Late morning sunshine has settled into Sanjay Garg’s serene work sanctum. I find the textile designer seated at his desk in his new office in industrial Gurugram. On the wall behind him are black-and-white photographs of Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad during their meetings with Indonesian delegates, which he bought for `4,000 from a collector.
At the year-old six-storey headquarters of his label Raw Mango, the designer and entrepreneur’s keen eye for minimalism and heritage is peering right back into me. “My first memory of personal space is associated with images of Mahatma Gandhi’s spartan room… with the white gadda. That’s the India I relate with,” says Garg, who it is easy to find dressed in a crisp white kurta-pyjama on a workday.
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But the floor is where Garg’s heart really is.
“I actually wanted people to be seated on the floor. This was again inspired by those visuals of munimjis working on their small desks while sitting cross-legged on the floor. That’s how I wanted my office to look like. I’ve always wondered how this whole concept of sitting on chairs came about. As Indians, we are very comfortable sitting down as it comes naturally to us,” says Garg, who experienced design as a discipline late in life.
“I can’t really put a finger on my early design influences. I didn’t even know that design exists, honestly. I grew up in a tiny home in a village called Mubarikpur in Rajasthan. We didn’t really have any furniture—we bought our first dining table when I was 18 or 20. I just grew up observing things, learning organically,” he recalls.
It’s the same resultant and unending zest for curiosity that Garg has brought to this office. Once lying vacant for years, the former garment production unit has now been repurposed into a functional and design-forward studio.
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“It has a lot of character that flows right through the space. My office looks like one big courtyard and has an open-door policy. Everyone sits across a long table and people walk in and out, giving it a very new-age vibe,” Garg gives me a mental walkthrough of the space. However, when you do float physically through this private sanctuary, spare—and spartan, indeed—are the words that come to mind. Take, for instance, the legless stone table sitting next to the wall over which a black-and-white Jeram Patel abstract hangs. “For me, the raw material is inspiration enough,” he says of the three-tonne plinth.
Across its expanse, the HQ is an eclectic assemblage of elements and visual inspiration. At the entrance to the office, two enormous bust casts used in sculptures hang over the reception counter. Upstairs and across, a library with archival material and literature, and his conference room, together make up a multipurpose sanctuary of sorts. In the conference room, huge Jaffna sculptures preside over 19th-century metal chairs from a haveli in Jhunjhunu crowding around a giant table.
No wonder Garg wants the space to do more than just serve as a place of work. “Last year, my sister Prerna hosted a dinner, ‘Grishma’, in our design room—and it turned out to be a beautiful evening of conversations. I would love to host a talk show or a film screening, too, some day.”
The office also serves as a home to his personal collections. Across the expanse, archival clay and brass vases, acrylic moulds of sculptures, archaeological finds and imagery created by Raw Mango coexist in harmony. But don’t let the collected stillness of his office at the HQ fool you. Garg is admittedly a “restless soul” and at the core, his conception of space is governed by his impulses.
“I’m very impulsive and sit in different parts of the office depending on where I am needed. That is why I don’t think I can meditate in the conventional sense. For me, my work is a form of meditation. It is about being engrossed in the moment,” he reflects. This is probably why the office is also the canvas where Garg paints the fluid contrast between the vivid sensibilities of his metier and the muted tones of his inner world.
“Space can be defined with multiple voices. For me, it is very organic—with many layers. For instance, there is the Cambodian statue that coexists with the [Jeram Patel] painting in the same room. That is where your skill comes in as a designer in putting things together. Be it this beautiful Rashmi Varma artwork (an embroidered map titled Delhi, 1924 that hangs in the reception), or my antique terracotta collection, I want to keep looking at it more than a few times.”
Beyond his work with textiles, the affinity for reclaiming historical iconography is unmistakable in
this studio. With characteristic childlike curiosity, Garg points towards the Cambodian statue at his desk that he referred to earlier. “This lady always stays in my room. Her eyes are so fascinating.”
For Garg, these visual cues stress on the need to reclaim lost narratives. In this case, it’s a constant reminder of how much the colour black was appreciated in this part of the world.
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“Look at Indian gods—we celebrate their skin tones. It is only after the British came to India that our whole perception towards skin colour changed,” he notes. Or consider the paw-shaped ladle his grandmother made half a century ago. “I always keep this punja here on my desk as a reminder of the past,” Garg tells me.
The private garden adjoining his office, partitioned by elegant French windows, is as bringing-the outdoors-in as it gets. This garden he couldn’t “live without”, and that was what he conveyed to his architect Saurabh Dakshini, who designed the workflow of the new factory and studio. “I told him this and he figured out how to have my office open out into one,” says Garg.
Unpredictable quaintness follows you around in Garg’s office. A tiny automaton with thin metallic legs rests imperceptibly over a little table in his office. Devotional Catholic statuettes stand eerily inside a glass cabinet as gossamer curtains flutter slowly behind. Somewhere else, a snake-sculpted door fixture saves unsuspecting visitors from bumping their heads against the glass wall.
“We live in a multicultural society. We have so many stories together,” Garg muses, before signing off, “I believe that tradition will survive as people pass it on—and not just display in museums where it will eventually die.”
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