at the divine by pretending the material world isn’t there. You arrive by walking through it – the whole of it, at full intensity, including desire, including the body – and exhausting it, and leaving it at the threshold. The stripping-away is not a rebuke to what came before. It only works because of what came before. An empty room at the end of an empty corridor means nothing. An empty room at the end of that ornate, vibrant corridor means something specific.

Which is why the placement of the erotic sculpture on the exterior is not a scandal requiring explanation - it is structural. It is the first thing you pass through because it is the first thing to be worked through. When you really think about it, it makes perfect sense.

A little disclaimer at this point about what remains contested here: scholars have argued for decades about what the Khajuraho carvings specifically meant – there are tantric readings, auspicious and apotropaic readings, readings that situate them within kāma as one of the four legitimate aims of life, readings about the display of royal prosperity and confidence. None of it is settled, and anyone who tells you it is has stopped reading about it.

But I think none of that matters – because all those disagreements don’t touch the real point. Whatever those carvings meant, they were on the outside of the building, at eye level, in daylight. The debates may have been about interpretation… but they have never been about concealment. Nobody was hiding them.

An ancient mechanism

So the slow burn works on you, and it works on a hundred million other people, and the reason is not that a Korean production company solved something new.

It is that the mechanics of longing are stable. They were mapped here with more rigour than anywhere else, and the mapping was done by people who considered the assembly of desire the highest technical achievement available to an artist. You are responding to a system that was described, tested, taught, and built into stone on this subcontinent for two thousand years.

But. That system did not survive intact.

It was subverted from two directions, and both are worth understanding separately, because they are not the same and they did not arrive at the same time.

The one we talk most about is the Victorian one – the imported conviction that the body is a moral failure and desire is dirty. That one came by ship. It is genuinely foreign to everything the Nātyashastra argues, and it is the subject of the third essay in this sequence.

But the other one? That was already here. Long before any colonial officer stood in front of Khajuraho and felt embarrassed on our behalf, we had built a brutal system that decided which bodies were permitted to be covered, which were required to be exposed, and what happened to a woman who got it wrong. That system was ours, it was older, and in its consequences it was worse.

That is the next essay.

Part of Look Again, on The Untrained Eye.

Part Two: caste, the upper cloth, and the question of who actually decided what Indian women could wear.

I want to show you a contradiction so deep you have stopped being able to see it.

You walk into an exhibition. You see a beautiful original painting priced at seven hundred rupees. Your first instinct is to bargain. You look the artist in the eye and ask - why is this so expensive?

You will hang that painting on your wall and feel cultured. You will describe yourself, without irony, as someone who values art. You will pride yourself on your eye, your taste, your ability to recognise quality.

And you will make sure your children never become the person who made it.

This is not personal failing. It is not simple hypocrisy. It is a colonial inheritance so thoroughly internalised that it presents itself as common sense - as obvious, natural, self-evident truth about the relative worth of different kinds of human work. Understanding where it came from is the first step to understanding what it has cost us.

Who Drew the Line

When the British established formal art schools in India in the 1850s - modelled on the South Kensington system, designed explicitly to serve the economic interests of the Empire - they made a very deliberate architectural decision.

They split the creative world in two.

On one side: fine art. European, intellectual, elevated. Something you appreciate, something that signals education and taste and cultural refinement. Something a gentleman collects and displays and discusses at dinner. Its value is spiritual and social - it exists to be seen, to confer status, to mark the appreciator as a person of civilisation.

On the other side: craft. Indian, manual, decorative. Something you produce. Something you execute on order, to specification, within the parameters set by someone else’s vision. Something a tradesman does with his hands so that a gentleman has something to hang on his wall. Its value is purely material - it is priced by the hour, by the piece, by the skill of replication rather than the originality of conception.

This was not an aesthetic opinion. It was a political strategy of extraordinary precision.

The British colonial economy needed Indian hands. It needed the finest Pashmina going to European luxury houses, the most intricate block prints filling pattern books for Western markets, the best Alphonso mangoes exported to foreign tables. It needed Indian makers producing goods of extraordinary quality and craft for export markets that would never name their origin.

But it needed those hands to remain hands. Not minds. Not originators. Not creative thinkers who might look at what they were making and ask why the value was leaving with the product rather than staying with the maker.

So they institutionalised the hierarchy. Fine art - the category that confers status and earns respect - belongs to European traditions, European academies, European ways of seeing. Indian production - however skilled, however sophisticated, however deeply embedded in millennia of technical and aesthetic knowledge - is craft. It is execution. It is the category of work that you compensate at the lowest rate the market will bear, because it is hands, not minds.

They drew the line between appreciation and making. Between culture and labour. Between the person who hangs the painting and the person who spent years developing the skill to paint it.

You inherited that line whole. You just forgot who drew it.

How It Transferred

The line didn’t stay in the art schools. It migrated into the family, into the conversation around the dinner table, into the quiet but consistent pressure that shaped what your generation understood a good life to look like.

You praised the craft on your walls. You made sure your children never became the people who made it.

Art school was a detour for the unfocused. Design was a fallback for those who couldn’t do something real. The creative career was the path you actively discouraged while loudly celebrating the outputs it produced. You wanted your children to be the appreciators - the people with the taste and the income to collect, to curate, to display. Not the makers. Makers were the people you bargained with at exhibitions.

This was not cruelty. It was rationality - the perfectly logical outcome of a value system that had been running in your household, your education, and your professional environment for generations. The South Kensington hierarchy had done its work so completely that it no longer needed an institution to enforce it. It enforced itself, through parental advice, through career counselling, through the quiet social calculus of what counted as achievement and what counted as a waste of potential.

And then you built organisations. And inside those organisations, you replicated the colonial hierarchy with remarkable fidelity - without recognising, for a moment, that this is what you were doing.

The Hierarchy Inside the Organisation

You cannot exist on a consumer’s phone without a graphic designer making your brand visible. You cannot launch a product without an illustrator, a typographer, a visual thinker translating your proposition into something a human being can actually perceive and respond to. Design is not the decoration on top of the business. It is the literal interface between your business and every person you are trying to reach.

But inside the organisation, the designer is the clean-up crew.

They receive the lowest budgets in the building. They work to the tightest deadlines - because every other department’s delays compound into a shrinking window that creative work is expected to fill without complaint. They absorb the structural blunders of every other function and are expected to produce something excellent under impossible constraints. And when the output is inadequate - when the brief that arrived broken produces work that looks broken - it is somehow their fault.

This is the South Kensington model running in a modern startup. Hands, not minds. Execution, not origination. A tradesman doing skilled work on order so that someone else can appreciate the result and call it their brand.

The most painful version of this plays out at the bottom of the creative economy, where the hierarchy does its most concentrated damage. The young freelancer with no contract and no recourse. The junior designer staying up until 3am fixing a brief they had no part in breaking. The illustrator asked to work for “exposure”, for portfolio “experience”, for the “honour” of association with a brand that will use their work and feel no particular obligation to compensate them fairly for it.

They are absorbing the colonial logic in their bodies so that the leadership can maintain a curated, tasteful, carefully aestheticised professional life - and feel, sincerely, like a person who values creativity.

What It Has Done to India

Here is the economic consequence of running this hierarchy at scale, across an entire generation of institutional decision-making.

Pre-Millennials are running the country’s budgets now. They moved fast and kept costs low and made the numbers look good quarter by quarter. They were not the ones staying up at 3am. They stopped asking what the numbers were costing because the cost was being paid by people they had already categorised, implicitly and completely, as hands rather than minds.

And genuine innovation has stalled.

When you treat creative thinking as a manual input - as execution rather than origination, as craft rather than art in the South Kensington sense of those words - the only things you build are platforms designed to promote consumption and extract attention. You optimise delivery mechanisms for other people’s ideas. You build the software that runs someone else’s concept. You manufacture the garment someone else designed. You iterate on the platform someone else imagined, faster and cheaper, until the margin disappears.

We have mistaken code optimisation for progress. We have mistaken execution speed for innovation. We have built an entire national economic identity around doing other people’s thinking quickly and cheaply and calling it a “knowledge economy”.

China can make it faster. China can make it cheaper. On that playing field, we lose by default. We were never going to win a race we didn’t design.

The only race India can win is the one that requires something no production machinery can manufacture: an original idea. A breakthrough in form, in concept, in the way a problem is understood and reframed before it is solved. The kind of thinking that requires a mind that has been given time, and autonomy, and the basic professional dignity of being treated as a mind rather than a pair of hands.

We are systematically destroying the people whose job it is to have those ideas. And the mechanism destroying them is a 19th century colonial hierarchy that we absorbed so completely we now enforce it on each other.

What We Actually Had

Before the South Kensington model arrived and drew its line, the relationship between making and thinking in Indian creative traditions was organised entirely differently.

In the Shilpa Shastras - the ancient Indian canonical texts governing art and architecture - there is no meaningful distinction between the artist and the craftsperson, between the one who conceives and the one who executes. The Shilpi is simultaneously thinker and maker. The knowledge is in the hands and in the mind, and the two are not separable. The weaver who understands the grammar of a textile tradition is not executing someone else’s design. They are thinking through material. They are originating through making.

The Sreni guilds that organised craft and trade in pre-colonial India operated on the same integrated understanding. The maker was not a tradesman doing hands work beneath the dignity of the appreciator. They were the custodian of a knowledge tradition - technically, philosophically, and culturally. Their expertise was not valued less than the gentleman collector’s taste. It was understood as a different and equally serious form of intelligence.

The British needed to destroy that understanding to make the colonial creative economy work. They needed Indian makers to see themselves as hands, not minds - to internalise a hierarchy in which their skill was compensation-worthy and their thinking was not. The South Kensington art schools were one instrument of that project. The devaluation of craft relative to fine art was another.

