How one family's collection of chairs turns seating into a record of power and craft

At first glance, the setting feels deliberately understated. A warehouse in Wadala, its proportions left largely intact, light filtering across polished wood and carved surfaces. Then you notice how the chairs are placed. Not lined up for admiration, not arranged for comfort, but positioned almost as if in conversation.

Some face forward, others turn slightly away. A few sit elevated, asking for eye contact. You realise quickly that this is not an exhibition about furniture. It is an exhibition about behaviour, authority, labour, and the slow evolution of daily life.

Exploring 'A History of India Through Chairs' in Mumbai

A History of India Through Chairs, opening on 28 February 2026 at the House of Mahendra Doshi, reframes seating as a historical document. Across pre-colonial traditions, colonial encounters, and modern movements, the chair becomes a marker of who sat where, who stood, and who was expected to serve.

The exhibition draws from a collection begun over fifty years ago by the late Mahendra Doshi, whose fascination with chairs was never aesthetic alone. He understood that chairs live hard lives. They are dragged, leaned on, mended, broken, inherited. They register change in posture and power long before those shifts appear in official records.

“Whatever Mahendra collected was always more than furniture,” says Anand Gandhi, his cousin, who joined the institution in 1994. “It was about preserving a piece of our heritage, especially the parts that get worn down or overlooked.” Chairs, he explains, were irresistible precisely because of their vulnerability. “They are the most abused pieces of furniture in a house. Restoring them is difficult, and that difficulty tells you something about how people lived with them.”

That early understanding shaped the DNA of the collection. This was never about pristine objects sealed behind glass. It was about survival, repair, and use. “At some point it became clear this wasn’t collecting in the casual sense,” Anand Gandhi adds. “It was building an archive, whether we called it that or not.”

The exhibition begins close to the ground. Pre-colonial seating is low, compact, and portable, designed for a culture oriented around floor-level living. These early chairs privilege proximity and flexibility. They belong to a world where hierarchy existed, but had not yet been built into furniture at scale.

As visitors move deeper into the warehouse, the physical shift is unmistakable. Chairs rise. Backs stiffen. Arms appear. Tables enter the picture. The body is lifted, separated from the floor, and placed into a more rigid relationship with space.

For Anand Gandhi, the Indo-Portuguese period marks a decisive rupture. “That was the first time elevated seating with tables really entered Indian life,” he says. “It changed how rooms were organised and how authority was displayed.” One object in particular anchors this transition: a rosewood Indo-Portuguese Goan Bishop’s chair. Heavy, commanding, and carved with intention, it reads as architecture more than furniture. “This chair makes hierarchy visible,” he notes. “Status, power, rank, all of it is embedded in the design.”

Stewardship of such charged objects now rests with Mahendra Doshi’s nephew, Chiki Doshi, who joined his uncle in the mid-1990s. For him, stewardship begins with restraint. “We are custodians, not owners,” he says. “Our responsibility is to ensure every object passes on with dignity and its story intact.” Restoration is approached conservatively, intervening only where stability demands it. “Over-restoring erases evidence,” he explains. “Age is not damage. It is information.”

His understanding of that distinction is personal. “I remember watching my uncle study craftsmanship and discuss provenance with real care,” Chiki Doshi recalls. “Those conversations shaped how I see objects. We are continuing a lineage of knowledge, not just presenting beautiful things.” He describes the collection as something that must remain active. “We don’t just sell pieces. We place them with intention.”

Among the chairs he hopes visitors spend time with are the Ceylonese Dutch Burgomaster chairs, long held within the collection. These pieces emerged from encounters between Dutch and Portuguese colonial forms and Indian craft traditions, blending European silhouettes with local materials and carving techniques. “They sit at a cultural crossroads,” he says. “You can feel multiple histories negotiating space within a single object.”

If the chairs carry the weight of history, the exhibition’s visual language is deliberately spare. Art direction by Vivek Gandhi resists theatrical framing, trusting detail to do the work. “Every carving, every splat, armrest, leg angle, even the choice of cane or upholstery was made in conversation with the culture of its time,” he says. “Our job was to let those decisions speak.”

For contemporary collectors, the exhibition makes a pointed argument. Provenance, context, and originality matter more than visual impact alone. Each chair is presented as a bearer of cultural memory, restored with patience and respect. Collecting, in this framework, becomes an ethical act.

As a living archive, A History of India Through Chairs reflects the sensibility of a family that understands India’s material culture as layered, regional, and deeply connected to global exchange. “Furniture here was never merely functional,” Chiki Doshi says. “It reflected trade routes, patronage, and exceptional craftsmanship.” To engage with these chairs is to engage with the way India learned to sit, to rule, to work, and to gather.

In Wadala, the chairs do not ask to be admired. They ask to be read.

“A History of India Through Chairs” on view from 28th Feb 2026 to 8th March 2026.

11AM-7PM

Mahendra Doshi, LM Nadkarni Marg, Wadala East, Mumbai.

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