Crafting a National Identity in an International Market: Indian Design Diplomacy

Crafting a National Identity in an International Market

22 January, 2025 -

The period following the death (in 1964) of independent India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru was marked by a growing climate of antipathy towards the dream of modernisation, resulting from increases in population, poverty, and illiteracy. India was rife with political and economic turmoil. Soon after Nehru’s death, the Indian industry faced an inability to sell produced commodities in order to realise the value embodied in them.(1) Niranjan Rajadhyaksha states that ‘the Nehruvian economic model had already run out of steam by the time of his death. India was left with an inefficient industrial structure, too much government regulation of its economy, an inability to compete in the global market and inadequate supply of consumer goods. It also put India at the mercy of foreign aid givers.’(2)

Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, who was elected prime minister in 1966, commissioned the Eames Office (the design consultancy of Charles and Ray Eames) to set up a posthumous tribute memorialising her father, which would open in India and abroad simultaneously. Given the impracticalities of organising such a major undertaking, the plans developed and an initial single exhibition, entitled Nehru: His Life and His India, was designed for the Union Carbide Building in New York and ran between January and March 1965. The exhibition then travelled to London, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and Paris, and finally to the NID in Ahmedabad. ‘Over time, new versions of the exhibition were produced, mostly by NID designers and Indian government officials, without the involvement of the Eames Office.’(3)

The exhibition highlighted Nehru’s life, his marriage, and his work with British and Indian leaders before and after becoming prime minister (Figs. 01 & 02). The Eameses returned to India for three months to plan and organise the exhibition in conjunction with the students and staff at NID. It incorporated almost twelve hundred photographs, fabrics, art objects, and sounds, as well as a recreated jail cell featuring Nehru’s prison writings. Paul Greenhalgh says that by entrusting the Eameses to design the exhibition, it was saved from the deadening government stamp.(4)

This exhibition can be viewed as one of the first instances of Indian design being presented on a global platform. It was part of the foundation for the new postcolonial Indian design, along with the Eameses’ modernist canon. While it was not a craft-centric display (despite the Eameses affinity with Indian craft), it links to the Golden Eye exhibition in the USA in 1985, which was a showcase of Indian craft traditions utilised by international designers. It also carries relevance for contemporary Indian design where Indian designers strive to exhibit their work internationally.

While nationalism was the crux of this memorial exhibition, it tapped into the wider political and economic agendas of the time. Wintle highlights the fact that ‘cross-cultural collaborative projects are always influenced by hierarchies of power (and not only those related to cultural difference)’.(5) This international collaboration exemplified cultural diplomacy, non-alignment, and Cold War politics. Further, it substantiated the fact that cultural heritage and exhibitions can support and contradict statements of national identity and international political affiliation. It was envisioned as a collaborative, transcultural product that transcended the realms of political posturing.

Nehru’s diplomatic strategy for the nation’s progress through design and craft reached its culmination in this posthumous tribute. Wintle remarks that it was distinctive for its wide geographical reach, political ambition, and physical endurance, but it is also representative in its link with diplomatic agendas and the involvement of government officials and creative professionals (Figs. 03 & 04). (6)

The Eameses, as most designers in the Western world did, also objectified Indian craft traditions, but here they used crafts as part of the nationalist agenda to boost the Indian economy and promote the traditional and collective values of the nation. The craft philosophy situated in this exhibition can be viewed as traditional and showcased the practices of marginalised societies on the borders of development, rather than communities that were at the forefront of science and technology, which is the privilege of developed countries. This craft knowledge validates the memorial as not just a tribute to a prime minister but one to his nation.

An important display in the exhibition was the Eameses’ history presentation (Figs. 05 & 06). This provided the students at the NID (who were involved in the project) the opportunity to perfect exhibition design by combining the typography, photographs, and textures associated with this didactic device. Dashrath Patel recounts, ‘although the Nehru exhibition did not include the signature Eamesian monumental multi-screen exhibits, the “History Walls” activated history at a glance and expanded the boundaries of the viewers’ world.’(7)

Despite praise for the exhibition at the time, it has since been criticised for its inability to depict the failures and contradictions as well as the victories of Nehru’s premiership. Wintle remarks on the issues of difference and dissent:

While the Eameses greatly admired Nehru and hoped to facilitate a design culture in India that worked with indigenous needs and skills, their complicity in the construction of a Nehruvian nationalist vision on behalf of the Indian government seems largely to have been unwitting, and led by the words of Nehru, rather than a deeper understanding of postindependence nationalism, or even a firm grasp of American interest in these themes.(8)

The fact that the Eameses were asked to curate an exhibition as a tribute to an Indian leader raises again the question asked above with regard to the India Report: what was the need to call on them when there were Indian design scholars at the NID such as H. K. Vyas, Pradyumna Vyas, and Singanapalli Balaram, who had helped spearhead the NID and the Indian design industry of the time? Is this another consequence of being ruled by foreigners for over two hundred years? Indians inadvertently found themselves in a dichotomous situation, defending their own country by criticising the West and also imitating the West at the same time. The psychological effect of colonialism is so tremendous that in past and present generations Indians have spent their entire lives struggling between commending their own country as a duty, placing it above the foreign countries that ruled them, and, at the same time, trying sometimes unintentionally to Westernise their lives. This is because heritage and design also have political agency, which validates the idea that Indira Gandhi’s diplomatic policies were in tandem with Nehru’s. By inviting the Eameses to design the exhibition, she allowed them to make visible a set of historical interconnections between a post-war modernism and the peculiarities of a postcolonial one. The posthumous tribute that they designed helped to chart a more global history in response to the needs of India at the time.

References

(1) D.N., ‘Political Economy of the Nehru Era,’ Economic and Political Weekly,
Vol. 23, No. 45/47, 1988, pp. 2459-2462.

(2) Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, ‘The Economics of Jawaharlal Nehru’. 30 May 2014. https://www.livemint.com/Opini... (accessed 09 March 2021).

(3) Claire Wintle, ‘Displaying Independent India Abroad: Nationalism, Cultural Diplomacy, and Collaboration at the Nehru Memorial Exhibition, 1965-2015’ inHeritage at the Interface: Interpretation and Identity, Glenn Hooper (ed.)., Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018, p.74

(4) Paul Greenhalgh, The Persistence of Craft, London: A & C Black, 2003, pp.188-189.

(5) Wintle, ‘Displaying Independent India Abroad’, p.85.

(6) Ibid., p.73.

(7) Nancy Adajania, ‘Dashrath Patel’s non-aligned alignments’. http://www.india-seminar.com, p.6.

(8) Wintle, ‘Displaying Independent India Abroad’, pp.80-81.