We got the line. We lost the integration. And we have been running the colonial hierarchy ever since, inside our families and our organisations and our national economic strategy, wondering why we cannot seem to produce the original thinking we keep saying we want.

Reclaim the Maker

The art/craft split was never ours.

It was drawn by people who needed our hands and feared our minds. It was institutionalised by a colonial education system designed to produce obedient executors for an empire. It was inherited by your generation as common sense and transferred to ours as career advice and organisational logic and budget decisions and the quiet daily practice of bargaining artists down at exhibitions.

Stopping it requires something more than paying designers fairly, though that is where it starts. It requires dismantling the hierarchy at its root - the belief that appreciating is more valuable than making, that conceiving is more serious than executing, that the person who hangs the painting has contributed something the person who painted it has not.

It requires us to stop treating creative time as overhead and start treating it as infrastructure. Not because it is the compassionate thing to do for the people whose labour we have been undervaluing - though it is - but because it is the only path to the innovation economy we keep claiming to want.

If we continue to treat the people who imagine our world as a line item, we will have nothing left to offer but cheap, derivative execution.

If we destroy the creative mind, we don’t just lose a designer.

We lose India’s ability to think its way forward.

Reclaim the maker.

This is Episode VII of the Dear Pre-Millennials series inside Monoculture Chronicles on The Untrained Eye.

Because I think there’s an important question no one has asked yet.

The question everyone asked was: did Prada do something wrong? Yes. Obviously. That question was answered in the first week of the controversy and has been relitigated many times since. The question I want to ask is different: what really made it legal? And the answer to that question is not a loophole in the GI Act, though the loophole is real. It is not a failure of international IP frameworks, though that failure is also real. I think the answer is a word. A single word that was installed into Indian creative life over a century and a half ago for exactly this purpose.

That word is craft.

The Word, and What It Does

In legal and commercial terms, craft means traditional. Folk. Communal heritage. And communal heritage means available – belonging to no one, which means belonging to anyone who wants to use it.

A luxury house can lift the form of a Kolhapuri sandal, attach its name and branding to it, call the result design, and charge ₹1.2 lakh for it. The Kolhapuri tradition cannot sue. The centuries of accumulated technical knowledge embedded in that form have no intellectual property status, no mechanism for claiming a share of the value their existence enables. India’s Geographical Indication Act protects the name Kolhapuri Chappal – meaning Prada cannot sell its version using that name – but the GI Act does not protect the design. Prada called its sandals “leather sandals” and “toe-ring sandals.” It never used the word Kolhapuri. It used the form without using the name, and the form, classified as craft, was available.

I argue that the word “craft” saw to all of that.

Harish Kurade is a Kolhapuri artisan whose family has been making these sandals for generations. When the controversy broke and he saw Prada’s version on his smartphone – models on a Milan runway wearing something he had been making his entire life – he said something that I want to put at the centre of this essay. Not because it is angry or accusatory, but because of the exact word he used: “We can’t run websites. We don’t know marketing. We just know craft.”

He used the word that keeps him subordinate to describe himself. That is what the word does. It has been so completely internalised by the people it disadvantages that it has become the language through which they understand their own work. Kurade is not wrong to call what he does craft. He is describing a reality. The problem is that the reality was installed, not discovered – and that the word carries within it an entire hierarchy of value that Kurade did not choose and cannot easily escape.

Where the Word Came From

I have written separately about the colonial history of the art/craft divide – that piece is already published as the one previous to this one – so I will keep this section brief. But the history is necessary context for what happened in Milan in June 2025, because Prada did not invent the mechanism it used. It inherited it.

In the 1850s, the British colonial administration established a network of schools across India – in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Lahore. These schools are sometimes described as the beginning of formal art education in India. They were not. They were the beginning of a specific kind of formal art education, designed to redirect Indian hands from competitive making into the production of commodities for European trade.

The curriculum installed a hierarchy. On one side: fine art – intellectual, individual, European, protected by the frameworks of authorship and ownership that European legal traditions had developed to reward individual creative genius. On the other side: craft – mechanical, communal, native, belonging to tradition and therefore to no one, available for anyone to use.

The separation was an economic and political decision dressed in aesthetic language. It kept Indian makers on the manual labour side of the value chain and kept European institutions on the intellectual property side. The form produced by generations of Indian makers was available. The adaptation produced by a European design team in a single season was protected.

Prada’s 2025 collection did not exploit a gap in this system. It used the system exactly as it was designed to be used.

The Three Numbers

The complete story of the Prada Kolhapuri controversy is in three numbers.

The Kolhapuri artisan in Kolhapur sells his chappal for ₹400 to ₹1,500, depending on leather quality and intricacy of work. This is the price that centuries of accumulated technical knowledge commands in its original market.

Prada debuted its uncredited version at Milan Fashion Week priced at approximately ₹1.2 lakh – the figure widely cited across media coverage at the time of the initial controversy. The form originated by Kolhapuri makers was repriced for a market that the makers themselves will never access.

After the public backlash, after a PIL was filed in the Bombay High Court, after politicians from Kolhapur’s district got involved, after Karnataka’s state agency LIDKAR issued a legal notice to Prada seeking approximately ₹5,000 crore in damages, after sustained pressure from artisan groups, media, and activists – Prada did the right thing. The company acknowledged the sandals’ Indian origins, entered into a formal collaboration with India’s state-backed artisan bodies LIDCOM and LIDKAR, and launched an official Made in India collection on Prada’s global web store. That collaborative version is listed at €750, which at current exchange rates is approximately ₹83,000 to ₹84,000.

That number is the one I want to stay with for a moment. Because it is the most revealing number in the entire story.

The Price That Got Lower

Every standard account of ethical fashion collaboration assumes a price premium. Fair trade certification costs more. Origin credits cost more. Artisan partnerships cost more. That is the implicit deal – companies that do the right thing by their suppliers pass some of that cost to the consumer, and consumers who care about ethical sourcing accept the higher price as the cost of their values.

Prada’s ethical version is cheaper than Prada’s exploitative version.

The original uncredited version: approximately ₹1.2 lakh. The collaborative Made in India version: approximately ₹84,000. The collaboration did not just acknowledge Indian artisans. It reduced Prada’s production costs. Manufacturing in Kolhapur with Indian artisan bodies, even as a headline-generating accountability gesture, costs less than whatever Prada was paying to manufacture the original version.

Someone saved money. It was not the artisans.

What the artisans in Kolhapur are actually paid by LIDCOM and LIDKAR per pair is not publicly disclosed. The state artisan bodies are the intermediary – Prada pays them, they pay the artisans, and the structure of that payment is not on Prada’s web store alongside the €750 price tag. What we can say with certainty is that the artisan selling his chappal for ₹400 to ₹1,500 in Kolhapur is not receiving a proportional share of ₹84,000 minus Prada’s margin. He is receiving whatever the state body passes through, structured to be defensible rather than equitable.

The collaboration is real. It is better than no collaboration. It is not justice. It is a settlement – the minimum Prada needed to do to make the story go away – wrapped in the language of partnership and empowerment, and priced to ensure that wrapping it in that language also saved money.

This is not a criticism unique to Prada. It is a description of what ethical fashion collaboration looks like when it is driven by reputational pressure rather than structural change. The mechanism – the word craft, the absence of IP protection for traditional knowledge, the legal framework that allows the form to be available while the interpretation is protected – is unchanged. Prada now works with the mechanism rather than simply through it. But the mechanism is intact. The next brand to lift an Indian craft form will operate under the same system.

What the Accountability Story Actually Shows

Prada eventually did the right thing. Under sustained pressure. After a PIL was filed and politicians got involved. After LIDKAR issued a legal notice seeking ₹5,000 crore in damages. After enough public anger made the story expensive to ignore.

Not because the mechanism corrected itself. Not because IP law was reformed. Not because the word craft suddenly acquired the legal protections it should carry. Because enough people made enough noise to embarrass a brand that had used the mechanism quietly and correctly.

The noise worked, in a limited way. It produced a collaboration. It produced acknowledgement. It produced a three-year artisan training programme that Prada announced alongside the Made in India collection. These are real outcomes and worth acknowledging.

They are not structural change. The mechanism that made the original appropriation legal and profitable is still intact. The next luxury house that sends a team member to photograph traditional Indian footwear in a market in Maharashtra, adapts the form for a runway collection, and lists the result as “leather sandals” with no attribution, will operate under exactly the same legal framework Prada used in 2025. The Kolhapuri case will be cited as evidence that the system self-corrects through public pressure. The question is whether public pressure is an adequate substitute for structural protection.

It is not. But it is what we currently have.

What This Has to Do With the Rest of This Series

Every episode in the Monoculture Chronicles has been circling the same problem from a different angle. The Pinterest Ghetto essay was about what Indian visual culture looks like when it imports aesthetics it doesn’t understand. The MBA Whiteout was about the boardroom posture that produces that importing. The entire Dear Premillenials series is about the psychological inheritance that produce these postures. I’ve also written about what the posture does to the people who work inside it. The Export Only Aesthetic was about why we send our best work out and accept the second tier for ourselves.

The Prada Kolhapuri story is what all of those things look like from the outside – from the perspective of a European luxury house looking at Indian visual culture and asking: what can we use?

The word craft is the answer the system has given them. Everything else follows from that answer.

The word was designed in the 1850s. We are still living inside it.

Coming next – Dear Premillenials Episode VII: The Art vs. Craft Lie. Not from Prada’s side of the table – from ours. What Indian clients and business owners lose when they undervalue making, and what the word “craft” is doing to how we see each other’s work.

There is a painting of an Indian Roller – a bird – made in Calcutta around 1780. It is exquisite. Every feather is rendered with a precision that borders on the unbelievable. The bird sits in profile against a plain ground, correctly proportioned, accurately coloured, lit from a consistent source. Beneath it, in a careful hand, is a label identifying the species.

