Gajanan Upadhyaya: The father of Indian furniture design

In 1966, he left for Copenhagen to train in furniture design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, worked with Poul Kjærholm, and a host of other designers during the golden period of Danish design.

In 2018, when I last met Gajanan Upadhyaya, he was as full of enthusiastic energy as in the 1980s when I was a student at the institute. He quizzed me in that inimitable way of his, ‘But you are not a furniture designer, you are a communication designer, why have you come to ask me about my chairs?’. As quickly and without waiting for my reply, he proceeded to explain the details of the particular chair he was holding up.

It was at the National Institute of Design, NID, that furniture design as a formal discipline was first established in India. The founding visionaries of NID, Gira and Gautam Sarabhai, were integral in bringing in national and international creative professionals to guide the early years of the institute, and Upadhyaya was one of the first Indian recruits. The ethos of ‘learning by doing’, on which the curriculum was largely based, resonated with GU, as he later came to be known, speaks of a childhood in rural Gujarat, spent working with his hands, from making simple slingshots to the more complex weaving of coir onto a charpoy.

Through the course of his career, he brought his initial training as an architect as well as the sensibilities he imbibed as a farmer’s son. In 1966, he left for Copenhagen to train in furniture design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, worked with Poul Kjærholm, and a host of other designers during the golden period of Danish design. He returned to India in 1974 to teach in the NID furniture design department for over 20 years, contributing his designs to iconic furniture stores such as Taaru in New Delhi. Even after retirement he continued to keep his design skills alive by working as a consultant for the TDW Design, a furniture design firm in Ahmedabad.