PROFILE

“Indian product design is to fashion design what Indian hockey is to cricket,” guffaws Viki Sardesai as we sit chatting in his artistically cluttered office overlooking busy Richmond Road in Bangalore. Being one of India’s topmost product designers — with the country’s best design magazines doing the ranking — Sardesai should know. And also understand that it’s better to laugh than to complain.

Even collaborating is not such a bad idea, and that’s what he did recently when he teamed with fashion designer Rajesh Pratap Singh to interpret the works of artist Jogen Choudhury. The exhibition at Bangalore’s Gallery Sumukha brought together nine product designers and fashion designers who interpreted the works of nine artists. Sardesai chose to combine two formats — Bidri work and lacquer work — to produce an abstract design that combines the black-and-white starkness of Choudhury’s works with a splash of colour.

Modernising Bidri and marble inlay work is what 49-year-old Sardesai has come to be most widely recognised for. He is especially credited with reviving Bidri, the art of inlaying patterns in silver or gold into a black alloy metal practiced by artisans from Bidar in Karnataka for as long as 4,000 years.

“But somewhere along the way, the craftsmen’s aesthetics had become corrupted. There was no fresh design input,” says Sardesai. He decided to retain the technique to create new forms, and the result was products with a clean, straight appeal and a sophisticated simplicity.

Today, his designs adorn plates, saucers, boxes, ashtrays, tea-light holders, candle-stands and key-chains and retail from several high-end lifestyle stores such as Good Earth and The Next Shop in Delhi, Cinnamon and the Sumukha Gallery in Bangalore as well as Couture Lab in New York. They are also picked up by hotels such as the ITC chain, IHHR in Hyderabad and Ista in Bangalore to be used in their rooms and lobbies.

Sardesai’s love affair with traditional crafts began in 1988, a few years after he graduated from the National Institute of Design. He was working on a house in Mumbai with Rajeev Sethi, the well-known champion of indigenous arts and crafts of South Asia. The house had 350 artisans working on it at one point of time. This was when Sardesai discovered his love for the traditional crafts. “It was like re-learning everything I had been taught at design school. It was a wonderful exercise in humility,” he says.

Initially, though, when he started retailing his products he had trouble finding customers in India. People felt they were too costly. “Indians have a tendency to believe that anything which is indigenous ought to be cheap,” laments the designer. But today, with lifestyle stores mushrooming in the metros, does he find anything changing? “Yes, it’s amazing what the media-savvy yuppie crowd has done,” he grins.

While functionality was for long the reigning deity in Indian homes, today even the middle class wants beautiful things to use everyday, Sardesai feels. According to him, the media has helped bring about this change by bringing the rich and famous and their beautiful homes closer to us.

Moving on, he wants to revive another craft that faces extinction. Called wood inlay, it involves embossing small multi-coloured wooden pieces into a wooden base to create textured designs. Few know that Sardesai is also one of the rare museum designers in India and is currently working on the Hampi museum. Along with this, he also does interiors, picking and choosing his projects with care. “Getting up in the morning and fighting with plumbers and electricians is not something I can do every day,” he laughs.

TRENDS

Sardesai feels there is a lot happening in Indian product design that can become universal, but it must retain an Indian identity and sensibility. According to him, designers/architects like Rajeev Sethi, Rahul Mehrotra, Michael and Neil Foley and Jivi Sethi cross these boundaries. “We also have a long way to go on finishes with new materials like plastics and steel,” he says.

PRODUCTS

The designer has used the age-old art of stone inlay to fashion everyday objects. The base stone is black or white marble, while he chooses between mother-of-pearl, shankh (conch shell), burnt Jaisalmer, green marble and some semi-precious stones for the inlays to make products such as plates, coasters, boxes and ash-trays. Prices range between Rs 1,500 and Rs 2,500 per piece.

Sardesai is the first to admit that creating a Bidri plate or candle-stand is a complicated process. The basic material used is an alloy of zinc, copper and other metals, which is a closely guarded secret — even the designer is not in the artisans’ confidence. Once the basic shape has been created, the craftsman hammers fine silver wire or flat sheeting into the engraved area. The final, dramatic step is rubbing the surface with a mixture of a particular type of soil found in very old ruins and ammonium chloride which makes it permanently black so that the silver inlay design stands out in bright contrast. Sardesai’s Bidri designs are priced between Rs 350 (for smaller items such as keychains) and Rs 3,000 for plates and candle-stands.

He has also worked with south Indian lacquer-ware — that’s wooden artifacts finished with lacquer and painted, at least traditionally, with vegetable dyes. Sardesai has given products made in this technique a superb finish, many new forms and added experimental touches such as merging it with steel.