It was painted by Shaikh Zain ud-Din, one of the finest miniature painters of his generation, trained in the Mughal tradition as it survived in Patna. And it is, in its way, a small tragedy – not because it is bad, but because of what it reveals about what he was being asked to stop doing.

I want to talk about that painting, and thousands like it, because they mark a moment most histories skip over. The moment Indian painters were quietly conscripted into a foreign way of knowing – and the moment the tradition that had produced them began, without quite realising it, to forget itself.

The bird and the manuscript

Put Shaikh Zain ud-Din’s bird next to a page from a Mughal manuscript – the Hamzanama, say, or the Akbarnama. The difference is not one of quality. Both are the work of masters. The difference is philosophical. The two images do not agree about what a painting is.

The manuscript page shows several figures at several scales. A king, larger than his attendants – not because he is physically closer to us, but because he is more important. A building shown from the outside and the inside at once, its courtyard visible from above while its entrance faces us head-on. Sometimes the same character appears twice in the same frame, at two different moments in the story – a technique with no European equivalent until the comic strip, five centuries later.

None of this is naïve. It is not what happens when a painter doesn’t yet know how to do perspective. It is a completely different theory of the image. The Indian painting is not a window onto a single moment seen from a single spot. It is a diagram of significance. It holds time, hierarchy, narrative, and cosmology in one field. Scale means importance. Multiple viewpoints mean completeness. The image knows more than any single eye standing in any single place could ever see.

The bird knows only what the eye sees. From one position. At one moment. Correctly.

That is the whole difference, and it is not small.

What the surveyor needed

The colonial project in India was, among other things, a project of knowing. To govern a place you have never seen, you must first catalogue it – map the land, count the people, classify the plants, survey the buildings, record the castes. Knowledge was not incidental to colonial rule. It was the precondition of it. You cannot administer, tax, or extract from what you have not first measured and named.

The painter’s eye was recruited into this project. Natural history illustration – birds, animals, plants, rendered accurately enough to be identified and classified – was part of the vast documentary machine through which the colonial administration came to know, and therefore to hold, the subcontinent. Wealthy Company officials and their wives commissioned Indian painters to produce these images. Lady Mary Impey, wife of the Chief Justice of Bengal, employed Shaikh Zain ud-Din and others to paint the birds and animals of her private menagerie. The commissions looked like patronage. They were also something else.

Because the accuracy the surveyor’s eye required was not a neutral skill added to the painter’s repertoire. It came with a whole epistemology attached. Fixed viewpoint. Single moment. Scale as distance, not importance. Shadow as optical fact, not symbolic weight. To paint the bird the way the commission required, the painter had to set aside – for the duration of the work, and then increasingly as a habit – the entire visual grammar his tradition had spent centuries building.

This is what I mean by an epistemic imposition. Not a better technique replacing a worse one. A way of knowing replacing another way of knowing – and the replacement serving, very precisely, the administrative needs of the people doing the replacing.

The lineage that made the painter

To understand what was lost, you have to understand what the Indian painter was, before the colonial art school redefined him.

He was not an individual artist in the modern sense. He was the current holder of a lineage – a parampara – that transmitted skill, knowledge, and purpose from master to student across generations. He was trained from childhood, not in a classroom but in a workshop, absorbing the tradition by doing real work alongside those who had mastered it. There was no separation between learning and practice, between school and life. The initiation was the work itself.

And the framework of authorship was completely different from the one we now take for granted. The maker understood himself as a conduit – for Vishwakarma, the divine architect, the cosmic source of all making. The meditative preparation before beginning, the dhyana, was not a ritual flourish. It was the means by which the maker aligned himself with the tradition and allowed the work to move through him. To copy the master was not to plagiarise. It was to re-manifest – to continue the lineage’s work with one’s own hands.

I want to be careful here, because the romantic version of this story overstates the anonymity. Indian makers were not all nameless. Hoysala sculptors signed their work on temple bases. Mughal court painters were named in the colophons of the manuscripts they illustrated. Names existed. Attribution existed. The point is not that the individual was erased. The point is that the individual was understood as the servant of the lineage, not its origin – the hand through which the tradition worked, not the sole author of the result.

This is a coherent, sophisticated, and complete philosophy of making. It is not a primitive stage on the way to the modern individual artist. It is a different answer to the question of where art comes from – and for most of human history, in most of the world, it was the more common answer.

The contract as an instrument

Here is where the two halves of this story meet.

When a colonial patron hired Shaikh Zain ud-Din, they did not engage the Patna lineage. They engaged a man. They paid a man. They owned, through that payment, what the man produced. The transaction had no place in it for the parampara. The lineage was not a party to the contract. The tradition could not sign.

This individualisation was not a gift of dignity to the Indian artist. It was an administrative convenience, and in the larger frame, an instrument. The traditional craftsman did not work alone; he worked within the Sreni, the artisan guild – an institution that regulated quality, protected livelihoods, managed the collective knowledge of a craft, and held real economic and social power. The guild was an obstacle to a colonial economy that needed cheap, controllable, individual producers. The individual contract was the tool that broke the guild’s power – extracting the craftsman from the collective that protected him and binding him directly to an employer who did not.

Individual authorship, in other words, arrived in India not as liberation but as leverage. It located the maker. It made him accountable, ownable, and alone.

The schools that sealed it

Through the 1850s, the logic was institutionalised. Britain had confronted its own industrial ugliness at the Great Exhibition of 1851 – the first World’s Fair, a vast display of manufactured goods, at which the machine-made objects of the industrial nations looked crude beside the handcraft of the colonised world. The British response was not to make their factories more beautiful. It was to harvest the surface ornament of India and feed it into their own industrial production.

The colonial art schools – Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, Lahore, established across the middle decades of the century – were built to serve this end. They did not teach Indian art. They taught European academic method – drawing from live models, plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture, oil painting, linear perspective, botanical illustration – to Indian students who could afford the fees and read the English textbooks. Which is to say, to the urban elite, not to the hereditary craftsmen whose traditions the schools claimed to be improving.

The karighar – the master craftsman with a lifetime of embedded skill – could not afford the school and could not read its textbooks. He was not the intended student. And so the institution drew a line that had never existed in Indian making. On one side, fine art: taught in the school, practised by the credentialled elite, hung on walls, signed, sold, and understood as the work of individuals. On the other side, craft: made in the workshop, practised by the hereditary artisan, classified as industry, and understood as the anonymous output of a lower order of labour.

The fine-art-versus-craft divide, which we now experience as natural and ancient, was legislated into being in the second half of the nineteenth century, for specific commercial reasons, by administrators who needed Indian makers to become factory feeders. We inherited the hierarchy. We rarely ask who wrote it, or why.

The tradition that kept its lineage

There is one comparison that makes the loss unmistakable.

Indian classical music largely kept its parampara through the colonial period and into the present. The guru-shishya relationship remains the dominant mode of transmission in both the Hindustani and Carnatic traditions. Musicians still learn through years of proximity to a master, absorbing not just technique but the entire living grammar of the form. The lineage was never replaced by a colonial curriculum. And so the grammar survived – inhabited, transmitted, alive.

Visual art did not keep its lineage, precisely because the colonial art school was imposed on the visual tradition and not on the musical one. The result is visible today. Indian classical music possesses a living, confident, unbroken grammar. Indian visual art possesses extraordinary individual practitioners and a transmission system that was interrupted two centuries ago – and it is still, even now, reaching for a vocabulary that survives mostly in the hands of craftspeople who were told their practice was not art.

This is why we so often read our own artists through borrowed frames. When SH Raza spent four decades painting the bindu, the standard reading placed him downstream of Malevich and Mondrian – a derivative doing a European thing. Read through his own tradition, the bindu is a yantra, a visual instrument built to draw the viewer inward, an heir to a lineage of the dot as a site of meditation and cosmic origin. The vocabulary to read him correctly existed the whole time. It simply wasn’t in the syllabus, because the syllabus was written by the people who had replaced it.

What the bird could have been

Shaikh Zain ud-Din painted the bird beautifully. That is not in question. The tragedy is not that the work is poor. The tragedy is what the commission required him to set aside in order to make it.

He was trained to make images that held a cosmology – where the size of a thing meant its significance, where a single frame could carry a whole narrative, where the painter and the viewer both understood that an image was not a record of appearance but a diagram of meaning. He was asked, instead, to make a specimen. Accurate. Labelled. Identified. Inventory.

We don’t know what he made of this. The record preserves the birds, not his opinion of them. What it preserves is the work – precise, exquisite, and quietly emptied of the thing his tradition had spent centuries learning to put into an image.

That emptying is the subject of this essay. It happened one commission at a time, one contract at a time, one school at a time, until an entire civilisation’s way of knowing through images had been reclassified as craft, and we had learned – so thoroughly that we no longer noticed – to sign our own names and forget our lineage.

Remembering it is the work. This series is one small attempt at it.

Next: The Ravi Varma Paradox – did he democratise Indian art, or colonise our imagination?

Look Again is a series re-reading South Asian art and aesthetics through the frames our schools forgot to teach us. Subscribe to The Untrained Eye to follow along.

A friend of mine works in advertising. He held a baby shower recently - the relaxed, generous kind that tells you something about who he is - and somewhere in the conversation he said something that I haven’t been able to put down since.

He told me he feels lucky. Genuinely, surprisingly, almost guiltily lucky. Because he has a kind boss.

Not a competent boss. Not a strategic boss. Not a boss with a strong vision or a clean management style or an impressive track record - though she has all of those things too. He specifically named kindness. As though it were rare enough to feel like luck. As though he understood, from experience, that it could disappear at any moment.

