MUMBAI, Feb. 22 -- Vivek Gandhi has spent months winnowing down the list of chairs that will be displayed next weekend at The House of Mahendra Doshi in Wadala. Around 200 chairs, drawn from the prominent antiques dealer's collection of over 3,000, will be placed on the floor for an unusual exhibition titled 'A History of India Through Chairs'. The display ranges from pre-colonial wooden planks to Portuguese folding chairs, planter's chairs, and Bombay Art Deco pieces. Together, they once occupied a multitude of spaces across eras, from darbar halls and high court benches to plantation verandahs and Art Deco apartments. Their sheer ubiquitousness might render them invisible to most of us, but few everyday objects are as revealing about social history as the chair. "Every chair carries a hierarchy," says Vivek, who now runs the antiques firm founded by the late Mahendra Doshi in 1974, along with his father, Anand Gandhi, and uncle, Chiki Doshi. India was largely a floor-sitting culture - low platforms and bajots were common - before the Portuguese popularised the European four-legged chair. (The Malayalam word for chair, 'kassera', for instance, derives from the Portuguese 'cadeira'.) Portugal, however, did not have access to the hardwoods available on the west coast of India, says Vivek. "They were working in oak and ash. Here they found rosewood and teak, which are stronger, darker, better suited to carving. So the chair remained European in form, but Indian in substance." "The Portuguese brought Gujarati carpenters to build their churches and make their furniture," he says. "If you look at Gujarat later - the sunbursts, the grape vine motifs - those are Portuguese designs that were absorbed and carried back by the craftsmen." The exhibition will follow this arc chronologically, moving from low, floor-bound seating to the elevated forms that arrived with colonial rule. With the ascendancy of the British and Bombay's rise as a major port, the traffic in furniture intensified. By the nineteenth century, Bombay and Calcutta had become key entry points for British furniture. Georgian and later Victorian furniture arrived by ship, furnishing government offices, mercantile homes and clubs. Many of these designs were soon being produced locally as well, in teak and rosewood, by established workshop networks. Chippendale and other Georgian styles were reproduced in Indian hardwoods. The shapes were recognisably European, but the way they were made often differed. "European chairs were typically assembled with dowels and pegs," he says. "Indian carpenters preferred mortise-and-tenon joinery. It's a different construction method and you can see that difference when you open up the chair." Some of the most striking examples of this colonial presence once lined the courtrooms of the Bombay High Court in the form of arched, high-backed Gothic chairs. "In the late 1990s, the High Court just threw them out," recalls Anand. "They were damaged, considered unusable, and were auctioned." In that sense, they met a fate similar to the chairs designed for Chandigarh by Pierre Jeanneret, cousin and collaborator of Le Corbusier. Those too were discarded by the administration before being rediscovered decades later, largely in the West, where they entered galleries and auction houses and were recast as modernist icons. Bombay also lent its name to several kinds of furniture. 'Bombay Blackwood' became a trade term for dense, dark rosewood pieces, often heavily carved and polished, that were popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "A lot of what people call Bombay Blackwood was actually produced in Surat," says Anand. "But it found its way into Bombay homes. The carving could be quite excessive. It was all very ornate, very detailed." These heavy, dark pieces were common in Parsi and Gujarati households. The city also gave a more mischievous name to another form: the planter's chair. Designed for tropical climates, with a reclining back and extended arms to support the legs, it moved from plantation verandahs into railway waiting rooms, clubs and drawing rooms. In Bombay, its reclining posture earned it the nickname 'Bombay Fornicator', a bit of ribald humour known to collectors and design circles. Among the early adopters of these European forms were the Parsis. As Sarita Sundar, the author of 'From the Frugal to the Ornate: Stories of the Seat in India', has noted, chairs were uncommon in most households in cities across the country right until the first decades of the 20th century. That changed with the arrival of Art Deco and, around the same time, the use of tubular steel in chair design. "Obviously, Bombay propelled the Art Deco movement in India, and Art Deco furniture was a lot simpler than Victorian furniture and less expensive to make. A lot of pieces were imported, but you also had the common man's Art Deco pieces that were made by the likes of Kamdar Furniture," says Anand. Vivek expects the Art Deco exhibits to be a major pull, especially a triangular 'sofa chair' that still looks futuristic nearly a century later. The exhibition also includes early steel chairs and furniture from the 1930s, mass-produced by companies such as Godrej & Boyce and inspired by the cantilevered tubular designs of Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer....