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, textures, symbols and stories from the spaces we inhabit? When subtraction becomes not merely a matter of taste but a civilisational reflex, we are no longer designing rooms. We are editing ourselves.

Travel to Khajuraho Group of Monuments, and you encounter an entirely different philosophy of space. The stone there is not content to be stone. It writhes with the forms of dancers, gods, lovers, musicians, celestial beings and animals. The temple does not present a blank façade upon which the mind projects what meaning it may; it overwhelms the mind with meaning already incarnated. It assumes that life is teeming, excessive, rhythmic. It assumes that the sacred does not fear density. Or stand beneath the exuberant towers of Meenakshi Amman Temple. Its gopurams are chromatic encyclopaedias, rising towers of carved deities painted in improbable blues and greens. It declares a worldview in pigment and granite.

These were not merely religious structures. They were pedagogical environments. They trained the eye to recognise pattern and narrative, the hand to value labour, the mind to inhabit a cosmos where the divine permeated the mundane. They insisted that beauty was not a luxury applied after utility but a principle inseparable from it.

We are often told that modernity requires subtraction. That ornament is indulgence. That clean lines signify intellectual progress. The intellectual defence of this shift often invokes modernism. One hears echoes of Adolf Loos and his polemic Ornament and Crime, in which he argued that ornamentation was a sign of cultural degeneracy, a waste of labour in an industrial age. To carve is to lag behind; to smooth is to advance. Efficiency becomes virtue. Blankness becomes moral.

But what was an argument forged in early 20th-century Vienna, amid anxieties about industrialisation, has metastasised into a global aesthetic monoculture. The drywall apartment in Noida resembles the condo in Toronto not because the climates or mythologies are similar, but because a single idea about progress has triumphed: that the future must look stripped.

This is not simply a matter of taste. Aesthetics shape consciousness. When children grow up in rooms devoid of local motifs, when festivals are reduced to removable décor rather than embedded architecture, when gods are miniaturised into polite shelf objects rather than presiding presences, something happens to cultural memory. Children growing up within such spaces may inherit economic capital, but the visual language of their civilisation arrives mediated through textbooks, festivals, or occasional tourist visits to heritage sites. Culture becomes something one visits, not something one inhabits.

Of course, one might object that temple carvings were products of feudal patronage, that they required economies of exploitation and hierarchies we rightly reject. True. But to acknowledge the moral complexity of their origins does not require us to embrace sterility as emancipation. There are ways of translating density without replicating injustice.

Moreover, minimalism often disguises its own form of excess. The smooth wall requires gypsum mined elsewhere, air-conditioning to compensate for thermal inefficiency, and periodic renovation to keep its perfection unsullied. The “simple” space is sustained by an invisible infrastructure of extraction. It is not less material, only differently material.

There is also a psychological dimension to subtraction. Ornament tells stories. A carved lintel might depict a myth; a painted ceiling might echo seasonal cycles. These visual cues anchor the inhabitant within time. Drywall, by contrast, is temporally mute. It speaks of the present continuous, a perpetual now, ready for resale.

The philosopher in us might ask whether this aesthetic erasure parallels other forms of cultural hesitation. In many Indian metro households, languages shift from mother tongue to English within a generation. Rituals become optional, then quaint. Food is de-spiced for global palates. Each change is individually defensible. Together, they form a pattern of attenuation.

For a generation educated in English-medium schools, raised on global media and eager to signal cosmopolitan competence, the ornate can feel provincial. The carved wooden swing in the ancestral home becomes ‘too much’. The brass lamps look ‘busy’. The temple alcove is reduced to a discreet shelf, if retained at all. We subtract not because we have carefully reasoned through Loosian arguments about labour and industrial production, but because we fear being misread.

Why are we so apologetic?

We apologise for our abundance. We apologise for colour. We apologise for ritual, for overt religiosity, for the visible thickness of tradition. I see a diffidence that routinely accompanies Indian upward mobility: a desire to appear streamlined before an imagined Anglo-global gaze. The white wall becomes a declaration of distance from the caricature of the “over-decorated” East.

Postcolonial societies often internalise the aesthetic hierarchies of their former rulers. Victorian critiques of Indian ornamentation, colonial narratives about excess and decadence — these did not vanish in 1947. They linger in drawing rooms and design catalogues. When we choose drywall minimalism, we are sometimes choosing absolution. We are saying: we too can be restrained; we too understand the grammar of global sophistication.

It would be dishonest, however, to reduce this to a crude East-versus-West binary. Not all Western postcolonial vestiges are bare, nor is all Indian architecture exuberantly chromatic. Walk through the French Quarter of Pondicherry, with its mustard façades, arched verandas and wrought-iron balconies — a legacy of France — or wander past the baroque churches and tiled villas of old Goa shaped by Portugal, and one encounters ornament of a different idiom, but ornament nonetheless. Conversely, travel north to the austere stone cluster of the Jageshwar Temples, and the mood shifts entirely. There, in the deodar forests, the shrines are restrained, almost severe, their power emerging not from riotous carving but from proportion, repetition and silence. Civilisations have always contained multitudes. The problem is not minimalism per se, but the unthinking assumption that authenticity lies in subtraction alone.

Nevertheless, a civilisation confident in itself does not fear its own motifs. It does not reduce its gods to decorative curios. It does not feel compelled to dilute its textures for approval. The profusion of temple carvings was not insecurity but assurance. It declared: we can hold multiplicity. We are not overwhelmed by ourselves. Our apologetic minimalism suggests the opposite. It hints at a fragile modern subject, anxious to signal belonging to a global elite, wary of seeming unsophisticated. 

And yet nostalgia alone is insufficient. We cannot, nor should we, return wholesale to medieval forms. The question is subtler: how might we design modern spaces that retain symbolic thickness? How might we allow walls to carry narrative without descending into kitsch? How might cities grow without forgetting their epithets? Some contemporary architects attempt such syntheses, reintroducing jaali screens for climate and light, reviving craft traditions in new materials, allowing courtyards to puncture high-rises. These gestures suggest that subtraction is not destiny. It is a choice.

Cultural suicide proceeds politely, through catalogues and Pinterest boards, through the conviction that less is always more. But less of what? If what is subtracted is merely clutter, we gain clarity. If what is subtracted is memory, symbol and texture, we risk impoverishment.

The temple carvings of Khajuraho or Madurai were not anxious about being too much. They trusted that the human eye and spirit could bear abundance. Our drywall interiors, by contrast, seem to doubt our capacity for richness. They assume we will be overwhelmed by detail, that our attention is too fragile for intricacy.

Between the over-carved stone and the over-smoothed plaster lies a middle path in which modern life does not require amnesia. The task is not to resurrect every motif, but to resist the reflex that equates blankness with progress. Civilisations do not die only through conquest or catastrophe. They can also fade through deliberate design choices. The question is not whether we prefer beige to vermilion, but whether we still recognise ourselves in the spaces we build.

Image: Ancient wall carvings in Hoysaleswara Temple, Karnataka.