And then he said: the system is going after her. Not because she’s failing. Not because the numbers are wrong or the clients are unhappy or the work is suffering. Because she’s nice. Because people feel safe around her. Because she leads without manufacturing fear. And this, he said, is the second time he has watched this happen to a good person in leadership.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think we rush past it too quickly.

The system is not going after her despite her kindness. It is going after her because of it.

The Ma-Baap Structure: What It Is and Where It Came From

To understand why kindness gets eliminated, you first need to understand the structure doing the eliminating.

Ma-Baap literally means mother-father. In colonial India, the British administration was referred to as Mai-Baap Sarkaar - the Mother-Father Government. The framing was deliberate and strategically useful: position the colonial authority as a benevolent parent, and suddenly the subjects become children. Dependent. Grateful. Obligated. Dissent stops being a political act and becomes ingratitude. Hierarchy stops being a power structure and becomes a family arrangement. The whole extractive machinery gets dressed up as care.

That framing did not leave when the British did. It migrated, intact, into Indian organisational life - into the way companies think about themselves, the way managers position their authority, and the way employees are expected to relate to both.

In a Ma-Baap organisation, the manager is not a professional superior with a defined scope of authority. They are a quasi-parental figure whose judgment is absolute and whose decisions exist outside the range of legitimate challenge. The organisation is not a professional arrangement between adults with complementary skills. It is a family - which sounds warm until you understand what that word is doing. The family framing is what allows the structure to demand loyalty beyond what any contract could require, to extract sacrifice that would be unacceptable if named as extraction, and to treat any assertion of professional boundaries as a form of betrayal.

The key features of this structure are consistent wherever it appears:

• Hierarchy is naturalised. Just as a child does not negotiate the terms of their relationship with a parent, a subordinate does not negotiate the terms of their relationship with a Ma-Baap manager. The power differential is presented as inherent rather than constructed.

• Dependency is manufactured and maintained. The manager positions themselves as the source of livelihood, opportunity, and protection - and then uses that positioning to demand obedience. Gratitude is the expected baseline response to being employed.

• Transparency is read as insubordination. In a functional professional relationship, raising a concern is a contribution. In a Ma-Baap structure, it is a challenge to parental authority. It implies that the parent-manager does not already know best - which is intolerable.

• Vulnerability is exploited rather than protected. A parent-child framing suggests that the more powerful party will protect the less powerful one. In practice, the Ma-Baap structure does the opposite: vulnerability - a pregnancy, a personal crisis, an honest admission of difficulty - is registered as weakness and used to renegotiate the power balance downward.

• Dissent is punished as ingratitude. The child who challenges the parent is not just wrong - they are morally deficient. Ungrateful. Disloyal. The Ma-Baap structure gives unkind management a moral language with which to describe its targets, and that language is remarkably effective at making the person being harmed feel responsible for what is happening to them.

This is the structure my friend’s kind boss is operating inside. And this is why her kindness reads, to that structure, as a malfunction. A leader who treats her team as professional equals, who makes people feel safe enough to be honest, who measures her success by their growth rather than their compliance - she is not speaking the Ma-Baap language. She is not performing the parental authority the structure requires. And so the structure does what immune systems do to foreign bodies: it moves to remove her.

What the System Is Actually Selecting For

We talk a great deal about toxic managers. We have names for them now, frameworks for identifying them, maybe some HR processes nominally designed to manage them. The Great Place To Work survey. We understand, at least intellectually, that the Ma-Baap corporate structure - the feudal-colonial hangover that demands absolute subordination in exchange for basic livelihood - produces a particular kind of leader: one who rules by distance, by fear, by the strategic withdrawal of safety.

What we talk about far less is the other mechanism. The quieter, more deliberate one.

The system is not just producing unkind managers. It is actively identifying and removing the kind ones.

This is a different and more disturbing argument. Because it means the problem is not simply that bad people rise. It means that the structure itself has an immune response to goodness. It looks at a leader who treats her team as full human beings and reads that as instability. It looks at empathy and identifies a liability. It looks at psychological safety and sees a seat that could be taken by someone harder, someone more willing to enforce the hierarchy, someone who has successfully internalised the message that softness is danger.

And then it moves. Quietly. Through the mechanisms available to it - the performance review, the restructure, the sideways move, the budget that doesn’t get renewed, the project that gets reassigned, the whisper campaign that frames warmth as weakness and calls it a professional concern.

My friend has watched this happen twice. He is not naive. He is not misreading the situation. He is describing something real, and something that everyone who has spent enough time in Indian corporate environments will recognise immediately.

The Proof of Concept That Never Arrives

Here is what the elimination of kind leaders actually costs, beyond the individual human toll.

Every good manager who gets pushed out is a proof of concept that never reaches the next generation.

The junior designers watching. The young strategists in their first real job. The newest hires who are still forming their understanding of what professional life actually looks like - they are all taking notes. They are watching what happens to the kind boss. They are filing it away, without being told, the same way our generation filed away what happened to the people who left at six o’clock. They are learning, precisely and efficiently, what kind of leader they need to become in order to survive.

Do not be like her. The table is not safe for softness. Harden up before it happens to you.

This is how the culture reproduces itself. Not through explicit instruction. Through the visible punishment of the alternative. Every time the system targets a good person for being good, it teaches everyone watching that the good person was wrong. That the system was right. That the only rational response to a structure that punishes kindness is to stop being kind.

And so the Ma-Baap culture perpetuates itself - not because everyone in it is cruel, but because everyone in it is rational. They have seen the data. They have drawn the correct conclusion from the evidence available.

The tragedy is that the evidence is manufactured. The structure decides what counts as weakness, and then it counts kindness as weakness, and then it punishes kindness, and then it points to the punishment as proof.

The Historical Argument

Dear Pre-Millennials - I need you to understand that this is not inevitable. It is not human nature. It is not simply how organisations work.

It is a colonial-feudal hangover that we have been living inside for so long that we have mistaken it for operational reality.

Long before the East India Company imported its hyper-rigid, extractive bureaucratic machinery into Indian professional life, our economic structures were organised differently. The Ṣreni - the craft and trade guilds that governed professional life in pre-colonial India - operated on a fundamentally different philosophy of leadership. They were far from perfect (because humans are far from perfect) and we should not romanticise them uncritically. But structurally, they did something that our modern organisations refuse to do: they tied economic production to collective welfare.

A Ṣreni was legally and socially accountable for the health, crises, and life-cycle events of its practitioners. A leader’s legitimacy was not derived from their ability to extract maximum output from the people beneath them before those people burned out. It was derived from their ability to sustain and develop the people in their charge over time.

At the philosophical core of this model was the concept of Kalyāna.

Kalyāna is not “niceness”. It is not a vague organisational sentiment about being pleasant to each other. It translates, in practice, to the deliberate, active flourishing of the collective - the understanding that the health of the community is not separate from the health of the enterprise. That a leader who cannibalises the people building the organisation is not a strong leader. They are a liability. They are consuming the asset.

When my friend describes his kind boss - the one the system is currently trying to eliminate - he is describing a leader who understands Kalyāna intuitively, whether or not she would use that word. He is describing someone whose success metric is the growth of the people around her. And the system is reading that as weakness because it has no framework for that kind of strength.

We had the framework. It was ours. We lost it.

The Silence That Sustains It

One of the most reliable mechanisms of the Ma-Baap structure is the way it names what it does.

It doesn’t call it the elimination of a kind leader. It calls it a restructure. A performance concern. A cultural fit issue. A difficult but necessary business decision. It wraps the purge in the language of neutrality and inevitability - and because that language is institutional, it carries weight. It makes the people watching feel that what they are seeing is not a choice but a fact.

The system relies on our silence. On us looking at what is happening to the kind boss and calling it politics, or calling it sad, or calling it “just how it is”, rather than naming it clearly as the structural elimination of everything that could make our workplaces human.

My friend named it. That is not a small thing. Most people don’t. Most people absorb the lesson and move on.

But naming it is the beginning of refusing it.

To the Kind Leaders Still Standing

You are not naive. You are not failing to understand the game. You understand it perfectly. You are choosing, deliberately and at personal cost, not to play it the way it has been designed to be played.

That is not weakness. That is the most demanding kind of professional courage - the kind that doesn’t come with a performance review category or a LinkedIn post or a founder story.

Every team that feels safe under your leadership is a counter-argument to the system’s core claim. Every person who grows under your management and goes on to lead differently is a proof of concept. Every time you hold the line, you are leaving evidence that another way is possible - evidence the system is trying very hard to erase.

Hold the line.

To the Next Generation Watching

You are taking notes. I know you are, because I was too.

Please add this note: the person being targeted is not wrong. The system targeting them is not right. What you are watching is not a lesson in how leaders should behave. It is a lesson in what the Ma-Baap structure cannot tolerate.

It cannot tolerate you feeling safe. It cannot tolerate your flourishing. It cannot tolerate a leader whose success is measured in your growth rather than your compliance.

That intolerance is information. Use it.

The Permission Slip

Dear Pre-Millennials - we inherited your drive. We are not giving that back.

But we are refusing to inherit this. We are refusing to pass the Ma-Baap trauma down to the generation behind us, the way it was passed to you, and to you from the colonial bureaucracy that invented it, and dressed it up as professionalism so convincingly that it took us this long to see the seams.

Kindness is not a Western import. It is not a millennial affectation or a Gen-Z demand for comfort. Kalyāna is ours. It is older than every corporate structure we now treat as inevitable.

The second time my friend watches a kind leader get eliminated, he is not just witnessing a professional injustice. He is watching the system eat its own future. He is watching it remove, one more time, the proof of concept that could have changed what comes next.

Let’s stop letting it.

This is Episode VI of the Dear Pre-Millennials series inside Monoculture Chronicles on The Untrained Eye.

I want to pick up exactly where that reel left off. Because what happened in the 1700s was not an isolated historical event. It is a pattern that is still running. And last week it showed up in my own studio.

