For 40 years, India has been my school. As a New York designer rooted in the textile traditions of the subcontinent, early on, I came to understand that what distinguished India’s visual culture from every other was not any single motif or palette, but an entire philosophy of making. In India, art is not a category. It is a condition of life—present in the block-printed border of a cotton sari, the painted threshold of a temple, the brass lamp outside a shopfront whose flame has not been permitted to go out in living memory. Nothing is too humble to be adorned. Nothing is adorned without meaning. I emphasize this is my new book, India: A Journey Within and Without (Flammarion).

What distinguishes the Indian aesthetic from all others is not, in the end, its complexity or its existence, though both are extraordinary. It is the refusal to separate beauty from meaning. In the West, we have long divided what belongs in a museum from what belongs in daily life, the “fine” arts from the “decorative.” In India, no such division exists. A carved and lacquered door with sunflower panels, a painted gateway at the Jaipur City Palace’s Pritam Niwas Chowk, whose lotus petals and flame palmettes have been renewed by hand for three centuries—these are not lesser art forms. They are the same impulse expressed through different materials. The artisan and the architect, the court painter and the village embroiderer, all work within a shared understanding: that to make something beautiful is an act of devotion, and that beauty itself can be a path toward transcendence.

This idea has ancient and layered origins. India’s visual traditions formed through millennia of convergence—the cosmological geometry of Hindu temple architecture and the devotional precision of Jain manuscript painting; the Persian floral arabesque and Quranic calligraphy carried into the subcontinent by the Mughals; later, the British and Portuguese colonial encounters introduced new architectural forms without displacing the old ones. What emerged was not a hierarchy of influences but a continuous act of translation. At Udaipur’s City Palace, Rajput chiteras—the hereditary court painters of Rajasthan—adapted the refined language of miniature painting to the scale of entire rooms, rendering lotus borders and repeating floral arabesques in mineral pigments on smooth aaraish, a polished lime plaster that gives painted surfaces their luminous, almost lacquered quality. The colors carry precise symbolic weight: red for vitality and auspiciousness, yellow for light and divine energy. At Garh Palace in Bundi, the inner ceiling of the Hathi Pol frames the rāslīlā—Krishna’s cosmic dance—in a circular composition that functions as an auspicious canopy over all who pass beneath it. Architecture and devotion become one.

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WRITTEN BY PETER D’ASCOLI
PHOTOGRAPHY BY AMBROISE TÉZENAS

This story appeared in the Fall 2026 issue of MILIEU.