What shapes the designs of book covers in India?

“There is no word for ‘design’ in our Indian languages,” says design historian Suchitra Balasubramanyan. The discourse, she points out, has been built almost entirely in English, shaped by upper-caste, upper-class practitioners and Western standards.

For approximately five centuries, design in the subcontinent has served colonial, and continues to serve post-colonial, capitalist systems. In the process, design has played a role in erasing, distorting, or disrupting earlier forms of indigenous visual language and culture.

So, when India’s readers look at what lines their bookshelves, whose visual language does it represent? No design is ever neutral and the covers of Indian books in English are no exception.

A culture of borrowed templates

In a podcast on decolonising design, Dr Dori Tunstall reflects: “We often define [design] as something that happened in Europe in the 1800s.” This hierarchy is entrenched. European traditions are treated as the measure against which all else is compared, while everything outside that frame is folded into the category of “craft.”

This hierarchy is also visible when it comes to Indian bookshelves. In Japan or the Nordic countries, book covers reflect aesthetic styles that connect to local geographies and culture. But Indian covers often lean towards global templates.

Designer Amit Malhotra says this is because India’s design language...

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