It’s vexing because we secretly suspect that there isn’t such a thing, or we feel an uneasy hollow darkness in our minds when we confront it; we revert to the safety of our largely Western world on Instagram. Not all of our country does that, not even most of it, but a minority of us antardeshi (international in Hindi) design crowd. Yes, you. Don’t look away.
My point is that it’s desirable, for reasons I will outline, to be able to speak in a voice that is international. We are global, aren’t we? The frame of our society is based on international models; as designers, we rest on a Western vocabulary and a set of practices, even when we communicate in Indian languages, which, let it be said, is only a small fraction of the time.
We are so content with this international voice that we can’t see what we are missing. We love the desi flavour of our best advertising, but as designers in the mainstream, we lack an Indian feel when we design.
For historical reasons, we combine western-ness and indian-ness in wonderful, awful, sensible and weird ways. As designers, we have a split personality. There’s an international mode (on by default) and an India mode (activated when panicked). We reach for truck graphics; awful Latin fonts in Devanagari fancy dress; temples; whatever is handy.
The danger with that is pushing our indian-ness into a corner. We have forced desi to mean not international, like we’re not on the world atlas. Be desi, be videshi; choose. Desi means antique and wise, but not technological or scientific or sleek or cool. Or desi means street and tapori/sadak chhaap; never sophisticated. Likewise, classical Indian music, which is a living, breathing tradition evolving every day, is not a place where we can adopt an international voice.
