If Morris Came to India...

If Morris Came to India...

Some years ago, on a winter afternoon when Delhi's smog softened, I found myself wandering in a narrow gully of Shahjahanabad. I took a turn to Dharampura, a neighbourhood where the air seems to be full of nostalgia. It was here, in the heart of what was once the Mughal capital, I came across a Jain Temple- delicate and utterly ignored. 

Pigeons are found almost everywhere- particularly in main city of Delhi. I next remember seeing the carvings were exquisite: slender goddesses, abstractionism. It was all done with an attention to detail. 

Now when I think of it, my mind wandered to someone very far from this scene: Mr. Morris. Morris would have never set foot in Delhi and probably never stood beneath a sky which is now full of dust and 'smog' And yet, there was something profoundly Morrisian in that temple courtyard. His emphasis on handwork, on craft, on the idea that beauty was not a luxury but a necessity of life is appropriate with that setting. 

Morris famously rejected the soullessness of industrialisation. He dreamed of a return to the guilds, to the age of artisan, to a world where the maker mattered. In medieval India, the 'sthapati' or temple architect was more of a priest of a form. 

Had Morris travelled east, beyond Kelmscott, in the lanes of Banaras or Madurai, he might have felt- strangely at home. All of India's ancient structures are anti-industrial, anti-alienation, anti-mechanical. India’s temple towns, from the pink sandstone shrines of Rajasthan to the granite sanctuaries of Tamil Nadu, are cities of craft. The temple was never a building alone; it was an ecosystem—where potters, bronze casters, stone sculptors, weavers, dancers, and cooks each had a role to play. Bronze-smiths in Swamimalai still cast Nataraja statues using a 5,000-year-old lost-wax technique. Temple weavers in Kanchipuram still dye silk in turmeric and pomegranate peel. In Bhubaneswar, young sculptors learn not from manuals, but from memory and lineage. 

Over a decade ago, I was in Konark. The first time you see the Sun Temple at Konark, it does not feel like a ruin. It feels like something that has paused. A 13th century temple was once a chariot for Surya- the Sun God drawn by seven stone horses and twenty-four elaborately carved wheels. 

Thousands of artisans- stonecutters, sculptors, planners, worked together, likely over decades, to create a structure that aligns with the solar calendar, conveying the story of the cosmos, and stuns the eye at every angle. These were not anonymous hands, but proud ones. 

In India, the tradition of the shilpin (craftsman) was sacred, passed down through generations, rooted in both lineage and metaphysics. Morris, who dreamed of reviving such guilds in his industrial England, would have found their living echo in Odisha’s temple culture.

Morris never came to India. But if he had stood beneath the soaring gopurams of Chidambaram, or traced a fingertip over the looping floral scrolls of a Jain shrine in Delhi, he might have nodded quietly to himself.