Vintage Indian Doors

In Indian culture doors of the house, especially main entrance of the house is very significant. While constructing new house, the day on which the main entrance gets fixed is very auspicious. That day the family members celebrate it with Pooja and distributing sweets. In this era of multistoried buildings and apartments, this event is becoming very rare, but still people celebrate this symbolically. On all festivals, the main entrance of the house is decorated with flowers, torans etc.

Old houses were built using teak wood. If we visit these old houses, especially in South India, we can see all the doors of the house are carved wooden ones. The carvings on the doors are very intricate and contains mainly designs like vine deigns and Mandala designs.

Vine designs

Mandala design carved

Beautiful garland design carved on sides

Flower carved

Recently I could visit some such house at my native Kumta.  Normally the doors height will be five feet or lesser. I don’t know the reason behind the short doors. My mother used to tell me that, when we enter the house, we bend little bit. This often reminds us that we need to be humble with other family members, and we should not have ego.

Here are the door designs.

Vintage Indian door- nearly 100 years old

This door is nearly 100 years old. Very beautiful carvings can be seen here. On top Lord Ganesha is carved and both the side we can see carved vine designs. The vine designs are ending in a pot ( Kalasha). Again symmetrical flowers.

Inside view of the top plank

Mandalas are carved again inner sides of the top plank of the door.

The below one is little different. This too is nearly 100 years old. This doesn’t have any prominent vine designs.

Another vintage door

It looks very simple from the front. But on the sides it has very attractive mandala designs carved.

Mandla designs carved

The mandala designs are little different alternatively.

Here is the closer view of the mandala carving:

Closer view of the mandala

Now these kinds of carvings are achieved using many modern tools. But those days the artists used to carve these using hand tools. Still they could achieve the beauty and symmetry.

If I get to see some more such vintage doors, will definitely share in this blog. Keep visiting to this blog to know about different arts and craft of the world.

Love, Laugh and Live the life to the fullest,

-Ranjana