Live Like A Deccani Royal

There’s a certain wizardry to being an antiques dealer.

Scurry and scamper through the criss-crossing bylanes of the pete, or the old city. Duck into an unassuming alleyway just off the vendor- and storefront-lined pavement on Avenue Road. Walk up the terrazzo-tiled stairs into a building the familiar colour of an old Bajaj Chetak — minty blue. In this shopping complex, there’s a large store with sequinned and silk saris gloriously fanned out, a handy ladies’ tailor next door for quick fixes, a team of framers fitting images of gods and goddesses into grand, golden frames, and even a sensible insurance office. Tucked away on the first and second floors is the famed Balaji’s Antiques & Collectibles, a jewel in a haystack. This treasure trove has just turned one — a hundred and one, to be precise.

Behind a dark-wood desk artfully cluttered with objects waiting to be appraised, hefty art reference books, and other paraphernalia sits the elfin Donti Govindrajulu Balaji, the fifty-seven-year-old third-generation inheritor of the establishment. He’s a sphinx and is usually quite reserved. But put any object from his packed-to-the-rafters store into his hands, and the exact historical details and colourful anecdotes come gushing out of him. It’s like a bullet train of information, and you’ve got to buckle up for the whole ride.

Old Pots are More than Just Vessels

While as a dealer, Balaji caters to finds from all the storied nooks and crannies of history, he admits to having a soft spot for masterpieces from the period of the Deccan Sultanates. From his desk, he picks up a rare bronze aftaba, a jug for water and wine, from the seventeenth century. He doesn’t just throw around the word “rare.” He points to “the intertwined serpentine figures” that form the elaborate openwork grid of the jug’s body, “the flared foot” on which it rests, the “two delicate parrots” on the vessel’s neck, and the S-shaped spout that ends “as the mouth of a makara, a mythical sea creature.” This intricate zoomorphic detailing is the reason he confers on this aftaba the honour of being rare. “While the Quran doesn’t explicitly forbid visual representations of living beings,” Balaji tells us, “in certain practices of Islamic art, there was an avoidance or ban of these figurations because only Allah creates life.” This artifact speaks to “the exciting exchange of ideas, techniques, and craft between the sultans and the local artisans,” he gently notes.

Balaji has great affection for objects from the Deccan Sultanates — dating across the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries — because “they elevated everyday household objects to art.” He picks up a lota — a traditional, multi-functional, quintessentially Indian vessel — to demonstrate his point. “This is a Deccan bimetal lota with geometric patterns. It is made of copper and brass; the technique is called Ganga–Jamuna,” he says. “The technique is inspired by the colours of the waters of the rivers Ganga and Jamuna meeting,” he adds poetically. Though simple and beautiful, it is extremely complicated to make, Balaji quickly informs us. “The melting points of these metals are at different temperatures, so it takes a skilled, practised understanding of metals to get it just right,” he explains. “We can’t repair these bimetal objects anymore because the knowledge to execute them has been lost,” he says, regretfully.

Make Every Day Elegant

His excitement to show us that the Deccan Sultanates didn’t “sacrifice functionality for form” has him darting across the room to seek out the perfect examples. His hands travel down an oil lamp decorated with beautiful brass peacocks and geese. These ornate finials are just for show, but the bellies of these birds are “hollowed out to hold oil,” and there are little, nub-like spouts for the oil to drip down “so that these lamps, which lined the palace corridors, could stay lit for hours at night without the need for constant replenishing.” He shows us an exquisitely carved lock with the most puzzling locking system that he hazards “was used for the Sultan’s harem.” The finely filigreed paan-daani, or paan boxes, weren’t just used for serving guests paan “in a ceremony similar to the highly stylised Japanese tea ceremony” but were even given away to them.

For Balaji, in this period, it seemed like “beauty wasn’t held at a distance,” kept in a showcase or nailed to a wall. “They weren’t decor pieces” —  you could hold them in your hands. These stunning objects were actually used everyday.

The real reason this period was “the zenith for functional brasswork,” Balaji tells us, was because the sultans of the Deccan weren’t as wealthy as their Mughal counterparts. While the Mughals were great patrons of the arts, “the Deccan Sultanates brought that same attention to detail to the everyday crafts.”

We’ve already eaten into an entire morning at this store, which has revealed more of itself magically with our every gasp of wonder. As we make our way out, Balaji stops us to show us a vajri. It has a fish-shaped pedestal engraved with scales and a base rendered rough with inter-crossing scored lines. Its handle is a decorated parakeet; he shakes it and we hear the jingle of little pebbles. It looks like the most handsome, sturdy, now-retired Monopoly game piece, but we’re told that it’s a foot-scrubber. “Women would bathe at streams and rivers, so when the scrubber was being used, the pebbles inside would rattle, warning passers-by to skip past the area,” Balaji says, colouring another day in the Deccan Sultanate, where the everyday was turned extraordinary.

A sound cue for private time? Now that’s a worthy investment in any century.

The Details: First Floor, 64, Balaji Silk Complex, Avenue Road, call +919342410288. Monday - Saturday: 11.00 am to 7.30 pm. Follow them here.