AFFLUENZA
An aesthetics of luxury
HINDOL SENGUPTA
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Luxury, like everything else around us, needs nurturing and an appreciative ambience. But in India, it’s been isolated to pockets of wealth…
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We want to consume, not appreciate. We want to buy, not experience.
Photo: K. Murali Kumar
Not elitist: Luxury is just a taste for the finer things in life…
After a particularly puke-inducing fashion show in one of India’s numerous fashion weeks, one of the highest ranking Louis Vuitton officials in India once told me why India just misses the point about luxury: “Every great work of architec
ture you see in India was either built by the British or the Mughals or the old Hindu kings, you tell me, what is the great piece of architecture that we have built after independence? What inspires awe and love and respect? Can you think of anything?”
I couldn’t.
“Exactly!” he said. “Luxury needs an atmosphere that inspires, fascinates, luxury needs luxurious surrounds, luxury needs a mindset of luxury and we have completely failed to create that atmosphere. So we have millions of rich people but their mindset remains poor.”
A few weeks later, another luxury guru described what the great luxe masters used to see when they arrived in India — the great, beautiful Gateway of India (because they arrived by sea.)
Now, they fly into the Mumbai airport and all they see from the air are slums, slums and more slums.
Changing image
Think then, how the image of India has changed. Once accustomed to the finest, we have become a country that will accept the lowest common denominator.
Filth on the streets? No problem. Broken roads? Who cares? Spitting, pissing, shitting, we can live with! Dipankar Gupta in his new book The Caged Phoenix: Can India Fly? argues that one of the defining Indian characteristic, derived from Hindu beliefs, is to clean the body and personal space and block out the rest of the mess.
The more acute our ablutions, the more lackadaisical our attitude to any space beyond our home and this prevents India from developing an urban aesthetic mindset. That’s why our cities — at least all the “modern” parts — look so ugly.
Think about the greatest portions of any city — from south Mumbai to British parts of Calcutta crowned by the Victoria Memorial to Lutyens’ Delhi — and they were all built more than 60 years ago.
A picture of contrast?
Now think of all our new constructions — from choked NOIDA to cramped Gurgaon to the repulsively mushrooming Mumbai suburbs to our murder of leafy cities like Bangalore.
No thought, no ideas, just concrete vomit spit out to accommodate burgeoning millions.
The reason I now live in Delhi, away from Mumbai, is simply because I cannot afford to live in south Mumbai and every other part of Mumbai is hideous.
Luxury suffers in India because it exists in vacuum, in splendid isolation, in micro pockets of wealth. And even in that wealth, there is a big difference.
What sells by the scores in India?
Brown LV bags which every Punjabi aunty and sex starved stock broker’s wife wants to own.
What is slow in India?
Hermes and Bottega Veneta.
Luxury in India is pushed by the acquirers, not the taste-drivers. So luxury in India remains uppity, crass and usually populated by the wannabes.
Luxury is always proud but in India, sadly, it has become that most unworthy of attributes, puffed-up snooty. Shying from “it makes me feel good”, it has become “I can buy this”.
It’s what we do to our homes. Five split ACs and garbage outside the door.
Luxury in India simply misses the bigger picture. In fact, has never, post-independence, been able to see the bigger picture. It is and, perhaps for a long time, will be show-offy.
Since it is poll season, allow me to draw an analogy.
Even today, in villages and hamlets across India, hundreds gather to see a helicopter land. The H-sign of a chopper landing spot is perhaps the most common insignia in these polls after the Congress palm and the BJP’s lotus.
In a poor country, the flying chopper has become a symbol of the other-worldly power of politicians, especially in some of the most underdeveloped parts of the country.
It drives home the wedge between the ruler and the ruled. And in many constituencies, that sense of regalia, power and pomp brings in many-an awed vote.
That’s why Indian elections are so much about the show, the tamasha and that’s why they are so often not about the real issues of governance.
So what’s my point?
My point is that we often have the same response towards luxury that we have towards politics. We want to consume, not appreciate. We want to buy, not experience.
That’s why it is enough for us to swing bags while driving by garbage bins. It is enough for us to sip champagne in dime-a-dozen fashion weeks and ignore that the event is being held amid some of the shabbiest infrastructure in the world.
In fact, let me stick my neck out and say that the only person really building what I call insignia architecture is being done by a woman called Mayawati.
Sustained effort
All the elephants and concrete parks that she is building in Uttar Pradesh is one of the first sustained efforts to build imagery in architecture in post-independence India.
Whether what she is building is aesthetic or not is a different argument but the point is that she is trying to bring some sort of imagery to our public space imagination, till now dominated by pre- and colonial work which, while lovely, does nothing for the independent imagination of India.
Unless this sense of refinement becomes part of national consciousness — and it will not as long as we live in filthy cities, growing filthier everyday, there can be no real scope of any real appreciation or development of luxury.
Alas, there will not be Punjabi aunties carrying Louis Vuitton and more Punjabi aunties carrying Louis Vuitton and… well, you get the picture.
Our response to luxury is a bit like our response to politicians — it’s all about love at first sight.
Does love at first sight work? Rarely, only very rarely. Love, like luxury and politics, needs nurturing. It needs tender care and attention and going deep and understanding the roots and causes, the history and heritage.
Are we doing any of that? Hell, no!
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