India by Design by Arthaus: Inside the Amrapali Museum With Tarang and Akanksha Arora

In a glass case at the Amrapali Museum sits a back scratcher made for a princess. Its shape is ornamental and its function domestic, until you learn that it conceals a dagger. “Once you know the story, you see the piece from a different perspective,” says Akanksha Arora, CEO of Tribe Amrapali.

It is a small lesson in design: form, function and meaning held in a single object. For Akanksha and her husband Tarang Arora, CEO and creative director of Amrapali Jewels, the museum is full of such lessons, and every collection Amrapali produces begins here. “This museum is everything that Amrapali and Tribe [Amrapali] stand for,” she says. “There is a big tree, and the very foundation, the roots, is the museum.

Tarang’s father and uncle built the collection while running what began as a single store, buying old pieces to rework, resell and preserve. What drove them, Tarang says, was a designer’s curiosity. “It was this obsession of returning to these pieces, understanding why they were made, from which area, by which tribe.”

For years, the collection lived in trunks in a basement. Today the collection in the museum spans jewellery, objects, paintings, coins and more.

For the couple, the Amrapali Museum also functions as a design library. “Pretty much every collection takes inspiration from something seen [in this museum],” Akanksha says. “An object, a motif, a bird or a peacock. It may be small, but something from the museum reflects in our collections.”

But ‘design’ means two different things for the creative duo. “I’m a minimalist, he’s a maximalist, and that’s how we balance each other,” Akanksha says. She trained in jewellery design almost by chance—having once hoped to do animation full-time—and calls herself the practical one, designing “for the majority.” At Tribe, each collection starts with a handful of one-of-a-kind masterpieces, which then inform a more wearable commercial line.

For Tarang, design begins with the object. Gold shaped with minimal intervention is a commodity; thought and handwork [make it] jewellery. He says, “It’s art first, and then it is anything else. That is the starting point when I design.”

It is a principle Arthaus, the presenting partner of India by Design, applies to whisky. Its blended malt brings together single malts from the Highlands and Speyside, and its label borrows from Bauhaus, the movement that made art, design and craft inseparable. Art, bottled, as the brand puts it.

That is close to how Tarang works. For him, it comes down to the detail of each element. He says, “Why a leaf, for instance, has to be the way it has to be, [and] how close can I make it to a natural leaf?” That intent carries from the drawing to every karigar and stone cutter at the bench. Even when Tribe repeats a design 50 or 100 times, each piece is made by hand. “Every piece is the same, but they are not when you see them next to each other,” he says.

Working with antique components brings one design constraint: many pieces can never be repeated. “The moment I reproduce something which was 100 years old, it’s not going to have that soul,” Tarang says.

That has changed the question he designs around. Antique material is scarcer than it once was, so the aim now is to make new pieces that people will value in 50 or 100 years the way the family values its archive today. “A museum is an heirloom which was created for the future,” he says. “At Amrapali, we are trying to create those heirlooms for the future.”

The family describes the museum as the final stage of a simple cycle: learn, earn, return. It also comes with a strict rule. Nothing on display is ever taken out to be worn, not even by the family. Though what he most wants to pass on is not an object. He explains, “[It is] the legacy of hand craftsmanship, and the generations of work every piece has taken. That acknowledgement is paramount.”

India by Design, a Robb Report India series presented by Arthaus, meets the creatives shaping Indian design today.