Celebrated light designer and founder of Design Democracy, Arjun Rathi, writes on reclaiming India’s oldest design instinct; the art of darkness and its play with light
There is a relationship India once had with darkness that modernity quietly dissolved. I think about this constantly. It is, in many ways, why I do the work I do.
For centuries, andhera, darkness was not the absence of something; it was an active presence. The playmate of prakash. The condition that made light legible, beautiful, alive. India’s builders understood this intuitively; the jaalis carved into temples, mosques, gurdwaras, and churches across the subcontinent were never merely decorative. They were instruments of dialogue — between interior and exterior, between shadow and the soul. The shadows that moved through them told stories. People built their lives inside those rhythms. Even Shah Jahan, legend has it, envisioned a black marble Taj to mirror the white; two opposites completing a single, perfect idea of beauty. Darkness not as counterpoint, as equal.
Craftsmen were the keepers of this knowledge. Their relationship with clay, wood, metal, and natural fibre was not technical; it was sacred. Passed down through generations as devotion, equal to one’s commitments to family and community. The objects they made, vessels, fixtures, homes, held within them an entire cosmology of how humans could live well within nature, not apart from it. There were no certificates, no exams. There was only a lifetime of practice and the responsibility to pass it on.
Then, somewhere in the pursuit of modernity, we stopped listening to them.
Today, the Indian home is lit by fixtures that could belong anywhere; mass-manufactured, uniform, imported in spirit if not always in origin. Darkness has been reduced to a problem to be solved, not a condition to be composed. Consumer imagination defaults to marble and maximum brightness. Stage lighting flattens the subtlety that once defined how Indians experienced performance, ritual, and rest. The craftsman, once central to how this country made meaning, has been pushed to the margins of an economy that no longer knows what to do with him.
When I started thinking seriously about lighting design in India, this is what troubled me most. Not the lack of a good product, but the lack of a genuine conversation between craft knowledge and contemporary production. Between what we already know how to make beautifully, and what the market actually needs at scale. The two worlds exist in parallel, rarely intersecting, each poorer for the distance.
That gap is where I want to work.
The goal has never been revival for revival’s sake; nostalgia makes bad design. It is about recognising that the intelligence embedded in India’s making cultures, its understanding of materials, of light, of shadow, of living in harmony with the natural world is precisely the intelligence the 21st century is hungry for. The craftsman must not be a footnote to India’s global story. He must help write it.
The light we forgot to keep was never just aesthetic. It was a way of knowing. And it is time to bring it back into the room.
Welcome to The Shape of Light.
