In this public lecture, held at the historic Durbar Hall, Asiatic Society, Mumbai on 7th January 2023, Dr. Abigail McGowan, explores how Art Deco brought a wholly new approach to interior design. The turn of the 20th century transformed several facets of life in Bombay. Modern amenities, travel and ideas shaped the city into the metropolis we recognise today. Key among these transformations were Bombay’s homes and how they were decorated, and the style we know as Art Deco had much to do with this. With its machine-age aesthetic, it is well known that Art Deco reshaped Bombay’s streetscapes in the late colonial period. But it also brought a similarly important – but lesser known – transformation to its interiors.
In the newly emerging apartments in the city, and through advertisements, designers, furniture makers, and suppliers now offered holistic plans that integrated flooring, lighting, furnishing, fabrics and wall treatments. Deco moved indoors to transform lived spaces and set new standards for interior design.
About the Speaker
Dr. Abigail McGowan is Professor of History, and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Vermont. Her work lies at the intersection of material culture, politics, and everyday life in colonial South Asia. Dr. McGowan puts the home at the centre of the history of late colonial India to argue for a materially-grounded understanding of the social, cultural, and economic politics of this era. She makes the significant intervention in the scholarship on modernism by bringing women into the conversation through a study of advertising and exhibitions of modern homes directed at them. Her current research explores how the relationship between changing ideas about domestic space in early 20th century India affected town planning, architecture, consumption, and family life.