Send Them the Best Ones

I have been working on a line of outerwear. Vintage fabric. Fully recycled material. Handmade zip pulls. Handmade buttons. Work that is slow in the way that considered things have to be slow - every decision made deliberately, every element chosen rather than defaulted to.

A close friend of mine, based in the United States, asked me to send her a piece. And what she said was: send me the best ones. Because people here will not accept anything less than extraordinary.

She meant it as a compliment. She was expressing confidence in the work. And I received it that way - for about thirty seconds, before something underneath the warmth of the exchange registered.

Send me the best ones. For export.

I have heard a version of that sentence my entire career. From clients who commission illustration work for international publications and specify that the brief is different from what they commission for Indian audiences. From artisan brands whose finest work is reserved for their export catalogue. From animation studios - and I worked in one during the 2008 recession - whose domestic work and international work exist in completely different registers of quality and ambition. The best of what we make leaves. The rest stays. And this is so normal, so structurally embedded in how we produce and price and commission, that most of the time nobody notices it is happening.

The Pattern

The best Alphonso mangoes are exported. They go to Japan, to the Gulf, to the United Kingdom - markets that will pay the price their quality commands. The mangoes that stay in India are the ones that didn’t make the export grade. Most Indians have never tasted the best version of their own most famous fruit. They have been eating the remainder.

The finest Pashmina goes to European luxury houses. The most technically sophisticated handloom work is commissioned by foreign buyers who have done the research and know what they are looking at. The most precise block-printing, the most intricate zardozi, the most refined Bidriware - the institutional buyers who commission and collect these things at the level that allows the traditions to survive economically are, disproportionately, not Indian.

Our animation studios make phenomenal work. The pipeline capacity, the technical skill, the ability to execute complex visual projects at scale - these are genuine and they are world-class. The studios that have built these capabilities built them almost entirely in service of foreign clients. Domestic Indian animation, domestic Indian visual storytelling, domestic Indian investment in the medium that these studios are technically equipped to serve - has not grown at the same rate as the export work. The capability exists here. The commissioning does not.

Software. Pharmaceutical research. Engineering solutions. In sector after sector, the highest-value output leaves. The people producing it are here - in some cases - and in more cases, the best of them are abroad. The value in every case accrues elsewhere.

And if you ask anyone involved in any of these industries why this is the case, the answer is almost always a version of the same sentence: foreigners know the value of quality. Why don’t we?

The Answer

That question is not rhetorical. And the answer is not that Indians don’t appreciate quality. Indians appreciate quality. Walk into any home where serious money has been spent on a wedding, on a puja, on a piece of jewellery that will be worn once and kept for a generation - the quality standards are exacting. Indians know quality. The question is about something more specific: whose quality signal counts?

And the answer, structurally, is: the foreign buyer’s.

This is not a new dynamic. When the East India Company established the export trade in Indian textiles, they were not just creating an economic relationship - they were establishing a hierarchy of validation. The quality of Indian work was real, but its value was determined by European buyers, European taste, European willingness to pay. Indian production was structurally oriented toward a foreign audience as its primary judge. What the foreign audience wanted, Indian production provided. What the foreign audience didn’t value - the space, the grammar, the intelligence embedded in the restraint - disappeared from the product.

The export market did not just change what Indian artisans made. It changed what Indian artisans understood their work to be for. The audience that mattered - the audience whose response determined whether the work was good - was not here. It was elsewhere.

That orientation has not been undone. It has adapted. The East India Company is gone. The pattern it installed is not.

The Psychological Cost

The export-only aesthetic is not purely an economic phenomenon. Economics explains why the best mangoes go to Japan - they command a higher price there. Economics explains why luxury houses commission from Indian artisans - the labour costs are lower and the craft quality is high. These are rational market behaviours with structural roots in colonial trade architecture.

But the psychology goes further than the economics. We have internalised the idea that foreign validation is the quality signal. Not just that foreign buyers pay more - that they know more. That if a Western buyer wants it, it must be good. That if it stays here, it must be - somehow - lesser. That the domestic market’s appreciation of something is a lesser form of appreciation than the international market’s appreciation of the same thing.

This shows up in language. Foreigners know the value of quality. The implication is that we don’t - or that our knowing doesn’t count in the same way. That quality recognised by an Indian audience is a lower grade of recognition than quality recognised by a foreign one. That the work needs to leave to be validated. That it needs to pass through a foreign gaze to become fully real.

The consequence is that we consume the second tier of our own culture. The export-reject version of our own production. The mangoes that didn’t make the grade. The craft that the international buyer passed on. The animation that wasn’t commissioned from abroad. And then we look at what is available to us domestically and register, correctly, that something is slightly off - that what we have access to is not quite the best version of what is possible - and we complain about it without ever really getting to the rub of it.

The rub is not that India cannot make extraordinary things. India makes extraordinary things constantly. The rub is that the extraordinary things are being made for someone else.

What This Does to the Visual Culture

There is a direct line from the export-only aesthetic to the visual landscape this series has been discussing since the Pinterest Ghetto essay.

When the best creative work - the most considered illustration, the most intelligent design, the most technically ambitious craft - is structurally oriented toward foreign commissioning, foreign audiences, and foreign validation, what develops domestically is a different register of ambition. The domestic market gets what the domestic market is understood to deserve. And what the domestic market is understood to deserve has been calibrated for a very long time by the assumption that Indians will not pay for extraordinary and that the extraordinary should be reserved for those who will.

This assumption produces the boardrooms the MBA Whiteout essay described - where creative risk is cut because the domestic market is understood not to value it. It produces the Pinterest Ghetto - where the aesthetic imported from abroad is treated as aspirational because the extraordinary version of the domestic aesthetic has been exported. It produces the backup story architecture of my Dear Pre-Millennials essays - where Indian creatives spend years not fully investing in their own work because the work is not understood, including by the creatives themselves, as being for a primary Indian audience.

The export-only aesthetic is not a separate problem. It is the economic infrastructure underneath every other problem this series has been diagnosing. The visual flatness of Indian corporate culture, the self-colonising of Indian design, the devaluation of Indian craft - all of these are, in part, downstream of a structural orientation that has positioned the foreign buyer as the audience that matters and the domestic buyer as the audience that takes what’s left.

What It Would Mean to Make for Ourselves First

I want to be careful with where this lands, because the argument can veer in two wrong directions.

The first wrong direction is nationalism - the idea that making for India first means making only for India, or that export is inherently exploitative, or that the foreign buyer’s appreciation of Indian work is somehow illegitimate. None of these follow from the argument. The foreign buyers who commission excellent Indian animation, who collect serious Indian craft, who pay premium prices for the best Indian produce - their appreciation is real. The problem is not that foreign buyers value Indian work. The problem is that we have structured our production around their validation to the exclusion of our own.

The second wrong direction is protectionism - the idea that the solution is tariffs, or export restrictions, or forcing the best mangoes to stay in India. This also does not follow. The economic argument for export is real and the solution is not to foreclose it.

The argument is psychological, and the intervention is psychological. It is the belief - which has to be rebuilt, consciously, because it was dismantled over a very long time - that the person most worth making the best version of something for is the person who lives here. That the domestic audience deserves the extraordinary. That quality does not need a foreign gaze to validate it. That the work does not need to leave to become real.

My friend asked me to send her the best ones. I understood the compliment. I am also keeping some of the best ones here.

Not as a statement. As a practice.

Common Ground is the design criticism series inside The Untrained Eye.

Coming next - Lesson 1.5: The Art vs. Craft Lie, and the colonial schools that installed it.

The deliberate, load-bearing field of flat colour that gives extreme detail somewhere to land. The visual dam. The Rajput miniature with its figure rendered in microscopic brushwork against a vast, uninterrupted ground of solid colour – not empty, not lazy, not unfinished. Calculated. The space doing as much work as the painting.

That is the grammar we are talking about when we talk about Indian colour. Not the loud, every-inch-covered, maximum-saturation aesthetic that most people associate with Indian design today. That version came later. And it did not come from us.

This essay is about where it came from. And why we are still living inside it.

The split we are stuck in

Walk through any Indian city today and you will see the same fracture everywhere.

On one side: the renovated apartment, the boutique hotel, the design studio. Walls in muted linen, pale stone, bone white. Imported restraint, performed carefully, at considerable expense. The people who live and work in these spaces have often looked at traditional Indian interiors and decided: not that. Too much. Too loud. Too chaotic.

On the other side: the tourist market, the heritage craft stall, the export-facing handicraft brand. Colours pushed to maximum saturation. Every surface covered. Pattern on pattern, motif on motif, nothing left to breathe. The visual equivalent of shouting.

Both sides of this fracture believe they are making a choice about aesthetics. Neither side realises they are both responding to the same event – an event that happened three hundred years ago, on the other side of the world, in a London drawing room.

What the Europeans actually wanted

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Indian textiles became one of the most coveted luxury goods in Europe. Chintz – cotton fabric printed or painted with intricate designs, primarily from the Coromandel Coast – flooded into English, French, and Dutch markets. Palampores – large hand-painted bedcovers, typically featuring flowering tree designs – became status symbols in aristocratic households across the continent. The demand was enormous. The East India Company built significant portions of its early commercial empire on the trade in Indian cloth.

But here is what the European consumer was actually buying. Not the grammar. The surface.

The Chintz that left the Coromandel Coast carried within it a visual logic built over centuries – compositional decisions about scale, density, colour, and negative space that were the result of a living tradition of making, transmitted through lineage and refined through practice. The flowering motifs had symbolic weight. The colour choices were not arbitrary. The organisation of the design on the cloth was not decorative accident. It was the product of exactly the kind of thinking we described in Part One – colour as emotional architecture, space as active compositional element.

