The Seat of Power: Depicting the history of India through chairs

Mumbai: At first glance, it appears to be a furniture exhibition. Look closer, and ‘A History of India Through Chairs' unfolds as a quiet, rigorous reading of the subcontinent's past through what has long been taken for granted. Opened this Saturday and running until March 8th at the House of Mahendra Doshi in Wadala, the exhibition approaches seating not as décor, but as evidence.Conceptualised by Vivek Gandhi and curated alongside father Anand Gandhi and uncle Chiki Doshi, the show draws from a lifetime of proximity. Vivek grew up navigating warehouses stacked with chairs, playing hide-and-seek among them. "Growing up around these pieces and hearing stories about royal families and different eras... I was already of the opinion that this is not just furniture, but art and history," he says. Under the exhibition design of Architect Supriya Gandhi (The Workshop Architects), these pieces are repositioned at the intersection of art, memory, and history.
That impulse shapes the exhibition's central proposition: chairs are treated as an archive that records transitions often absent from written documents. A Rosewood Indo-Portuguese chair, for instance, carries an Ashoka emblem crudely inserted into its headrest. The emblem is carved from teak, a material that stands in stark contrast to the refined rosewood craftsmanship around it. "The entire area for the emblem has been chiselled roughly and crudely," Vivek explains. This rough chiselling reveals a physical erasure and replacement, a colonial or religious symbol removed to assert a post-independence identity. Faded government inventory codes on the back suggest the chair's later life in a bureaucratic office, where multiple regimes quietly coexist in a single object.The selection process was part intuition, part "detective work." From a holding of over 3,000 chairs, the curators pulled 500 based on visual intrigue. This was followed by painstaking research using old auction catalogues, hand-drawn sketches from the 80s and 90s, and specialist texts on Indian vernacular furniture to locate each chair within its specific era and geography.Together, the chairs map changing ideas of power. Pre-colonial India favoured baithaks and charpais, where conversations and meals were shared. "It was more communal... less ‘one individual per chair,' which is how the Europeans did it," Vivek says. Hierarchy still existed, but it was encoded subtly: the "head" versus the "foot" of a seat, or a raised platform. The arrival of European forms altered this grammar; individual chairs, aligned with tables and formal posture, introduced a more rigid spatial ordering. Authority began to sit alone.Colonial administrators brought prototypes, but Indian craftsmen provided the soul, creating hybrid forms where local aesthetics seeped into borrowed typologies. Portuguese-era chairs feature grape and wine motifs rendered with Indian sensibilities, while climate shaped the furniture's anatomy. European Oak gave way to Teak, Mahogany, and Rosewood, timbers that enabled thinner legs and greater durability in humid conditions. To combat the heat, rattan (cane) replaced heavy upholstery, enabling ventilation in plantation and campaign chairs.Restoration posed its own ethical questions. While many chairs retain their nicks and watermarks to preserve the "patina of usage," others demanded a near-miraculous revival. One extraordinary example is a chair bought 30 years ago in tatters, covered in tiny, 1mm ceramic motifs. Restoring it required six months of searching before a collective in Gujarat agreed to take on the work, led by a 78-year-old artisan who was the only one willing to handle the intricate, irregular handmade beads. The result is not perfection, but continuity.What ultimately makes the exhibition resonate is its refusal to monumentalize. These chairs were sat on, moved, altered, and repurposed. They witnessed shifts from church to office, from colony to nation, and from community to individual. In reading India through chairs, the exhibition reminds us that history often resides at eye level, directly beneath our weight, waiting to be noticed.