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Marking the 100th anniversary of Art Deco, a trail through South India tracing the design’s distinctive localised representations
Art Deco emerged between two world wars and two design impulses: the ornate excesses of the past and the strict austerity of modernism to come. It was a style for a world rediscovering elegance through simplicity. Geometry met glamour. Steel met stucco. Buildings curved with confidence.
It took root across the globe—shaped by local materials, climates, and imaginations. In India, it arrived with cinema, insurance, and department stores: signals of a new economy and an emerging urban identity. It marked a turn from colonial classicism to a more self-fashioned, cosmopolitan aesthetic—modern, personal, aspirational.
Deco didn’t demand attention. It softened corners, rounded railings, etched flourishes into facades. It introduced a quiet sophistication that could sit easily in daily life. In South India, this sensibility was not just welcomed—it was already understood. This is a region fluent in rhythm, alignment, and surface: from the lush curves of the Western Ghats to the stepped towers of gopurams, from kolam drawings to handloom borders. Deco arrived not as a foreign accent but as a second language.
Curves became courtyards. Porthole windows welcomed monsoon winds. Laterite and lime plaster stood in for chrome and concrete. A cinema in Alappuzha, a bungalow in Malleswaram, a mosque in Kasaragod—each spoke Deco fluently, in a voice entirely local.
Here, beauty is often found in detail: in oxide floors, carved thresholds, shadow play. Deco didn’t interrupt this visual memory—it added to it. In a country often flattened in the name of unity, the South continues to assert its distinctiveness with dignity. Deco is one among many such expressions—subtle, intelligent, and enduring.
Art Deco carried a rhythm—balanced, composed, generous. Its lines were confident, its ornament precise. In a young India imagining its future, Deco offered form to possibility.
Post-Independence modernism, with its concrete institutions and state symbolism, was bold and monumental. But Deco shaped a different kind of modernity—one that belonged to cinemas, homes, colleges, and shops. It was civic. It was neighbourly. It was design you could walk past every day and still notice anew.
Builders and craftsmen shaped Deco with imagination: anchor-shaped grills, seashell railings, rudraksha patterns, lotuses stylised into speedlines. In smaller towns, the improvisation was bolder. A theatre in Thrissur mimicked a gopuram. A cinema in Madurai wore neon-like embroidery. A mosque in Kasaragod framed light with portholes. These weren’t borrowed forms. They were local declarations.
Tamil architecture moves through alignment—of space, ritual, and attention. From gopuram towers to kolam grids, form guides the eye and body. Deco entered this visual grammar with composure.
In 1930s Madras, architect L.M. Chitale brought the style into civic life with buildings like EID Parry headquartered in Dare House and the Andhra Insurance Building—clean-edged, curved, and composed. These weren’t just façades of fashion. They offered orientation, rhythm, and a sense of arrival in a transforming city.
In Karaikudi, Deco met Chettinad domesticity. Temple-like facades stepped into silhouette. Verandahs curled around thresholds—portals between ritual and routine. Athangudi tiles in ochre and indigo patterned floors with precision. Red and black oxide cooled and grounded interiors.
Here, Deco didn’t stylise Tamil architecture—it participated in it. It shared its respect for movement, transition, and pattern.
In Kerala, Deco adjusted to the monsoon—and to Marx. It worked with sloped roofs, laterite walls, and oxide floors. But more than material adaptation, it reflected a cultural one: a state defined by literacy, equity, and a resistance to excess.
The New Theatre in Thiruvananthapuram is quietly monumental—symmetrical, accessible, and open to the street. The Coir Board Building in Alappuzha blends Deco lines with cooperative economy. In Kasaragod, the Chemnad Juma Masjid folds porthole windows and curved verandahs into a structure that speaks both tradition and modernity. At the Pankaj Theatre, a canopy arcs outward—not to impress, but to welcome.
Kerala’s Deco was ideological. It fit the socialist and secular framework of its public life. Buildings here weren’t built to dazzle. They were built to serve—with clarity, proportion, and quiet radicalism.
In Andhra Pradesh, Deco marked progress—across university campuses, cinemas, and expanding towns. In Visakhapatnam, Andhra University’s Deco towers reached skyward with symmetry and grace. The Jagadamba Theatre offered sweeping curves and illuminated signage. In Tirupati, Sapthagiri Cinema aligned itself with temple forms—tiered, centred, formal.
In homes across Guntur, Rajahmundry, and Nellore, Deco lived modestly: rounded balconies, oxide floors, terrazzo thresholds. Grilles echoed the border geometry of Mangalagiri cottons and Venkatagiri saris. Even Guttapusalu jewellery, with its clustered pearl drops, found architectural echoes in balustrades and stair rails.
Architect Mohammad Fayazuddin, who worked across the undivided state, helped formalise this language. His civic buildings and hospitals were structured but not stark—modernism with cultural depth.
In Andhra, Deco didn’t separate form from surface. It wrapped civic function in the textures of local craft.
Telangana’s Deco was shaped by cosmopolitanism and Deccani poise. In Hyderabad, princely ambition, Islamic craft, and European design coalesced into a language of elegance and intent.
Architects like Fayazuddin, Zain Yar Jung, and Karl Malte von Heinz designed buildings that embodied this fusion. The State Bank of Hyderabad at Gunfoundry is all gravitas and rhythm—vertical fins, recessed arches, civic clarity. The Osmania University Arts College blends Deco geometry with Islamic symmetry and skyline silhouettes. The Moazzam Jahi Market, though built in dressed stone, carries Deco proportions in its colonnades and portals.
In Jeera Colony, Deco entered the domestic sphere—spiral staircases, rudraksha grillwork, pale pink walls. Masjids across Secunderabad incorporated streamlined parapets and corner towers. Cinemas like Sheesh Mahal and SD Theatre carried Deco into the popular imagination with scalloped facades and neon signage.
Hyderabad, long known for its pearl trade and syncretic culture, made Deco its own: less spectacle, more synthesis.
In Karnataka, Deco lived inside the neighbourhood. In Bangalore’s Basavanagudi, Malleswaram, and Fraser Town, two-storey homes wore curved balconies, porthole windows, and oxide floors. Wrought-iron railings resembled Kannada letterforms. Terrazzo stairs curled around courtyards. Cuddapah thresholds offered cool underfoot.
Public Deco flickered in the now-demolished Plaza and Rex theatres on MG Road—elegant and slightly cinematic. In Mysore, Sharada Talkies mirrored the city’s layered aesthetic: princely outside, Deco inside.
Karnataka’s Deco wasn’t a movement. It was a mood. Not designed to dominate, but to dwell in. Its strength lay in proportion, warmth, and restraint. A modernism for the street, the stone, and the family.
Art Deco in South India is not a style that arrived—it’s one that grew roots. What began as a global aesthetic found, here, a landscape already fluent in geometry, surface, and subtlety. Each state, with its own language, material memory, and sense of beauty, translated Deco with poise and personality.
In a country too often narrated through sameness, South India’s Deco insists on difference—not as resistance, but as richness. A cinema in Tirupati may not resemble a mosque in Kasaragod, but both share the same belief: that design is dialogue, and modernity can be many things at once.
These buildings don’t demand attention. But they reward it—quietly, lastingly, and with luminous precision.
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DEC 2023
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17 Oct 23, 03.00PM - 04.00PM