None of this was legible to the English buyer. And crucially – this was not a misunderstanding. The merchant who sold the cloth understood perfectly well that the grammar existed. He simply had no commercial use for it. What sold was not sophistication. What sold was spectacle. The more exotic, the more extravagant, the more aggressively foreign the textile looked, the higher the price it commanded in a London drawing room.

Restraint did not sell across the ocean. Spectacle did. And the merchants who ran the trade drew the logical commercial conclusion.

The pattern books

This is the mechanism that most histories of Indian textile design quietly skip over.

As the export trade grew, British merchants began to intervene directly in the design process. They sent pattern books – European-designed templates and instructions – back to Indian artisans along the trade routes. The instructions were specific. Fill every inch. More motifs. More density. More colour. The flat, restful fields of ground colour – the Akasha – were to be eliminated. Not because they were aesthetically inferior, but because they read, to the European buyer, as unfinished. As empty. As not enough for the price being asked.

The artisan who received these instructions was not being asked to make better work. They were being asked to make different work – work calibrated to a foreign market’s idea of what Indian textiles should look like, rather than to the visual grammar their own tradition had developed.

This is the moment the grammar broke.

Colour stopped being what it had been – a precision instrument, carefully chosen for its psychological and emotional effect on the viewer, organised within a system that understood the relationship between density and void, between intensity and rest. It became a commodity. A surface product designed to perform Indianness to someone who had never been to India, who could not read a single symbol in the design, and who would pay more for more.

The Akasha went. The visual dam was demolished. And what remained – all density, no relief, all surface, no depth – became, over generations, what both the producers and eventually the consumers began to think of as the authentic Indian aesthetic.

It was not authentic. It was an export format. And we inherited it as though it were ours.

What independence did and didn't change

When the British left in 1947, they took their administrators. They did not take the export economy. The craft sector that had spent two centuries producing for Western markets continued producing for Western markets, because that was the economy it had been built into. The visual grammar those markets had demanded – maximum saturation, every inch covered, spectacle over structure – continued to be the grammar that sold. Because the buyers were still there, and they still wanted the same thing.

The global tourist who arrives in Rajasthan today wants what the London drawing room wanted in 1750. Extravagant. Colourful. Exotic. Loud. The market has not changed its expectations. The craft sector, which cannot afford to ignore the market, has not changed its output. The hollowed-out aesthetic has been in continuous commercial production for three hundred years. It has had so long to embed itself that most people – including most Indians – now experience it as tradition rather than as the distortion of a tradition.

This is what we mean when we talk about internalising a colonial imposition. Not a conscious adoption of foreign values. Something slower and more thorough than that. The gradual naturalisation of a commercial format until it feels like heritage. Until the thing that was done to the tradition becomes indistinguishable, to most eyes, from the tradition itself.

The two escapes that aren't

Here is the fracture again, seen from this angle.

The Indian upper and middle class looked at the craft sector’s output – the maximum-saturation, every-inch-covered export aesthetic – and saw chaos. They saw the loudness and the density and the visual noise, and they reached for the opposite. Imported restraint. The beige wall, the pale stone floor, the bone-white linen. Minimalism as the antidote to the caricature.

This was a completely understandable response. But it was a response to the wrong thing. They were reacting against the export-market distortion, not against the original grammar. They were choosing the Loosian white wall as an escape from a visual tradition that was itself already an imposition. The real tradition – the Akasha logic, the visual dam, the calculated relationship between density and void – was not what they were running from. They had never seen it clearly enough to run from it. What they were running from was the caricature.

And the other half – the brands and makers who went deliberately, proudly loud – were doing the same thing from the opposite direction. Not reclaiming the grammar. Reclaiming the caricature. Owning the export-market aesthetic as a form of cultural pride, as a counterstatement to the beige wall. But the caricature is still the caricature, whether you embrace it or reject it. Neither move gets you back to Akasha.

Both escapes are still inside the commercial pipeline that created the problem. One end goes beige. The other end goes loud. The pipeline is still running.

What the grammar actually looked like

I want to be concrete about this, because the argument can start to feel abstract if it stays at the level of colonial trade history.

Go and look at a Cheney or a Palampore from before the export-market era – a piece made for a specific shrine or a specific festival perhaps, not for sale. Look at how the lotuses are arranged. Look at the fields of deep colour between the pattern – the rich, flat, unbroken grounds of blue, white, red or gold that hold the detail in place. Look at the ratio of dense, worked surface to quiet, restful field. The detail is extraordinary. And it has room. The ground is giving it room.

Now look at a contemporary cheent made for the export market. Every inch worked. Every field broken up with additional motifs. The ground colour, where it appears at all, interrupted by more pattern, more ornament, more density. The detail is still there. But it has nowhere to breathe. The visual dam is gone. The detail has no field to hold it. The result is not more cheent. It is less – less structured, less intentional, less itself.

This is the difference between the grammar and the caricature. Not the quantity of ornament. The relationship between the ornament and the space. The caricature fills the space. The grammar uses it.

The code is still here

The reason this essay does not end in despair is that the grammar did not disappear. It went underground. Into the hands of the practitioners who continued to work within it not for the export market but for devotional use, for local patronage, for their own tradition.

The kolam drawn on the threshold every morning is still working the Akasha logic – the dense, geometrically precise motif against the plain stone ground. The Warli painting made for a community celebration, not for export, still holds the relationship between figure and field. The weavers who make cloth for local temples rather than for export still understand that the ground colour is not the absence of design. It is the design’s foundation.

The code was not deleted. It was moved. It survived in the places the export market did not reach, in the practices that were never fully converted into commodities, in the hands of the people who kept making for reasons other than sale.

Reclaiming it is not archaeology. It does not require excavating a lost tradition from historical records. It requires looking at what is still being made – in the right places, for the right reasons – and being able to see the grammar in it rather than just the surface.

Which requires knowing the grammar exists. Which is what this essay is for.

What this means for your space

Part One ended with the practical application – give your patterned textile an Akasha, a field of flat intentional colour that is as heavy and deliberate as the object it holds.

Part Two ends with something slightly different. Not a design instruction. A reframe.

When you look at your grandmother’s bedspread and feel overwhelmed by it – ask which version of Indian colour you are reacting to. The grammar, or the caricature? Because if it’s the caricature you’re reacting to, the solution is not to put the bedspread in a drawer and buy something beige. The solution is to see the bedspread clearly enough to know what it is and what it needs around it.

Most of what we have been taught to call “too Indian” is too export-market. Too hollowed-out. Too much surface and not enough structure. It is reacting against the wrong thing.

The original grammar is not too loud. It is not too much. It is extraordinarily precise. And the eye that has been trained to see it as chaos has simply never been given the tools to read it.

This series is an attempt to give those tools back.

This is Lesson 1.5, Part Two of Look Again. The full two-part Maximalism lesson is now complete on The Untrained Eye.

Next: The Colonial Spreadsheet - how the East India Company didn’t just change what Indian painters painted, but what painting was for.

Look Again is a series re-reading South Asian art and aesthetics through the frames our schools forgot to teach us. Subscribe to The Untrained Eye to follow along.

We need to talk about what you taught us about work. Not the lessons you intended – the discipline, the ambition, the refusal to quit – but the ones that got transmitted underneath all of that. The ones encoded not in what you said, but in what you modelled, every single day, for the entirety of our childhoods.

You taught us that pain is a prerequisite for productivity.

It isn’t. It never was. It was a prerequisite for safety – and that is a completely different thing. We need to unpack that difference, because the gap between those two ideas is where an entire generation of Indian professionals is currently burning out.

What the Boom Taught You

To understand the inheritance, you have to go back to the moment it was formed.

Your generation entered the Indian workforce during one of the most electrically charged economic periods this country has ever seen. Post-1991, the liberalisation of the economy cracked the world open. Suddenly, effort had a visible, tangible return. The people who stayed longest, worked hardest, and complained least got to move up – and moving up meant something real. It meant your family’s address changed. It meant your children would not have the same anxieties you had. It meant you had won.

In that context, the equation was not irrational. It was empirically, demonstrably true: sacrifice changed your economic class in a single generation. Pain was load-bearing. The hustle worked.

So you did what any reasonable person does when they find something that works: you encoded it. But here’s the kicker: you encoded it not as a tactic, but as a value. Suffering became proof of seriousness. Hours became the metric of dedication. Rest became something you earned at retirement, not something you built into a Tuesday.

We are not writing this to tell you that you were wrong for your moment. You were absolutely right for your moment.

The context changed. The manual didn’t. And this is a huge problem.

How It Transferred

The inheritance wasn’t subtle. It was stated plainly, from the beginning: hard work is everything. Hours clocked mean effort made. Effort made means you are serious.

And the system agreed. The education we both went through was not designed to produce original thinkers. It was built on the blueprint of South Kensington-modeled institutions established in the 1850s – colonial art schools and academies designed with a very specific brief. Not to foster avant-garde self-expression or critical, disruptive thinking. To produce obedient clerks and mechanical draftsmen for the Empire.

The formula was explicit:
Show up. Sit still. Reproduce exactly what you are told. Master the linear perspective. Copy the European plaster cast. Hit the deadline. Put in the hours, and the marks will follow.

This factory logic handed back confirmation, again and again, that hours in equals results out. We learned before we were old enough to question it that this was simply the correct approach to any problem worth solving.

What nobody told us – and what we will get into in a future episode – is what that system was actually optimised for. And what it was quietly, systematically destroying in the process.

What Happened When You Became Our Managers

What is harder to sit with is this: the people who carried this formation into our creative workplaces weren’t villains. They were designers, writers, makers, and strategists who had themselves been deskilled by the same system – who had learned to produce under pressure in an India that genuinely needed everyone to work that hard to move the country forward. We understand that. We honour it.

