Cultural Suicide by Aesthetic Subtraction
I find a certain silence, when I enter a newly built apartment in the metropolises of India. It is not the contemplative silence of a temple courtyard at dusk, nor the dense quiet of a forest before rain. It is the silence of subtraction. I have lived in various cities — New Delhi, Gurugram, Bengaluru, Mumbai — and I find that the aspirational interior has become startlingly uniform: white walls, recessed lighting, a sofa in obedient beige, a potted plant selected less for its life than for its compliance with a palette. The room feels hygienic, efficient, decluttered, and also faintly amputated. The visual field is disciplined into flatness. Ornament is treated with suspicion, as if it were an embarrassing relative from a less enlightened era. One might think I would hesitate to use a phrase as melodramatic as “cultural suicide,” yet something close to it flickers at the edge of our aesthetic decisions. For what else should we call the systematic stripping away of inherited forms, tex...