Indian Brass Finds A New Language In Design

Few materials age as beautifully as brass. It softens with time, gathers a patina, and develops a warmth that feels almost inseparable from the room around it. Walk into a well-designed hotel lobby in Mumbai or a private home in Delhi right now, and you will probably see it: a brass handle worn smooth by hands, a brass lamp with a dull, honeyed patina, a brass screen catching the evening light. Brass is having a moment. And the interesting thing is not that it is having a moment, but why.

For a long time, brass in India sat in two boxes: there was the everyday brass, the pots and lamps and ritual objects that lived in kitchens and temples, useful and unglamorous, and the other was the export brass, the vases and trays that Moradabad sent out to gift shops around the world. Neither of these was thought of as design, exactly. Brass was craft and craft was something separate from the world of considered, expensive, collectible interiors. That separation is now breaking down, and it is because a new generation of designers has started treating brass the way it treats bronze in Italy or walnut in Scandinavia. It is now taken as a serious material, worthy of serious ideas.

What Is Indian Brass?

Before going any further, it is worth being clear about what we are talking about, because "Indian brass" covers a lot of ground. There are the utility pieces, the everyday tumblers and cooking vessels that most Indian households still own, even if they use them less than their grandmothers did. There are the ritual objects, the diyas and idols and temple bells that carry religious weight and are bought for what they mean, not what they look like on a shelf. There is decorative craft, the trays and figurines sold at craft fairs and export houses, pleasant but produced at volume. And then there is the newer category this story is really about: brass as a design object, made in small numbers, often by hand, and bought by people who think of it the way they think of a piece of furniture by a well-known studio, rather than a souvenir.

Moradabad And What Happens Ahead

You cannot write about Indian brass without starting in Moradabad, the small city in western Uttar Pradesh that has been shaping the metal for over four hundred years. Locals call it Pital Nagri and the name is not an exaggeration as the town supplies around 80 per cent of India's brassware today. Walk through its older lanes and you will find a whole ecosystem. There is the caster, known as the dhaliya, who sandcasts the raw form, and then there are separate specialists for sheet metal work and for engraving, each running their own small workshop, so a single object might pass through several pairs of hands before it is finished. A piece with proper ornamentation can take anywhere from four to six weeks to complete, which is a useful thing to remember the next time you see a hand-engraved brass bowl and wonder why it costs what it does.

What has changed in Moradabad is not the skill because it was always there, but the ambition of what that skill is being asked to make. For most of the last two centuries, the town's story was an export story with British colonial buyers in the nineteenth century, then a growing list of international markets through the twentieth. That 400-year-old craft tradition still quietly supplies some of the world's biggest home décor brands, but increasingly it is also being asked to supply something unique. They are one-off, design-led pieces for architects and collectors who want a specific idea realised in brass, not a catalogue item. 

From Technique To Vocabulary

To understand why brass photographs so well in a design magazine, it helps to know a little about how it is actually made. Lost-wax casting, where a wax model is coated in a mould and then melted away to leave a cavity the metal fills, lets a maker produce shapes that would be almost impossible any other way. Repoussé, which is, hammering a design into the metal from the reverse side so it stands proud on the front, gives a piece real depth and shadow. Engraving adds the fine detail on top. And then comes finishing, which is really where the character of a piece is decided. One has to decide if it should stay bright and mirror-polished, or is it deliberately burnished, darkened, or left to develop a patina over years of use?

This is the part that separates a good brass object from a merely decorative one. A skilled maker is not just reproducing a pattern from memory, though many artisans genuinely can. They are making a series of judgement calls about weight, proportion and finish that determine whether the finished piece feels considered or simply ornate.

Designers working today are pushing hard on that vocabulary rather than repeating it. Vikram Goyal's studio Viya, for instance, builds furniture and lighting where brass is worked into sculptural, almost architectural forms, drawing on traditional metalworking but landing somewhere closer to fine art than to tableware. Paul Matter's lighting studio treats a lamp almost like a study in geometry, offering the same brass form in burnt, aged, buffed or silvered finishes, so the metal itself becomes the subject rather than the decoration. Mumbai-based Arjun Rathi Design pairs hand-blown glass with brass framework to build chandeliers that feel closer to sculpture than to lighting fixtures. And collaborations like the brass writing desk designed by Matteo Cibic for the Kolkata studio Scarlet Splendour show what happens when an international design eye meets an Indian production capability: something that would look at home in a gallery, not just a home.

The Allure Of Brass 

Luxury interiors everywhere have been moving away from anything that looks too new, too flawless, too obviously bought yesterday. There is a broader appetite, well beyond India, for materials with some artisanal handwriting in them be it hand-thrown ceramics, unlacquered brass, plaster that shows the trowel marks. Brass fits that mood perfectly, because it is a material that is genuinely built to age. Left unlacquered, it darkens and marks with use, and rather than looking tired, it tends to look more interesting, which is precisely the opposite of what happens to most modern materials. A patinated brass handle on a door tells you, quite literally, how many hands have touched it. That is a kind of luxury that cannot be bought new.

There is also a hospitality story here that matters more than it might first appear. Luxury hotels and private clubs across India have been looking for a way to feel unmistakably Indian without leaning on the more obvious, the carved elephants and heavy drapery. Brass offers a way round that. A hand-hammered brass reception desk or a screen of pierced brass panels can read as thoroughly contemporary and quietly, confidently Indian at the same time, which is a harder trick to pull off than it sounds.

The Bigger Shift

None of this comes without tension. Alongside the handmade renaissance sits a flood of cheap, machine-pressed brass-look objects, often not even brass at all, that trade on the same visual language without any of the labour or skill behind it. Competition from cheaper brass-like alloys made elsewhere has genuinely squeezed the incentive for buyers to pay for the real, handmade thing, and that gap is exactly what gives the genuine article its value.

The easy version of this story would be that India is simply rediscovering its own past, dusting off an old craft and putting it in a nice photograph. But that is not quite what is happening. Brass is not being revived out of nostalgia. It is being reinterpreted because contemporary Indian design has grown confident enough to treat its own material heritage as raw material for something new, rather than as a fixed tradition to be preserved unchanged. The artisans of Moradabad have not stopped doing what they have always done. What has changed is who is asking them to do it, and what they are being asked to make. That, more than any single lamp or table, is the real story worth watching.