IN most parts of the world, the words ‘craft’ and ‘design’ are considered antonyms. The arrival of ‘design’, and its associations with industrial mass manufacture, new materials and an aesthetics to match, marked the end of small-batch ‘craft’ manufacture using family labour, transforming local materials through traditional technologies into products with a form and ornamentation vocabulary going back centuries, if not millennia.

In postcolonial India, however, craft and design were uniquely integrated into what might be termed ‘Mobius-strip modernism’, where these two seemingly contradictory discourses were brought onto a single plane. Just as a strip of paper joined after a 180-degree twist results in a surface with one continuous plane and one boundary, nation building provided the impetus for the reconciliation of craftsmanship with the industrial modern. This variant of modernism lies at the heart of the establishment of the National Institute of Design, and though the amalgam is fraught with internal tensions, it continues to remain the defining feature of both design pedagogy and professional practice in India.

Though the first institutions of technical training such as the Mechanics Institute in Calcutta (1839) or the School of Industrial Arts in Madras (1850) began to appear in India in the 19th century, craft manufacturing was the norm and the high calibre of Indian products was showcased at the Great Exhibition at London in 1851. East India Company officials through committees formed in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, oversaw the selection, fabrication, transportation and display of objects. Soon after, in 1853, one of the members of the selection committee in Bombay, Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, approached the government of Bombay with a proposal for setting up ‘a school for the improvement of Arts and Manufactures.’

While participating in the city’s selection committee for sending exhibits to the Great Exhibition, Jeejeebhoy concluded that an art school was needed to ‘develop skill, elevate taste, expand demand, introduce new industries, stimulate employment, and improve the habits of industry of the middle and lower classes of our native population’ and enable India to ‘take up an advanced position among the manufacturing countries of the world.’

Thus, the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art was established in Bombay in 1857 followed by two more art schools in Calcutta (1864) and Lahore (1875). Their curriculum was modelled on contemporary art schools in Britain, whose graduates came overseas to teach at these Indian schools. The early students, many of whom belonged to artisanal communities, became draughtsman and commercial artists in the emerging industries – textile mills, publishing and printing units and advertising agencies of the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Ananda Coomaraswamy sum-med up the deleterious effect on craft:

‘The true function of Schools of Art in India, is not to introduce European methods and ideals but to gather up and revitalize the broken threads of Indian tradition… So far from this, the School of Art craftsmen has hitherto worked essentially for a foreign public, making things which neither he nor his own people desired to use, but only to sell. . . Now that they work for tourists or occupy themselves in carving furniture for Anglo-Indian bungalows, or in making tea-pots overloaded with cheap ornament for Anglo-Indian tea tables, it is naturally otherwise.’

 

If the Great Exhibition led to the establishment of the first art school in India, a hundred years later another exhibition led to the establishment of India’s first institution for design education. British rule had ended by then and independent India had embarked on a programme of nation building focused on large-scale industrialization and modernization through Soviet-style five-year plans.

Concurrently, the cultural presence of the United States became more pronounced and in 1952, the Ford Foundation established its first office outside the U.S. in New Delhi, believing that its support would be ‘for the good of the future of India and the good of the free world.’ In the early years the foundation provided technical assistance and a major proportion of grants was ‘spent on bringing foreign experts to show the Indians the way.’

In 1955, supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) organized the ‘Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India’ exhibition showcasing India’s craft traditions in New York. Much like the Indian Section at the Great Exhibition, it showcased traditional Indian fabrics, handicrafts, toys, embroideries, utensils and so on. The catalogue of the exhibition noted that independence had brought India ‘to life’ and a ‘renaissance’ was underway with ‘enthusiastic expressions of the desire to improve living standards, to provide better education, and at the same time to revive the esthetic [sic] traditions and techniques of the great past.’

 

In the same catalogue, the emerging tensions between the craftsperson and the designer could be discerned in an essay entitled ‘Indian Fabrics in Indian Life’ by Pupul Jayakar:

‘The introduction of an alien concept of the designer as distinct from the craftsman has only further destroyed the craftsman’s natural response to good form... The Indian craftsman is faced with a situation where, on the one side, he is admonished to turn ‘back to the past’ and, on the other, he is dazzled by incomprehensible forms evolved in the West after centuries of experimentation. To go back to the past is impossible, for the past was background to a life that has no longer any meaning in terms of the new social order. The mere absorption of Western forms equally has no meaning, for they are alien and have no link with the craftsman’s comprehensions and concepts. What then is possible? The question has no easy solution.’