But India moved forward. The survival emergency passed. We got richer, safer, more stable. And the metrics didn’t update.

You became our managers and brought every hour of that formation with you. Hours on seat. Availability after hours. The ability to absorb an unreasonable brief without pushing back. The willingness to eat the weekend.

Here is the part that is difficult not to say out loud: our colonisers’ most durable legacy was never a physically impoverished country. Physical poverty can be rebuilt. The more stubborn inheritance was a population trained to operate from scarcity even in abundance – to hustle as a reflex, to treat rest as guilt, to never quite believe that we have enough time to actually think.

Wealth of mind becomes real the moment you start acting like you have time. We have had it for a while now. We just haven’t acted like it.

The Biology Will Not Cooperate

Here is the part that should have been in the conversation thirty years ago, and wasn’t, because neuroscience hadn’t yet caught up with the argument.

The part of the brain responsible for creative synthesis, non-linear problem solving, and original thought is known as the Default Mode Network. It doesn’t activate when a screen is flashing or a manager is hovering over a desk demanding a layout change. It activates during rest. During mind-wandering. During the walk that nobody on your team can take because there is a manufactured emergency in the Slack channel.

The moment a human being is placed under sustained, high-stakes pressure, the Default Mode Network goes completely dark. The brain switches to survival mode, relying on familiar, well-worn patterns to execute safe, predictable outputs as quickly as possible.

This is not a soft complaint about wellness. It is a hard biological reality – and it explains something important. Hustle culture doesn’t just exhaust people. It deskills them. It biologically forbids them from being original. When you strip away autonomy and rest, you are not demanding more from your team. You are guaranteeing that they will produce less – safer, more derivative, more identical work, executed faster, because their brains are too depleted to do anything else.

This is where the monoculture comes from. Not laziness. Not lack of talent. Exhaustion, dressed up as output.

Stanford research has established that productivity per hour drops sharply past fifty hours of work per week. A study of over ten thousand knowledge workers found that extending beyond eight hours in a day causes a twenty percent drop in output and doubles burnout rates. The extra hours are not producing extra value. They are producing extra damage.

The Indian Numbers

We wish this were a theoretical argument. It isn’t.

You always told us hard work never killed anyone.

In July 2024, a 26-year-old chartered accountant died four months into her first job. Her mother wrote a letter to the company’s chairman describing excessive workload and unrelenting pressure. That letter went viral on every platform simultaneously – because every single person in this country immediately recognised the culture she was describing. The performative busyness. The managers acting out a theatre of panic. The complete erasure of boundaries. It wasn’t one employer’s failure. It was the inheritance, made visible in the most devastating way possible.

Indians work an average of 46.7 hours per week – more than Americans, more than the Japanese, more than the South Koreans, more than the Chinese. We out-hustle nearly every workforce on earth. And the 2024 CII-MediBuddy report found that 62% of Indian employees are experiencing burnout. The global average is 20%.

We are working more than almost anyone, and we are breaking at three times the global rate. The equation has stopped working.

And in almost the same news cycle as that young woman’s death, one of India’s most celebrated founders, quickly followed by many others, called on young Indians to work 70-hour weeks in service of national competitiveness.

That is the inheritance, laid out in plain sight. A mother’s grief and an entrepreneur’s exhortation, arriving together. Both rooted in the same belief: that the pain is the point.

It never was.

Recovery Is Not a Perk

Autonomy and recovery are not rewards for high performance. They are the conditions that make high performance possible. This is the reframe the Indian workplace has not yet made, and it is costing us – in talent, in innovation, in human lives.

Work from home and hybrid schedules have become flashpoints in this argument, and they don’t deserve to be. The data is not ambiguous: 74% of Indian employees now prefer hybrid models, and productivity in IT services has risen 18% under flexible policies. Hybrid working doesn’t improve output because people are working less. It improves output because it gives back the in-between.

The commute hours. The real lunch break. The twenty minutes on a terrace between briefs where the actual idea arrives. The Default Mode Network does not fire on command – it fires in the gaps. And the gaps are what thirty years of hustle culture have been systematically eliminating.

This is not an argument for full remote work as a universal rule. There is genuine evidence that in-person time matters for certain things – the informal osmosis of being in a room together, the relationship texture that holds a team. The argument is not for a specific location. It is for conditions. Autonomy over time. Permission to recover. Trust that output, not presence, is the measure.

When you demand visibility over value, you don’t get commitment. You get a performance of commitment. And those are not the same thing.

Creativity Is Not a Profession

Before we close, we need to dismantle the assumption that makes it easy to dismiss everything above: the idea that this only applies to creative industries.

Creativity is not a profession. It is a capacity. It lives in every engineer who finds an elegant solution where everyone else found a workaround, every logistics manager who reroutes a broken supply chain on a Tuesday, every accountant who spots the anomaly that everyone else scrolled past. It lives in any human being asked to solve a problem that doesn’t have an obvious, pre-existing answer – which is to say, almost every professional role that exists.

When we treat creativity as a soft, optional, vaguely embarrassing trait that belongs exclusively to people with drawing tablets and Pantone swatches, we don’t build rigorous, serious workplaces. We build compliant ones. We build rooms full of people executing instructions and calling it excellence, because the conditions that would allow them to do anything more have been engineered out of the working day.

Innovation – the thing every Indian company claims to want, the thing every founder invokes when they talk about competing globally – requires the same conditions as creativity. Space to think. Room to recover. Permission to arrive at an idea instead of being forced into the nearest available one.

You cannot demand 70-hour weeks and innovation simultaneously. The biology doesn’t permit it.

What We Actually Had

Here is the part of this conversation that gets lost in the debate about hours and productivity and hybrid policies: we are not describing something new that needs to be imported.

We are describing something we already had and lost.

Our culture had balance encoded into it. In the architecture of the traditional Indian day – the rhythms of rest and work, the afternoon that was allowed to be slow, the understanding that a person is not a unit of production but a whole life that includes stillness — there was an intuitive wisdom about recovery that the post-liberalisation boom quietly erased. We replaced it with a hustle borrowed in part from a Western industrial model, applied to a knowledge economy it was never designed for, and told ourselves it was discipline.

It wasn’t entirely discipline. It was also fear – the same fear that packed our childhood homes with plastic boxes and rubber bands, the fear that scarcity was always one step behind us, that to slow down was to fall behind, that rest was a luxury we could not yet afford.

The scarcity that fear was designed for is not the scarcity we live with now. The metrics it built are not the metrics that will carry us forward.

The Permission Slip

We are writing this to give you something you have not been given enough: permission to update this equation.

The hustle that built your career was the right tool for its moment. It was genuinely, remarkably effective at doing what it was designed to do. We are not writing this to erase that or to diminish what your generation built under extraordinary pressure with limited resources and enormous personal cost.

We are writing this because the tool is being applied to a different job now, and it is breaking the people holding it.

Rest is not the opposite of commitment. For anyone doing work that requires thinking – which is almost everyone – rest is part of the work. Recovery is not earned at the end of the project. It is what makes the project possible. Creativity is not a reward for suffering. It is a capacity that requires specific conditions, and those conditions include quiet, and autonomy, and the freedom to take the walk.

You don’t have to keep demanding the sacrifice to know that we are serious. We are serious. We just refuse to keep proving it by burning out.

We inherited your drive to build. We are not giving that back.

But we are officially refusing the burnout.

The pain was never the point. The work was always the point.

Let us show you what the work looks like when we actually have what we need to do it.

This is part of the Dear Pre-Millennials series inside Monoculture Chronicles on The Untrained Eye. Next week: Your design team is miserable, why this is a real problem, and what you can do to fix it.

Not the feeling of admiring it from a distance, reading the museum label, noting the iconography – Shiva dancing the universe into destruction, the ring of fire, the demon underfoot. That is a different experience, and a perfectly fine one. I mean the other feeling. The one where the boundary between you and the bronze becomes, for a moment, unclear. Where something in your chest recognises something in the figure before your brain has had time to explain what you’re looking at. Where you are, briefly, not separate from what you are seeing.

Most of us have had some version of this experience – in front of a painting, inside a piece of music, watching a performance that suddenly stops being a performance. We don’t always have language for it. We say things like it moved me, or I was completely absorbed, or simply I don’t know, I just felt something.

Western art theory has a name for this kind of experience. It’s called the sublime. And if you studied art or design anywhere in the world, you were taught one very specific definition of it – a definition that, it turns out, describes almost the opposite of what just happened in front of that Nataraja.

This essay is about the other definition. The one that actually fits.

Kant: the sublime as conquest

In 1790, a German philosopher named Immanuel Kant published a book called the Critique of Judgment. In it, he described what he called the sublime – the highest form of aesthetic experience. And his description goes something like this.

You are standing in front of something terrifying. A violent storm. A sheer cliff. A churning ocean. Your body panics – you feel small, threatened, helpless in the face of something vast and indifferent to your existence. This is the first part of the experience, and it is genuinely unpleasant.

Then something else happens. Your rational mind steps in. And it realises something your body didn’t: that while your physical self is fragile and finite, your capacity for reason is not. Nature can destroy your body. It cannot touch your mind. And in that realisation – the moment you recognise your own intellectual infinity in the face of physical terror – the panic transforms into something like triumph. The storm has become the occasion for you to discover your own greatness.

Kant had a term for the emotional state this produces: interesseloses Wohlgefallen, which translates roughly as disinterested satisfaction. The key word is disinterested. To have this experience, you must be physically safe from the thing you’re looking at. You have to be at the window, not in the storm. On the cliff path, not falling from it. The distance is not optional. Without it, you’re just terrified.

What Kant is describing – though he would not have put it this way – is a philosophical arm-wrestle between the viewer and the world. Your body loses. Your mind wins. The sublime is the mind’s victory.

