“To take a trivial example near at hand: I wrote a magazine article recently comparing the writing brush with the fountain pen, and in the course of it I remarked that if the device had been invented by the ancient Chinese or Japanese it would surely have had a tufted end like our writing brush. The ink would not have been this bluish colour but rather black, something like India ink, and it would have been made to seep down from the handle into the brush. And since we would have then found it inconvenient to write on Western paper, something near Japanese paper - even under mass production, if you will - would have been most in demand. Foreign ink and pen would not be as popular as they are; the talk of discarding our system of writing for Roman letters would be less noisy; people would still feel an affection for the old system. But more than that: our thought and our literature might not be imitating the West as they are, but might have pushed forward into new regions quite on their own. An insignificant little piece of writing equipment, when one thinks of it, has had a vast, almost boundless, influence on our culture.”

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Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 1933

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“India has no room for the effete revivalism that afflicts the consumer societies of the West. Change is too pressing to admit nostalgia, and tradition is too vital to permit academicism. Rituals, crafts, clothing, even the way people carry water or use space, reflect long standing patterns.”

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“If the elements of an architect’s vocabulary are sufficiently rooted in realities like climate, structure, and the deeper patterns of tradition, they may take on a certain objectivity beyond the whims of taste and personality. It is the quality to which Charles and Ray Eames were referring when admiring the refinement of the standard water vessel of the Indian peasant, the lota: the simple vessel of everyday use, stands out as perhaps the greatest, the most beautiful… no one man designed the lota, but many men over many generations - many individuals represented in their own way through something they may have added or may have removed…” 

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Balkrishna Doshi: An architecture for India, William J R Curtis, 1958

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We have been patiently working on ऐक्यम् (Ekyam), a desire to document and study objects of everyday use - containers of identity. Its richness lies at the intersection of communities, craft, ritual, cultural histories, geographies, human gesture and need. We are manifesting this research in a first line of Objects of Identity, available for purchase in 2025. 

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