Craft manufacture was an important part of the Indian economy, second to agriculture in providing livelihood. Parallel to building hydroelectric dams and steel plants and fertilizer factories, Nehru’s government also focused on the development of small and cottage industries, establishing the All India Handicrafts Board and Weavers’ Service Centres, government emporia to market handicrafts and, later, gave national awards to honour master craftspersons.

 

In late 1953, an international team sponsored by the Ford Foundation arrived in India consisting of American and Swedish experts in handicrafts, small industries and cooperatives. Their report contained recommendations for establishing multipurpose institutes of technology for small industries; suggestions for improving design and methods of supply for quality products in handicrafts, art crafts and a specialized sector of small industries and modalities for enhancing credit and finance in the sector.

In 1957 an International Study Team on the handicraft industry was brought to India supported by another Ford grant. The team, headed by the vice president of the New York department store, Macy’s, urged the government to protect the artisan’s world ‘from the shock of arbitrary transformation’, ‘keep folkcraft pure’, to ‘re-establish old standards, that have been lost’ and ‘regenerate creative talent in the villages.’ The team anticipated that achieving this would ‘necessitate the cooperation of ethnologists, art historians, and village teachers with a feeling for the true cultural past.’ Finally, the report included practical suggestions about marketing and design.

Alongside the anxiety of the designer overrunning the craftsperson, of craft production being made redundant by industry, of cultural anchors being pulled up by rapid modernization, the stage was being set to introduce design as a new discipline in higher education. At the Textile and Ornamental Arts of India exhibition, Pupul Jayakar met the American designer Charles Eames, who had loaned his collection of clay toys to the display. Soon after, in 1957, Charles and his wife Ray, visited India on the invitation of the government and the sponsorship of the Ford Foundation ‘to recommend a programme of training in the area of design’ which would play a catalytic role in the development of small industries in the country and ‘to state what India can do to resist the rapid deterioration of consumer goods within the country.’ Distilling design values from an analysis of the form and function of the lota (pot), their ‘India Report’ (1958) outlined the way the approaches of traditional Indian crafts could inform contemporary design and how this new discipline could contribute to the nation building initiatives by addressing complex problems of information access, dissemination and service delivery in the new republic. Significantly, they posed two questions about ‘those things that constitute a ‘Standard of Living’ in India’: ‘What does India ultimately desire? What do Indians desire for themselves and for India?’

 

A discussion on these questions was already underway in two Indian journals, Marg (1946 to present) and Design (1957-88), through which modernist ideas about architecture and design circulated among an English-reading elite in India. They were non-technical and profusely illustrated with articles dealing with architecture, planning, art, industrial design, film and the performing arts. The inaugural issue of Marg hoped that the magazine would clear the ‘cobwebs out of the minds of our intelligentsia and the middle sections of our population’, and constructive ideas realized at the moment ‘only by a very few’ may ‘percolate among the vast majority of our countrymen.’ The advertisement announcing the publication of Design declared that it was for people who want to know about ‘new vistas of thought and expression’ to ‘make a life well spent and well lived, a design for living.’

Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra wrote for Marg, while Bauhaus masters Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer were on the editorial board of Design. While these journals campaigned to transplant modern materials, industrial manufacturing and a western aesthetic, they also vigorously promoted Indian handicrafts, contemporized by design, through regular updates on furniture, ceramics and textiles produced under the aegis of the All India Handicrafts Board and its regional design centres. For almost two decades after independence, ‘Design for Living’ was a popular slogan, used to popularize tubular furniture in Marg in 1951, and advertise handicrafts in Design in 1959.

 

Barely a year after the India Report, in 1959, MoMA organized another exhibition titled ‘Design Today in America and Europe’. Sponsored once again by the Ford Foundation, it consisted of 400 objects of everyday use selected ‘to bring to the attention of the Indian public the aesthetic values of the West in largely machinemade, mass produced objects’ and to ‘provide an inspiration to Indian manufacturers and craftsmen for a solution to the many new problems that confront them.’ The Ford Foundation’s representative in India, Douglas Ensminger commented, ‘This show is absolutely going to stand this country right on its ear – which is precisely what we want.’ Finally, funds were allocated in the Third Five Year Plan to establish an institute for modern design education in India.

