History Through Chairs: How a Mumbai Exhibition Turned Furniture Into a 200-Year Story of India

History through chairs may sound like an unusual way to understand a country as vast and layered as India, but a Mumbai exhibition showed how much social, political and design history can survive in an everyday object. A History of India Through Chairs, staged at the House of Mahendra Doshi in Wadala East from 28 February to 8 March 2026, brought together a large selection of historic seating collected and restored over decades.

The exhibition is now over, but its central idea remains: chairs can record changing ideas about status, empire, craftsmanship, technology, domestic life and modernity. A low wooden seat, an Anglo-Portuguese armchair, a ceremonial throne or a modernist lounge chair can reveal who was expected to sit, how they were expected to sit, what materials were valued and which cultural influences were moving through India at the time.

That is what made history through chairs more than an antiques display. The show treated furniture as evidence.

Why history through chairs became more than a furniture showcase

The House of Mahendra Doshi has dealt in antiques and period furniture in Mumbai since 1974, a legacy explored in ELLE DECOR India’s exhibition feature. Its founder, Mahendra Doshi, built a reputation as a collector with a sharp eye for material, joinery, age and craftsmanship. After his death in 2010, members of the family continued expanding and restoring the collection.

Published accounts differ slightly on the number of chairs visible at any one time. Condé Nast Traveller India described roughly 150 seats arranged across the two-storey warehouse, while The Nod reported a 250-chair exhibition and other coverage referred more broadly to more than 200 pieces. What is consistent is that the display came from a much larger private holding: the family collection has been described as containing around 2,500 chairs.

The Doshi-Gandhi family shaped the project: Anand Gandhi and Chiki Doshi curated the collection, Vivek Gandhi contributed to its interpretation and visual direction, and architect Supriya Gandhi designed the exhibition. The chairs were organised largely by period so visitors could follow changing design languages.

That chronological method gave history through chairs its narrative strength. A visitor could move from indigenous and pre-colonial forms into furniture influenced by Portuguese, Dutch, French and British presence, then into Art Deco and post-independence modernism.

History through chairs begins before the European chair became dominant

One of the most useful ideas in the exhibition was that the history of sitting in India did not begin with the European-style chair. Indian domestic and ceremonial life had long included floor seating, charpais, paats, bajots, low stools, platforms, thrones and other forms that reflected local climate, materials and social custom.

At the entrance, the exhibition used forms such as wooden paats, khaats and brass bajots to remind visitors that the upright chair was only one part of India’s seating traditions. A durbar-style baithak, with an elevated and commanding presence, made the connection between seating and hierarchy especially visible.

The exhibition placed European-style furniture inside a much longer continuum of Indian ways of sitting, gathering, ruling and receiving guests.

Seats also communicated rank. The difference between a person sitting on the floor, on a low platform, in an armchair or on an elevated throne could carry social meaning. Ceremonial furniture made authority visible long before offices developed the modern language of executive desks and boardroom chairs.

Colonial rule changed furniture, but Indian artisans changed it too

Between the 16th and 20th centuries, different European powers established political and commercial footholds in parts of the subcontinent. Portuguese influence was especially important in Goa, while Dutch, French and British networks introduced additional styles, techniques and tastes.

Vivek Gandhi explained during the exhibition that European arrivals brought furniture traditions with them and also commissioned Indian craftspeople to reproduce forms they already knew. The result was not simply European furniture placed in India. Local artisans worked with Indian hardwoods, local carving traditions and existing craft knowledge, producing hybrid forms that could look European in silhouette while being unmistakably Indian in material or decoration.

This is one of the clearest lessons of history through chairs. Cultural exchange rarely produces perfect copies. Designs change when they meet new makers, materials, climates and customers.

The exhibition included 19th-century Anglo-Portuguese chairs from Goa, carved rosewood pieces and other furniture in which European and Indian design vocabularies overlap. These objects complicate any simple divide between “Western” and “Indian” furniture because many were created through both traditions at once.

The same pattern can be seen at the scale of architecture. UNESCO describes Mumbai’s later Victorian Gothic and Art Deco ensembles as products of exchanges between European and Indian design values. Its account of the city’s Victorian Gothic and Art Deco heritage notes that local adaptations helped produce distinctive Indo-Gothic and Indo-Deco forms. The chairs in the Wadala exhibition told a similar story at human scale.

Why wood mattered so much to the story

Furniture history is also material history. India had access to hardwoods that were both structurally useful and visually rich, including teak, rosewood and ebony. Those woods shaped what artisans could carve, join, polish and preserve.

