Design, Production and After-lives

The book offers a rich historical study of goods and commodities in modern India, focusing on three iconic objects, namely the Godrej Storwel, the office chair, and the refrigerator. It pays close attention to the larger material context in which manufacturing experiments were undertaken by a premier business house, namely Godrej & Boyce, whose goods became household names, and were sought after by an emerging middle class. It simultaneously documents and analyses the emergence and success of a business firm over time, through a period of chronic shortages, government oversight, and a narrow consumer base that changed with liberalization in the 1990s. It makes a strong pitch for a careful and critical reading of business archives and demonstrates how these can be deployed to write a nuanced history of production and consumption.