A TYPICAL OFFICE REFRIGERATOR is likely to be filled with employees’ home-packed lunchboxes, a fruit or two and perhaps a packet of milk for tea. But if you’re visiting the office of Dirty Hands, a design studio based in Ahmedabad, and you happen to peek into the refrigerator, you will encounter rather more disturbing contents. “Here when you open the refrigerator, you find a hand. You find a leg,” said Zuby Johal, who handles marketing and accounts for the studio. And it is very likely that these chilled appendages will have coagulated blood on them, and fragments of bone showing through.
Dirty Hands was founded in 2008 by Rajiv Subba and Mamta Gautam, graduates of the National Institute of Design who were interested in taking on a range of design projects—from ceramic work to interior design to outdoor installations. The same year they founded the company, however, the team grew interested in another field of design—creating realistic prosthetics.
Subba had come across information on the Internet about the use of prosthetics in Hollywood movies, and had spent time learning about materials and techniques before finding a project that they could test their skills on—the under-construction Darshan Museum in Pune, intended to showcase the life and work of educator and spiritual leader Sadhu Vaswani using multimedia exhibits, and a variety of realistic mannequins which would recreate scenes from Vaswani’s life. “We convinced them to let us make one model,” Johal said. “We got down silicone from Canada and made one sample. They liked the sample but we needed to improve on the quality because the material was very new to us.”
Delays in the museum project allowed the group to spend more time learning to craft the material, and achieve precise shapes, textures and colours. During this period, they met filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, who was then doing pre-production work for his Gangs of Wasseypur films. The designers showed Kashyap some of their prosthetic work in progress, which impressed him so much that he signed them on for the films. “We did a lot of work for him—two pregnant stomachs, couple of cut hands, an artificial leg. Then there’s another scene where they put 600 bullets into [the character Ramadhir Singh’s] chest. That was made completely in silicone because it had to bounce like a normal body,” Johal said.
Dirty Hands’ studio in Ahmedabad’s busy Paldi neighbourhood is like a house of horrors, with sculptors working on disembodied heads and limbs, grafting hair, applying gobs of fake blood and carefully detailing stomach-churning flesh wounds. A komodo dragon appears to be climbing a wall, not far from the eerie staring faces of Angelina Jolie and Narendra Modi, all test models made by the group. And while visitors might find themselves repulsed in accordance with the ‘uncanny valley’ hypothesis—broadly, that when models resemble humans very closely, they arouse revulsion in the viewer—the designers themselves are used to the creepy objects that surround them. “People keep asking us, don’t you feel weird when everywhere you see you’ve got faces, hands, legs?” Johal explained. “We don’t get scared because we make it, but for other people who come in it’s very absurd.”
Unprepared onlookers, however, have been seriously alarmed by the group’s creations. Subba recounted the time they had set up a fake butcher’s shop on their terrace, part of an exhibit intended for the Sadhu Vaswani museum. “The entire housing society was outside our door one morning, and they were furious,” Subba said. “Being a strictly vegetarian residential setup, they were horrified by the realistic butcher shop!”
They’ve faced other extremes of reactions, too. “When we made Jain saints [for a festival in Ahmedabad] people came to touch our feet because it could only be gods who recreated the saints!”Johal said. “Then there’s this client who tells me ‘I want a fish but we have to make it swim and as it takes a turn, it should die.’ I tell him ‘I am not god.’”