Inside the archive: Curating a century of Godrej’s everyday objects

The exhibition Shaping Dreams, Designing Lives: A Godrej Story, presented at CEPT University's Lilavati Lalbhai Library in Ahmedabad, began with a deceptively simple curatorial question: what connects a steel cupboard, an office chair, and a refrigerator? The answer turned out to be India itself — its industrialisation, its aspiring middle class, and the domestic and professional spaces they were building from the early twentieth century onwards.

Curated from over 1,50,000 archival records held by Godrej Archives, the exhibition distilled 128 years of history into 128 carefully chosen objects, documents, photographs, and testimonials. The curatorial logic organised the material into two primary sections — Godrej at Home (almirah and refrigerator) and Godrej at Work (tubular steel chair) — reflecting how the brand has long inhabited the spaces where Indian life actually unfolds.

The curatorial process surfaced unexpected discoveries at every turn. Patent and construction drawings tucked inside salesperson catalogues. A map of India illustrating Godrej's dealer network as early as 1955 — a presence built through Naval Godrej's personal travels to forge dealer relationships across the subcontinent. An 1930 order of 728 steel almirahs from the Government of Hyderabad, demonstrating that institutional trust in the brand predated independence by decades.

The refrigerator's narrative was particularly striking in its departure from global conventions. Rather than positioning the fridge primarily as a domestic convenience for women — as advertising trends worldwide tended to do — Godrej's own records and campaigns framed it as a member of the family. The Storwel almirah, meanwhile, generated testimonials of almost legendary character: accounts of the cupboard baffling burglars, opening only with its own key, and surviving eight hours submerged underwater during the Pune floods.

For the tubular steel chair, the exhibition traced how an ergonomic design feature — posture support — quietly became a marketing strategy by 1969, and how the iconic CH-13 model passed through three generations of office hierarchies, embedding itself in India's post-Independence institutional imagination. Together, these three objects do not merely demonstrate what Godrej made. They show how India worked, rested, stored, and aspired.