Asian Paints Colour Journey
We journeyed across 5 states to capture 6 wonderful arts and the oft overshadowed craftsmen behind them. For this series, I travelled to Rajasthan to cover Glass Inlay and Durry making. What we found makes these beautiful pieces of art even more precious in our eyes
Legacy of Light
Sitting at his workstation by the window, ninety-year-old Harlal Sharma is busy sifting through pieces of mirror, oblivious to the 10 am sunlight that he’s scattering all over the room. His son-in-law Subhash Chandra Sharma is off to one corner rummaging through their stores of coloured glass, looking for the perfect shade for his new design. The sharp scrape of glass on glass, competes for attention with the soft music playing on their crackling radio. And making himself comfortable on the floor is Tarun Sharma, the grandson, sipping on his chai, examining the Glass Inlay frame that was left out to set the night before. It’s clear to see all three men share an impeccable work ethic stemming from real love for their craft, even though they were all introduced to it differently. A four hundred year old art, Glass Inlay was exclusively crafted for the Suryavanshi Rulers of Udaipur - a Rajput clan that reveres the Sun. It is only fitting that their Palace was designed to capture the Sun’s light. Until one ingenious artisan developed a way to do more with light, using mirrors and glass, he set it free. It was in that very Palace that Harlal Sharma found his calling. Silvery mirrors shimmered all day, holding memories of ages past. Coloured glass panels lit up his steps in hues of red and green, drawing him into this world of light and colour. Soon he learned to bend glass to his will and transform mirrors to create art with light, lessons he would eventually pass on to his son-in-law and grandson. The sheer detail and quality of work was so grand, it was fit only for a King. Or so he believed. Today, artists take inspiration from Mughal patterns and Rajasthani motifs, sketching their designs onto paper. Once perfected, the design is copied onto clear glass and then painted in reverse onto coloured glass pieces with a fine brush, a relic from the past that very few use today. A very few like Subhash Chandra Sharma. He wasn’t born into an artistic family, but he has always been fascinated by colour. When the time came for him to choose his line of work, he gravitated towards Glass Inlay and found himself a mentor, spending years honing his craft. Using a diamond tipped tool, Subhash Chandra Sharma is surprisingly delicate as he cuts the glass pieces and shapes them with a grinding tool, sprinkling glass dust all over himself, flecks of colour that fall unnoticed as he concentrates on the task at hand. Despite his ideal for perfection, the process is quite imperfect. Even with his years of patience and careful hands, glass tends to break. Tarun gathers up the glass fragments shaped by his father and starts to piece them together, revealing its design. He sets them in a paste of lime and marble powder he’s prepared, and after a few hours and a bit of intensive scraping and polishing, they will be ready to install on walls, ceilings or smaller pieces like furniture and even photo-frames. By the eighties and nineties, mirror inlay work was no longer confined to the palace walls. Hotels were the new abodes of the opulent. And to experience Rajasthan, was to live like the kings did. With every new hotel that sprung up, Subhash Chandra Sharma found himself spreading the magic of light and colour further than his father-in-law ever imagined possible. But today, unlike his grandfather and father, Tarun believes art shouldn’t be reserved for kings, royalty or not. It needn’t be larger than life and beyond reach. Art should bring joy everywhere, whether it towers above everyone in grand halls or fits in the palm of our hands. These men remind us to stop and appreciate the shimmer of reflections on a wall. They bring back that child-like wonder of looking at a rainbow, into something as simple as a little box we can carry with us, anywhere we go. In many ways, Mirror Inlay has changed from lining entire rooms with silvery mirrors, magnifying every moment to becoming subtle accents in our lives, taking any form our imaginations allow. But in the more important way, it has remained true to its essence, setting light free to illuminate our lives with its reflections and colours.
Seated All The Same
It’s sundown at Salawas, a village just outside Jodhpur. The sky is a faint pink curtain creased by wispy clouds. A group of men trudge along an empty street, just wide enough for a tractor, covered in the same red dust you’ll see all over the streets and walls of the village. They make their way to the home of Dariya and Pukhraj Prajapat, the man who put their village on the map as the durry centre in India. Guests are common in the Prajapat household and as is custom, cots are cleared away and large durries are rolled out in their courtyard. Delicious aromas greet them as the women of the house carry out large plates of food. The men sit down, four to a plate, outdoing each other with jokes and compliments about the food as the night wears on. When the guests are gone and the durries rolled away, Pukhraj and his eldest sons Chhotaram and Samburam recount the day’s events, before heading to bed, to prepare for another day of weaving. Their days begin early, and by 6am Dariya and Pukhraj are seated at their 100 year old loom to weave together. Their hands dance across its threaded base in perfect synchrony, every movement second nature to each other’s, a tradition almost as old as their marriage. It takes weeks and sometimes months to complete a durry. The patterns and colours drawn from their mind’s eye, almost instinctive. Pukhraj comes from a long line of weavers who’ve been making durries for over five hundred years now, a craft that was born from a very basic necessity. As the story goes, hundreds of years ago, a Royal visited their humble village. As a mark of their respect, they offered up their highest seat to him and had nowhere else to sit but the bare floor. Soon, they started weaving durries for themselves and as the years passed, it evolved from a functional piece of cloth spun with camel hair to a form of art. Weavers started experimenting with different materials, using threads spun from cotton and coconut fibres, dyed with natural pigments to create unique patterns in vivid colour combinations. It wasn’t too long before this new form of art caught the attention of the king himself, who commissioned durries for the palace. This humble piece of cloth travelled from the homes of common folk to deck the halls of the palace, entertaining the nobles. And just like that, by the simple act of sitting down, two classes were brought to the same level, with nothing differentiating them. For that moment, they were just people sitting on a beautiful dhurry in the comfort of their homes. Depending on the size of the durry, the loom is set up with two layers of white yarn wound multiple times between the frame upon which they weave. More often than not, they begin with no visual guide, letting the design come to them as they intersperse coloured threads one line at a time. At the end of every line, they pack the threads tightly and interlock the layers of the loom, a process so smooth you’ll almost miss it. Thread. Tap. Interlock. The process is long and they keep at it for hours on end. It takes about a month to reach the end of their design. After the final interlock, the treads are cut and the loom dismantled, just for a few days before the process begins all over again.
E-Bay Untold Stories
Co-wrote the script and penned the feature
on marine conservationist Nayantara Jain, for eBay.