Teak became especially important because of its durability and resistance to moisture. Rosewood lent itself to dense carving and a deep finish, while ebony could be used for dark, highly decorative work. The exhibition used these materials to show that style cannot be separated from the resources and craft traditions available to makers.

In history through chairs, the wood itself often becomes a clue. Restorers inspect grain, joinery, proportions, hardware and previous repairs when trying to understand where a piece came from and how old it may be. A chair may arrive with no documentation at all, so its construction becomes part of its biography.

That is one reason the House of Mahendra Doshi’s restoration work was central to the exhibition rather than hidden backstage.

How restoration made history through chairs readable again

Many of the chairs entered the collection in poor condition. Upholstery was torn, legs were missing, joints had failed and later repairs sometimes obscured the original construction. The restoration team worked with skilled craftspeople, including artisans from families that have practised their trades for generations.

One installation at the show presented chairs at different stages of restoration. It helped explain that conservation is not simply a matter of making old furniture look new. Restorers have to decide how much to repair, what to retain, which techniques match the original construction and how to avoid erasing the evidence of age.

The most dramatic example in the exhibition was a moti chair from Kathiawar in Gujarat, covered in intricate ceramic beadwork. It had been acquired through an estate sale and reportedly took eight months to restore.

That single object illustrates why history through chairs depends on preservation. Without restoration, a damaged chair may survive physically but lose the details that make it historically legible.

The challenge is familiar across museums and collections. The News Ink’s coverage of major museum openings in 2026 looks at how institutions build narratives around objects and places. The Mumbai chair exhibition worked on a smaller scale, but it relied on the same principle: preservation becomes meaningful when objects are placed in context.

How a moti chair enriched history through chairs

The ceramic-beaded chair was more than a technical restoration challenge. It also showed how furniture could become a display of wealth, identity and local craftsmanship.

Its colourful ceramic beadwork was associated with Kathiawar, and Vivek Gandhi suggested it may have belonged to a local chieftain. The object shows how imported furniture forms could be transformed through regional ornament.

History through chairs is strongest when it allows uncertainty to remain visible. Antique furniture often changes hands many times. Documentation disappears. Families sell estates. Parts are replaced. Government offices reuse older furniture. Attribution may therefore be based on material evidence, style, provenance fragments and expert comparison rather than a complete paper trail.

That is more credible than pretending every chair has a perfectly documented biography.

History through chairs made power visible

Among the most imposing exhibits were throne and durbar chairs. Such furniture was designed to do more than support a body. Its scale, elevation, carving and upholstery could separate one person from everyone around them.

One Anglo-Indian throne chair combined teak with rich burgundy and gold details. Another durbar hall chair from the Raj of Dhrangadhra carried evidence of its maker on a plaque. In objects like these, authority becomes physical: the person in the most commanding chair is visually distinguished before speaking.

In history through chairs, furniture structured encounters: who sat centrally, who sat higher, who waited and who remained standing.

The chair has retained some of that symbolic language in modern life. Political office is still described as a “seat”. Universities have endowed chairs. Company leaders chair meetings. Courts place judges in elevated positions. The vocabulary survives because sitting and authority have been connected for centuries.

History through chairs showed how styles travelled

The exhibition also included a Carolean-style chair sourced from an old furniture shop in India. Carolean design belongs to the Restoration period associated with Charles II in the 17th century, not the 15th century. Furniture from the period became more ornate after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and absorbed continental influences.

Its presence in an Indian collection shows how design ideas could travel far from their original setting and then be reworked through local materials and craft. The restored chair represented several layers of influence rather than one pure national style.

That hybridity is a recurring theme in history through chairs. A chair can be commissioned in one region, made elsewhere, used by another family and eventually surface in a Mumbai warehouse.

Art Deco gave history through chairs a Mumbai identity

The exhibition’s Art Deco pieces had particular resonance in Mumbai. By the 1930s and 1940s, Art Deco had become a defining part of the city’s visual culture, visible in apartment buildings, cinemas, interiors and furniture.

The show included streamlined chairs and a striking triangular Art Deco sofa set with small bookcases built into its armrests. Such designs reflected a world moving away from heavily carved historic styles toward geometry, functionality and the glamour of modern urban life.

Mumbai is an especially appropriate place to tell this chapter of history through chairs because the city’s architectural Art Deco heritage is internationally recognised. UNESCO inscribed the Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai on the World Heritage List in 2018, highlighting the city’s distinctive blending of Indian design with Art Deco imagery.

In history through chairs, the furniture belonged to the same broader transformation that reshaped Bombay into a modern commercial metropolis.