In early 1962, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote an official note to Pupul Jayakar: ‘I am glad to learn of the establishment of the National Institute of Industrial Design, a training service and research agency at the national level. I think such a design institute is certainly needed in view of our development in many ways. I wish the Institute success.’

 

The National Institute of Design (NID), as it was eventually named, was established in 1961 in Ahmedabad. The Ford Foundation made further grants for equipment, and faculty members of NID were trained in design schools in Britain, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia. Curricula for undergraduate programmes in industrial design and visual communication were developed adapting pedagogies from the Bauhaus, Basel and Ulm schools of design. Significantly, NID was administered by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce and its purpose was to provide professional education.

The defining characteristic of a profession, according to NID’s first chairman Gautam Sarabhai, was that ‘its practice is required by its society’, involving not only teaching theory but practice under supervision as well – ‘learning to know’ and ‘learning to do’. Such learning would take place through apprenticeship where teachers would be able to retain the respect of students only if they themselves practiced. Practice would also provide opportunities for the application of intellectual rigour and ingenuity to the ‘messy, complex, multiple variables of community life.’

Accordingly, in the early years of NID, students worked with noted modernist designers such as Adrian Frutiger, Armin Hoffman, Bob Gill, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Eames, Christian Staub, Frei Otto, George Nakashima, Hans Gujelot, Herbert Lindinger, Ivan Chermayeff, Louis Kahn and Tapio Wirkkala. The objects of ‘good design’ from the ‘Design Today in America and Europe’ exhibit were installed as a teaching collection at the NID and generations of students imbibed their aesthetic ideals.

Students also joined faculty in providing professional design services: to stateowned enterprises and public corporations such as airlines, television, museums and banks; for the state’s development programmes in public health and sanitation; for India’s participation in international exhibitions and in designing typefaces for Indian scripts, animation films and industrial products using lowcost technologies such as energy efficient cooking stoves, wheelchairs and agricultural equipment.

 

Work on craft continued alongside modern graphic and industrial design activities in the form of research on Mata ni Pachedi temple cloths of Gujarat and Kalamkari textiles of South India and documentation of the cane and bamboo crafts of northeastern India. The BauhausUlm influenced curriculum took an ethnographic turn to include fieldbased studies of urban and rural communities and extensive documentation of crafts across the length and breadth of the country. Student diploma projects expanded to contemporizing crafts through the development of new products to serve the emerging modernizing middle classes in India and for export abroad. A muchvaunted example was product development for the leather workers and weavers of the village of Jawaja in Rajasthan, a project which began in the mid1970s and resulted in range of bags and rugs which are in demand to this day.

As an institution sponsored by the Indian government, the task of nation building was thus at the heart of the existence and purpose of the NID. This focus dovetailed in the 1970s with an international thrust in design towards appropriate technology and socioenvironmental consciousness. Victor Papanek’s book Design for the Real World (1971) brought international attention to the issues of unsustainable design practices and he participated in the meeting for the ‘Promotion of Industrial Design in Developing Countries’, convened by United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) in 1979 at NID.

Participants adopted the ‘Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development’ which underlined that ‘design can be a powerful force for improving the quality of life in the developing world’ and must be committed to ‘finding local answers for local needs, utilizing indigenous skills, material and traditions while absorbing the extraordinary power that science and technology can make available to it.’ Once again, the twinning of craft and design was ratified at the NID.

 

The liberalization of India’s economy in the 1990s and the contemporaneous introduction of digital technologies, led to greater expansion in design specializations offered at NID, coinciding with wider acceptance of design in Indian industry, public institutions and nonprofit organizations. Private design schools proliferated from the late 1990s onwards and a majority of their faculty were NID alumni. Graduates of both these and the government run design institutions contributed to the material and visual culture of India, particularly in urban centres. Consumer goods, corporate graphics, packaging, advertising, textiles, kitchen equipment, fashion and transportation are some of the many domains that have seen design interventions.

