Walk into most furniture showrooms in Bangalore and you will hear both words applied to the same pieces. A walnut credenza with tapered legs will be called "modern." A white sofa with clean edges will be called "contemporary." Sometimes the same piece gets both labels, which tells you that neither is being used with any precision.
The distinction is worth understanding. Not as an exercise in terminology, but because the two ideas produce very different objects, and knowing which one you are looking at changes how you evaluate it.
Modernism: a position, not a period
Modernism in furniture is a design philosophy that took shape between roughly 1920 and 1970. Its propositions were specific: that ornamentation was dishonest, that form should follow function, that industrial materials and processes deserved to be used without apology or disguise, and that good design should be replicable and accessible. Bauhaus, De Stijl, mid-century American design: these movements operated from a shared belief that decoration was a kind of lying, that the structure of an object should be legible and that the object should do nothing more than what it needs to do.
The furniture this philosophy produced is still in continuous production because it solved the problems it set out to solve. A Barcelona chair, an Eames lounge, a Noguchi table: these pieces are not popular because they are old. They are popular because the propositions behind them turned out to be durable. Clean geometry, honest construction, no applied surface that obscures structure: these are not trends. They are a set of design ethics that either appeal to you or they don't.
Contemporary: a timestamp
Contemporary furniture is simply furniture being made now. It has no manifesto, no shared principles, no particular commitment to any idea about what design should do. Contemporary design can be Maximalist or austere, craft-driven or algorithmic, referencing tradition or deliberately breaking from it. The only criterion is that it is current.
This makes "contemporary" a nearly useless descriptor on its own. It tells you when, not why. A piece of contemporary furniture might borrow the formal language of Modernism, or of Art Deco, or of nothing in particular. It might be made by hand from a single slab of walnut, or injection-moulded from recycled plastic. The category is defined by time, not by position.
Where Druvtara sits
The work here is contemporary in the sense that it is being made now, for spaces and lives as they actually exist in 2025. Indian apartments with specific dimensions, Indian light, Indian humidity, Indian habits. It borrows from Modernism's discipline around material honesty and the belief that a piece should do what it needs to do without ornamentation that serves no structural purpose. It does not subscribe to Modernism's faith in industrial materials or mass reproducibility, each piece at Druvtara is made once, in solid wood, by hand.
The design language is understated and material-forward. The wood is the argument. The form contains it. It does not compete with it.
This is not a position that needs a label to be coherent. But understanding what Modernism actually proposed, versus what "contemporary" actually means, is useful when you are deciding what kind of furniture you want to live with. And why.