Designers in India are rejecting the western canon and instead searching for home-grown approaches to their discipline.
The movement to decolonise design in India comes as practitioners question the way they were taught about the subject. Design education in the subcontinent has until now largely focussed on overseas examples.
"When we were in design school, we never studied Indian work," said graphic designer Shiva Nallaperumal. "Instead, we were learning about Paul Rand's logos or about Massimo Vignelli's New York Subway maps which had no relevance to us culturally or technically."
Nallaperumal, a partner in a Mumbai-based practice November, described the emphasis on Swiss modernist ideals of good design as "design-school propaganda" in a lecture at Hyderabad Design Week. "We deeply appreciated this work, but it was just purely visual," he told Dezeen. "There was always this disconnect because we never studied the things that we grew up around and were influenced by like Tamil cinema, Hindi cinema, magazines. But why" This is our language."
Documenting visual culture is key
In his talk at Hyderabad Design Week, Nallaperumal showed a typeface that can work in Indian scripts as well as Western alphabets.
In addition Nallaperumal's studio, November, is curating an online archive of graphic design from South Asia. The initiative is one of several efforts to document and share Indian visual culture.
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