The global neoliberal climate has compelled Indian industry to look at design for its competitive advantage just as Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy had envisaged in the 19th century and as the MoMA objects served to under line a century later. Yet, craft continues to be twinned with design as is reflected in the government’s National Design Policy 2007, which aims at achieving a ‘designenabled innovative economy’ by making ‘designed in India’ a byword for quality and utility in conjunction with ‘Made in India’ and ‘Served from India’. Simultaneously, the policy intends to create ‘original Indian designs in products and services drawing upon India’s rich craft traditions and cultural heritage.’

The action plan for implementing this vision includes setting up four more National Institutes of Design on the pattern of NID in different regions of the country during the 11th Five Year Plan which will be tasked with ‘sustaining and strengthening India’s traditional knowledge, skills and capabilities while being sensitive to global heri tage so that our shop floor workers, craftsmen and artisans could be engaged in the manufacture of innovative products and contemporization of traditional crafts for a broad spectrum of uses and niche markets.’

 

The designer’s engagement with premodern or preindustrial artefacts and practices has taken several forms. We can recall the Arts and Crafts movement in mid19th century Britain and William Morris’s return to medieval sources in search of a visual vocabulary. Recent research to mark the centenary of the Bauhaus has revealed how its teachers and students engaged with nonwestern and European folk traditions in their rejection of European classicism. In the United States, artists and designers looked to preColumbian cultures to develop a language of abstraction, while Brazilian modernism tried to forge its own identity by incorporating indigenous and AfroBrazilian cultural production.

These researchers have shown how the programme of translating precolonial cultural production into the language of modernity acquired a sociopolitical dimension as the synthesis could also be seen as cultural appropriation, which failed to take into account the often violent social and political disruption caused by colonialism.

 

But what of Mobiusstrip modernism? The encounter between craft and design in India was shaped by a different set of historical circumstances. In the mid19th century the tensions were either about rejecting craft to turn to industrialization or bemoaning its vulgarization in AngloIndian drawing rooms. By the mid20th century there was a real worry that craftspersons needed to be saved from designers. Yet, the postcolonial Indian state, in its preoccupation with nation building, charged designers, and gave them a sense of entitlement to engage with craft in order to transform, and confer a new relevance on it through contemporization, all the way into the 21st century. European and American interlocutors have played their part from time to time and the Englishspeaking Indian elite too has played its mediating role.

While the rhetoric of nation building gave rise to Mobiusstrip modernism, it can be sustained only as long as it elides questions of cultural appropriation. It will soon be time to reflect upon the implications of designers transmuting the cultural production of the Jawaja craftsmen into the language of modernity such that the bags and rugs they produce have no place in their own lives. It will be time to reexamine the experiment of the ‘Golden Eye’ exhibition in New York in 198586, where eleven famous designers from Europe and America were invited to design products which were subsequently produced by 285 craftsmen, and bridging the two were young Indian designers, many of them NID graduates. What forms of cultural appropriation take place in such settings of design innovation?

 

And, finally, the digitally printed ajrakh jacket exhibited in 2015 at ‘The Fabric of India’ exhibition at the V&A. The human skull motif incorporated into the traditional floral pattern greatly disturbed hereditary ajrakh craftsmen who refused to make the fabric, whereupon the designer turned to digital printing to produce ‘a creative fusion of tradition and technology.’ Whether the impetus to critical thinking about the still evolv ing relationships between design and craft comes from selfreflexivity at the design schools or from the social sciences, remains to be seen.

 

References:

National Institute of Design, 50 Years of the National Institute of Design 19612011. Ahmedabad, 2013.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Art and Swadeshi. MunshiramManoharlal, New Delhi, 1994.

Charles Eames and Ray, ‘The India Report’ (1958). National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, 1997.

Leela Gandhi,‘The Ford Foundation and Its Arts and CultureProgram in India: A Short History.’ http://theatreforum.in/static/upload/docs/Ford_Fndn_A_short_history.pdf, 2001.

Pupul Jayakar, ‘Indian Fabrics in Indian Life’, in Monroe Wheeler (ed.), Textiles and Ornaments of India: A Selection of Designs. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1956.

Farhan Karim, Domesticating Modernism in India, 19201950. Doctoral thesis, University of Sydney, 2012.

Government of India, ‘National Design Policy 2007’. Press Information Bureau, GOI, New Delhi. http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease. aspx? relid=24647