Withdrawing from drawing rooms

The word “drawing room” comes from the 16th-century English phrase “withdrawing room” – a room where the host and guests would withdraw after dinner for conversation while servants cleared the table

The word “drawing room” comes from the 16th-century English phrase “withdrawing room” – a room where the host and guests would withdraw after dinner for conversation while servants cleared the table. During the colonial period, this idea entered South Asia, especially among aristocratic households, princely states, and the emerging urban elite. The living room is a later construct, where functionality and intimacy predominated. In the South Asian context, the ceremony of the drawing room and the familiarity of the living room have attained distinct meanings.

Indira Gandhi’s drawing room in the Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum.

In a house in Daryaganj belonging to a joint Jain family, the drawing room was bedecked in Deco, green, with a gallant fireplace, motifs on the floor, and windows adding to the iconographies of geometry. The room is glorious, right at the entrance of the house, marked by an opulent console table so beautifully carved it seems to receive royalty. And royalty it did – not in rank but in the arts. Pandit Birju Maharaj once stayed here in 1960, for three years.

The drawing room certainly marks a family, since for many the room is designed for cultural performance. As a site of occurrence, the colonial drawing room that entered Delhi houses became where polished cupboards, leatherbound books, porcelain lamps, and western-style ornate furniture sat adorned every once in a while. Most of the year, a house with a separate drawing room remains comically covered with sheets and plastic.

A Mughal drawing room remains in ruins, squatted but resiliently beautiful. Khazanchi Haveli, one of the few remnants from Shahjahan’s era, has a Dalaan – a spacious courtyard built in white marble, with scalloped arches, fluted columns, and intricate carvings – where the master of the house would have entertained guests amid Persian carpets, lamps, and vases. The Haveli, as its name suggests, belonged to the treasurer of Shahjahan. The art of hosting comes alive in the dilapidated courtyard, because the bones of this building still hold the opulence of Old Delhi.

The power of the drawing room takes on another meaning at Indira Gandhi’s drawing room in Delhi. Now the Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum, this house – once Asia’s most visited small museum – is preserved as it was on the last day she lived there: her clothes ready for her next change, her stationery aligned as always in her study, and her drawing room graceful, modernist, antiquarian in its art collection, with a respectful nod to the folk and indigenous.

A political drawing room, where guests withdrew from formal dinners and gathered in different seating arrangements for polite conversation. The furniture was built in a frugal modern style with an air of domestic futurism. Tanjore paintings, thankas, and pichvais take over the walls, while a large Pallava goddess piece commands the room. A Buddha Maitreya still glistens through its patina, and smaller bronzes and wood pieces remain displayed in inbuilt showcases which, I like to believe, evolved from the old taak – niches and shelves for a burning lamp or household objects.

For years this room may have been one of the most powerful drawing rooms in the country. With training from her father’s drawing room at Teen Murti Marg, her drawing room at 1 Safdarjang Marg still remains a room preserving power.

Drawing rooms like these slowly began withering away in a swelling city, made rapidly not by careful planning but by the urgent rehabilitation required post-Partition. Houses and flats in Delhi soon filled and demanded expansion; spaces started becoming smaller. The distinction between the drawing room and the family room began fading, and the room for entertaining came to be called the living room for many in Delhi. The ceremony had indeed changed.

When I first entered the Daryaganj house, the Jain family already knew I was coming to document it, and the first order of business was to listen to the whole story, planned by the family in full attendance, over a sumptuous thaali with bedmi pooris. The next hour was personal, in the presence of all the brothers. This conversation was intimate, and demanded we sit close in the family room, or living room, and not the green, opulent Art Deco drawing room. It was a choice the family made, perhaps to initiate trust. It was the living room that was now becoming the site of occurrence.

How a house becomes a site of culture, delicate and intricate, filters into the living rooms and drawing rooms of Delhi, into the spaces where power once sat upright and now slouches, comfortable, unbothered by ceremony. A space of communing still brings cultural engagement, yes, but somewhere between the drawing room and the living room, we lost the art of waiting outside a door, and gained, instead, the terrible ease of walking straight in.

Anica Mann works on archaeology and contemporary art in Delhi. The views expressed are personal