Modernism changed the language of history through chairs

The exhibition eventually moved from ornate historic forms toward modernist furniture. Here, decoration often became secondary to structure, proportion and the logic of materials.

A Red and Blue Chair associated with Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld represented the radical geometry of the De Stijl movement. Jørgen Høvelskov’s sculptural Harp Chair showed a later Scandinavian approach in which the frame almost becomes a piece of abstract drawing.

The display also included a rare lounge chair attributed to Le Corbusier. That made a direct connection between international modernism and one of independent India’s most ambitious urban experiments: Chandigarh.

Le Corbusier was invited to work on Chandigarh in the early 1950s as India created a new capital for Punjab after Partition. The city’s Capitol Complex later became part of UNESCO’s Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, a transnational World Heritage property comprising 17 sites in seven countries. UNESCO describes Chandigarh’s Capitol Complex as an important expression of the Modern Movement and India’s accession to modernity.

But the Chandigarh furniture story is broader than Le Corbusier alone. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s history of the Chandigarh chair explains that Pierre Jeanneret, Eulie Chowdhury and other members of the architectural team contributed significantly to furniture used across the city. Some designs later became popularly identified almost entirely with Jeanneret even though the historical record points to a more collaborative process.

History through chairs therefore reaches beyond antique collecting. It also raises questions about attribution: whose names become part of design history, and whose labour disappears?

History through chairs exposed how objects acquire new lives

One of the most revealing pieces was an 18th-century Indo-Portuguese bishop’s chair. At some point in its long life, it appears to have been repurposed in an Indian government setting. An Ashoka emblem in differently coloured wood on the back suggests a later modification rather than part of the original design.

Such alteration is historically valuable because later changes can reveal how furniture moved across institutions and political systems.

A chair can begin in a religious context, pass into a colonial household, enter a government office and eventually arrive at an estate sale. Each stage adds another layer.

That is why history through chairs works so well as a method. Objects are not frozen at the date they were made. Their repairs, scratches, reupholstery, additions and changes of ownership become part of the historical record.

What history through chairs corrected about Indian design history

The show also challenged the idea that Indian furniture history is mostly a story of imported styles. Colonial influence was real and visible, but imported forms were repeatedly transformed by local makers.

Indian artisans adapted European furniture to different woods, decorative traditions and practical demands. Later, Indian designers and architects participated directly in modernist projects. The result is not a straight line from “traditional India” to “Western modernity”. It is a much messier story of borrowing, adaptation, resistance, reinvention and local skill.

The Indian Express later used the exhibition to examine how much anonymous craftsmanship has disappeared from conventional design histories. Many 19th-century pieces can be linked to a region or stylistic tradition but not to an individual carpenter. That absence matters. Design history often remembers patrons, architects and famous designers more readily than workshops and craftspeople.

History through chairs makes that imbalance visible because so many of the most technically impressive pieces are unsigned.

Why the exhibition matters after it has closed

A History of India Through Chairs ended on 8 March 2026, so readers should not treat it as an ongoing Mumbai attraction. Its value now is retrospective.

For collectors, it demonstrated how a private archive can become a temporary public history. For designers, it showed the importance of material knowledge and regional craft. For historians, it offered an alternative archive built from objects rather than official documents. For ordinary visitors, it made broad themes such as colonialism, class and modernism easier to see because those themes were embodied in familiar things.

That is also why history through chairs fits naturally into a wider interest in historical travel. Heritage is not limited to monuments and archaeological sites. It can survive in domestic objects, workshops, markets, houses and furniture that was never originally intended for a museum.

The bigger lesson: ordinary objects can hold extraordinary history

The most memorable achievement of history through chairs was its change of scale. It took enormous subjects such as empire, class, royal authority, industrialisation, independence and global modernism and brought them down to the size of a seat.

A chair can reveal who had power. Its wood can reveal trade and ecology. Its carving can reveal a craft tradition. Its proportions can reveal changing ideas about comfort. Its upholstery can reveal fashion. Its repairs can reveal long use. Its maker’s mark, when one survives, can rescue an individual artisan from anonymity.

The Mumbai exhibition did not claim that chairs alone can explain India. No single type of object could. But it demonstrated that furniture deserves to be taken seriously as historical evidence.

History through chairs also leaves a useful warning for anyone looking at antiques: beauty is only the surface. The more interesting questions begin underneath it. Who made the object? For whom? From what material? Under which political system? What was changed later? Why was it preserved when so many similar objects disappeared?

Once those questions are asked, a chair stops being just a chair.

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