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Once
the craftsmen crafted them expertly under Portuguese patronage.
Today a new and unlikely generation restores the furniture that
was made and sold for the domestic market in Goa, and remained in
the homes of Goa for centuries, unnoticed and virtually discarded.
It emerged once again in the last ten years as a new-found object
of appreciation for some. People like Daniel Ferrao of the Attic
in idylic Camarcazana, near Mapusa, are perhaps the most serious
of the restorers. For the others, it is simply a product to be
supplied to the well-heeled who are willing to pay big bucks for
the pleasure of sitting, dining and sleeping on Goan antique
furniture. The degree to which the Portuguese – the first
Europeans to arrive in Asia – were involved in directing
workshops to manufacture furniture is not really known. Portable
fall-front cabinets were designed, for example, to hold personal
effects and were a basic requirement of the European merchants and
traders living and travelling in Asia.
The production of such furniture was based in western India,
primarily Gujarat, a long-standing centre for luxury goods as they
were strangely called in the old days. Not much is known today
about the precise place of manufacture of this furniture, because
there were probably several centres in western India where the
Portuguese were located, where they worked in related styles and
shared methods of production. Whatever their place of manufacture,
it is clear that portable fall-front cabinets were made in large
numbers and traded both locally and in Europe where they were
highly esteemed. “Be sure that Goan artisans made some of the
best and exotic furniture done in India and Goa dating back to the
16th century, which were done for export only to royalty,” says
Ferrao.
Daniel Ferrao says Goan antique furniture – for sitting, dinning
and sleeping – was influenced by Portuguese designs, which in
turn was influenced by European designs but still remained
Portuguese eventually. “They are Portuguese designs – lots of
carving involved, and the locals contributed their own
creativity.” Typical of the local contribution is the
‘Jacobian twist’ around the legs and tie of a table. For a lay
person, a tie would be the part that connects two sides of a table
on which a person can also rests one’s feet. There are also the
Jacobian pillars, candlesticks and bedposts. “Other local
influences are lions, birds that could have been influenced by
Hindu mythology – creatures of fantasy, part bird or part
animal.”
A large category of furniture made in India under Portuguese
patronage was called the ‘cabinet on stand.’ Although pieces
of this type were produced in quantity, there is little again that
can be firmly established about the workshops that made them. A
historian wrote that Indo-Portuguese cabinets of this size were
also characterised by wholly distinctive elements like an
abstracted animal, and geometric designs that have no precedent in
any one European or Indian tradition. In a book titled Luxury
Goods from India, the author Amin Jaffer said that the
scrolling legs, for instance, derive from 17th Iberian furniture,
but are inlaid with bird forms that scholars have associated with
‘Jatayu,’ king of vultures, and a central character in the
Ramayana.
The materials, inlay and intricately pierced mounts on cabinets of
this type are similar to the fitted chests of drawers and cabinets
in the sacristy of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, Old Goa. The
existence of purpose built church furniture in a closely related
style and identical materials suggests that cabinets of this type
were made in or around Goa. The Victoria and Albert Museum today
hold the most comprehensive and sizeable collection of furniture
and woodwork made in the Indian subcontinent. A pair of armchairs,
when acquired by the museum in 1879, were identified as mahogany
and thought to be of mid-eighteenth century English manufacture.
By the 1980s, it was felt that the chairs were made in China for
western markets because of their ruyi-head on the splats. Only
recently, it was finally discovered that the chairs were made in
Goa! The inverted cloud motif on the splats or main back rest
derives from the head of a ruyi (literally meaning ‘what one
wants’), a wand associated with good fortune.
An electronics engineer, third generation antique furniture
restorer, Ferrao says the early Indo-Portuguese furniture
comprising of exotic woods like rosewood, ebony or furniture
inlaid with ivory was mostly of the made-to-order variety.
“It’s highly probable that much of it was made in Gujarat and
the fittings were done in Goa i.e. the decorative mounds in silver
and brass or, the locking, handles. In fact, Goa may have been a
fitting area only for the exotic export market, simply because
tiny Goa could not cope with the numbers. And probably because
Goan artisans were better at the intricate aspects of the
furniture.” Goan antique furniture, like its craftsmen, may not
become extinct simply because the existing items of furniture will
always be available for restoration; at least that is what Ferrao
thinks. Goa’s famed craftsmen in the village of Benaulim in
south Goa are an extinct species because there’s hardly any
rosewood available. “There are no quality craftsmen available.
In fact, it could take a year to get your furniture delivered, if
one them does agree to take up your job.”
Ferrao, who “wisely” got himself an electronics and
communications degree before “I returned to my roots,” says
there is just no respect any longer for furniture craftsmen or,
for that matter, any artisan. “Everyone wants to be a
professional or wants a white collar job.” The beauty and the
richness of the broken-down furniture too, waiting to be restored
in the huge colonial-house-turned-workshop in Camarcazana, has not
been able to convince anyone to switch streams. You would have to
be an idiot to give up the chance of making money at the stock
market or developing software, notwithstanding the vagaries of the
two, is the strict belief here.
“Awareness in people is also a necessary part of the
whole thing. We could make a beginning here in Goa by banning the
demolition of old colonial buildings and houses,” says Ferrao. A
beginning could also be made with a graduate course on wood craft,
says Ferrao, involving identification of period furniture and
techniques in fittings ie what was used in earlier periods. “All
this could be merged with modern machinery, which, ironically,
would make things so easy for the modern craftsmen; though the
hand will never ever be replaced in the chiselling aspects of
making antique furniture.”
What happened to the old genuine craftsmen? They simply ran out of
steam, literally and figuratively. “I cannot put a finger on the
number, maybe 10, but this figure would also depend on their
calibre. One thing is for sure; there are no second or third
generation craftsmen around any longer. The worst part is that
they take upto two years to deliver, because they simply juggle
around with other work orders.”
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