This is the model most art schools teach. And when you look at what it produces – the white-walled gallery, the polished floor, the prohibition on touching, the required hush – you can see the Kantian condition, architecturally enforced. You are meant to encounter the work from a position of safe distance and master it with your intellect.

Now look at what happens in front of the Nataraja.

Abhinavagupta: the sublime as dissolution

Before we get to the alternative theory, a piece of context that most art schools consistently leave out.

Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Judgment in 1790. He is often spoken of as though he invented the question of what the sublime is – as though the aesthetic experience of encountering something vast and powerful was not something humans were thinking seriously about until the German Enlightenment got around to it.

In the 9th century – nine hundred years before Kant – a philosopher named Ānandavardhana, writing in Kashmir, developed a theory of aesthetic experience built on a concept called dhvani. Resonance. The word behind the word. His argument: the most powerful meaning in any work of art is never the stated meaning. It is the meaning that reverberates beyond what is literally present – the emotion the image points toward without naming, the feeling that the words are reaching for without quite touching. He called this the dhvani of the work, and argued that it was not the incomplete or the unclear, but the most complete. I think that suggestion exceeds statement the way music exceeds notation.

A generation after Ānandavardhana, a philosopher named Abhinavagupta – also writing in Kashmir, in the 10th century – took dhvani and built on top of it a complete philosophy of aesthetic experience. He was not working from nowhere. He was systematising a tradition already centuries old, rooted in a text called the Nātya Shāstra – an encyclopaedic treatise on performance, music, poetry, and visual art attributed to a philosopher named Bhārata Muni, and dating to somewhere between 200 BCE and 200 CE.

Read that again: at least two thousand years old.

So when we talk about Abhinavagupta as though he is an interesting regional footnote to the real philosophical conversation happening in Europe – we are describing a thinker working inside a tradition older than most of what European aesthetics claims as its foundations. The footnote is not a footnote.

It is the original text.

The other definition

Abhinavagupta’s philosophy of aesthetic experience is built on a word whose translation should already tell you the philosophical engine is completely different.

Rasa. Literally: juice, sap, flavour, taste.

The aesthetic experience, in this tradition, is not a problem for the mind to solve. It is something you swallow.

His argument works like this. A work of art – a Nataraja, a raga, a poem, a performance – contains within it specific emotional states, encoded in its forms and rhythms and gestures. These are not the artist’s personal feelings. They are universalised, depersonalised – bhāvas, emotional essences that exist in the work itself, available to anyone who knows how to receive them.

Now the viewer enters. But the viewer Abhinavagupta is interested in is not the detached, rationally trained academic standing back with their arms folded. The viewer he’s interested in is what he calls the sahṛdaya. Literally: same heart. One of the same heart.

The sahṛdaya is someone whose emotional and sensory apparatus has been refined through sustained, serious engagement with art, music, poetry, performance. (How… luxurious a description that is.) Not more rational than other viewers. More resonant. They have developed, through long practice, the capacity to vibrate at the frequency of what they are encountering – the way a tuning fork responds to a specific note that other objects in the room simply don’t register.

This matters because both Kant and Abhinavagupta require a prepared viewer. But they are prepared for completely different things. Kant’s prepared viewer has trained their rational faculty – they can perform the cognitive move from terror to intellectual triumph. Abhinavagupta’s prepared viewer has trained their feeling body – they can receive what the artwork is transmitting through their senses, not despite them.

When the sahṛdaya encounters the work, the emotional essences encoded in it – the bhāvas – find and activate what Abhinavagupta calls vasanas: latent emotional impressions resting in the viewer’s own subconscious, accumulated through a lifetime of experience and refined through aesthetic practice. The grief in the painting finds the grief in the viewer. But what gets activated is not personal grief – not your grief, tied to your specific losses. Something more general, more luminous. A universalised emotional awareness that lifts out of the personal and becomes, briefly, something shared and infinite.

This process of universalisation – sadharanikarana – does something to the viewer’s sense of self. The personal ego, the I that entered the room with its specific history and anxieties and preferences, begins to dissolve. Not in crisis. Quietly, the way mist lifts. The boundary between viewer and work becomes permeable, then fluid. At the peak, it disappears.

What remains is sānta rasa. The ninth rasa. The aesthetic sublime – defined not as the mind’s triumph over an object, but as the total, luminous collapse of the wall between the person and the thing they are looking at.

This is not mysticism. It is a precise, carefully argued account of how the deepest aesthetic experiences work – developed over centuries, within a rigorous philosophical tradition, by thinkers whose names our syllabuses have simply not bothered to include.

The same experience, different passports

Here is the thing I keep coming back to.

Kant’s sublime is also, if you read it without the secular philosophical language wrapped around it, describing a quasi-mystical experience. The mind confronting the infinite. The dissolution of ordinary selfhood in the face of something vast. The recognition that the rational self partakes of something beyond the merely physical. These are not the dry propositions of a rationalist philosophy. They are a description of the numinous. Of standing before something greater than yourself and being, however briefly, undone by it.

The difference between Kant and Abhinavagupta is not that one is rational and the other mystical. It is that Kant’s mysticism gets to call itself philosophy, and Abhinavagupta’s philosophy gets called mysticism.

The mechanism is simple once you see it. Kant writes inside the tradition the Western academy decided was the legitimate home of serious thought – the German Enlightenment, the secular university, the vocabulary of Latin and Greek. His terms are the right kind of difficult: technical, requiring apparatus to decode. So the experience he describes – ego momentarily overwhelmed, rational sovereignty reasserted – gets theorised as rigorous aesthetics.

Abhinavagupta writes in Sanskrit, within Kashmiri Shaivism, inside a tradition the Western academy spent the 19th century classifying as spiritual rather than philosophical. His terms get coded as exotic, as religious, as insufficiently secular. So the experience he describes – ego dissolved into the work, the boundary between viewer and viewed becoming temporarily meaningless – gets filed under mysticism instead of aesthetics.

Same intensity of experience. Same seriousness of philosophical inquiry. Same fundamental question: what happens to us when art undoes us?

Different passports.

Why it matters: reading Raza

I want to be honest about something before I go further.

I have never felt at peace with the standard reading of Raza’s work. Or Tyeb Mehta’s. Or Akbar Padamsee’s. The art-historical explanations – the Western lineages, the European influences, the placement inside movements I was taught to treat as the main story – have always felt like they were describing something adjacent to what I was actually experiencing in front of the work. Like reading a translation of a poem when you can half-hear the original underneath it.

I think this is more common than we admit. I think a lot of us stand in front of work that is doing something to us – something specific and real and not entirely explainable – and then reach for the vocabulary we were given, and find that it doesn’t quite fit. And because we have no other vocabulary, we assume the gap is in us. That we are not educated enough, not sophisticated enough, not sufficiently trained in the right way of seeing.

But what if the gap is not in us? What if we have simply been handed the wrong dictionary?

We have been reading our own art – our own visual inheritance – using a vocabulary built to describe someone else’s experience of art. And then we wonder why we feel lost. Why the explanations never quite land. Why something keeps slipping through the gap between what we feel and what we are able to say.

This is not a purely historical argument. It has consequences for how we read our own art – including our most important modern artists.

This is not a purely historical argument. It has consequences for how we read our own art – including our most important modern artists.

SH Raza spent four decades painting the bindu. A black dot, usually centred, on a coloured field. The standard art-historical move is to place him in a Western lineage – Malevich, Mondrian, the geometric abstractionists. Read through that lens, Raza becomes a derivative figure: an Indian painter doing a European thing.

Read him through Abhinavagupta and the picture inverts completely.

The bindu is not a geometric reduction. It is a yantra – a visual instrument, a diagram designed not to be looked at but to be entered. The flat coloured field around it is not background. It is the dhvani field – the resonance space Ānandavardhana described, the region of meaning that reverberates beyond what is literally present. The viewer who stands in front of a Raza bindu for long enough does not analyse it. They are pulled into sadharanikarana – the ego begins to thin, the boundary between the viewer and the dot becomes unclear, and something like sānta rasa becomes available.

Raza was not doing a European thing. He was doing an Indian thing with such precision that people trained on the European vocabulary could not see what tradition he was working in.

We have had the vocabulary to read him correctly for a thousand years. We just keep reaching for the wrong dictionary.

What this series is asking for

The minimalism essay asked you to look at a white wall and ask who told you to want it. This essay is asking something related: to look at the vocabulary you were given for talking about powerful aesthetic experiences, and ask whose experiences it was built to describe.

Kant’s model is not wrong. It describes something real – the experience of encountering something vast and being cognitively reorganised by it. It is a useful tool. But it is one tool, built for one kind of experience, in one tradition, at one historical moment. When we treat it as the universal default, we quietly disqualify every experience that works differently – every aesthetic encounter that bypasses the rational faculty rather than engaging it, that dissolves the viewer rather than fortifying them, that reaches the body before the mind has a chance to intervene.

Which is to say: we quietly disqualify most of what Indian visual art was designed to do.

The Nataraja was not made to be conquered by your intellect from a position of safe distance. It was made for the sahṛdaya – the viewer who comes prepared to be dissolved. The Chola bronze-smith was not working in Kant’s vocabulary. They were working in Abhinavagupta’s. And when we stand in front of that figure and feel something we cannot name –when the boundary between us and the bronze becomes, for a moment, unclear – we are not having an experience that Western aesthetic theory forgot to account for. We are having an experience that a Kashmiri philosopher described with extraordinary precision in the 10th century.

We just were never taught his name.

This is Lesson 1.2 of Look Again. Next: Beauty – the Greek ideal form versus saundarya and lāvanya, and why geometric perfection was never the only way to think about what beauty is for.

Look Again is a series re-reading South Asian art and aesthetics through the frames our schools forgot to teach us. Subscribe to The Untrained Eye to follow along.