Crafting a National Identity in an International Market: The India Report

Crafting a National Identity in an International Market

27 November 2024 -

The India Report of 1958 set the foundation for design in India (as discussed in the previous blog), and today design pedagogy in India is still in consonance with it.

A decade after independence, on the recommendation of Pupul Jayakar,(1) Jawaharlal Nehru (independent India’s first Prime Minister) invited Charles and Ray Eames to create a programme of design to serve as an aid to small industry. They were also asked to suggest the steps India should take in light of the Industrial Policy Resolutions of 1948, 1953, and 1956 that increasingly sought to establish design as a mechanism for raising the demand for Indian products in the global market. The Eameses were a feasible choice to be brought in to help in Nehru’s vision since in the 1950s as they were continuing their work in architecture and modern furniture design in America. This holds true because design had not yet made its foray into India, and the Eameses were well established and had an affinity with India.

It must be pointed out that Nehru could have called upon Indians such as the upcoming architect Charles Correa who had been educated at the University of Michigan and who played a pivotal role in the creation of architecture for post-independence India, with buildings such as the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial, Ahmedabad, and the National Crafts Museum, New Delhi. Balkrishna Doshi could have been another viable option as he had worked for four years with Le Corbusier in Paris and then returned to India to supervise Le Corbusier’s projects in Ahmedabad. The advantages the Eameses had were that they were both designers and architects and they played into Nehru’s ‘Western’ psyche.

The Eameses spent three months in 1958 exploring ‘the actuality of India’(2) and familiarising themselves with Indian design traditions, especially those related to everyday objects. They met various people who were involved in education, handicrafts, industry, design, architecture, science, philosophy, sociology, and literature. After their travels, in April 1958, they submitted the India Report (Figs. 01 & 02). It laid out the functions and objectives of the future National Institute of Design (Fig. 03) established in 1961 on the basis of this recommendation very clearly,

We recommend an institute of design, research and service which would also be an advanced training medium. It would be connected with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry but it should retain enough autonomy to protect its prime objective from bureaucratic disintegration (3)

The primary focus of this report was to reiterate the need for quality of design and production if newly independent India was to survive and grow. The Eameses believed that one of the most valuable functions of a good industrial designer was to be able to find a solution not just for their own problems but for problems that others face too. The Eameses in India represented both the beginnings of an era of US hegemony and a set of creative aesthetic responses to it, a paradox that was ultimately expressed and codified in their design manifesto and ethical vision for the new republic.

Saloni Mathur states that today, after sixty-six years of it being drafted, the India Report has acquired something of the status of a scripture in India, and that it is frequently cited in the explosion of contemporary discourses surrounding design.(4) However, the India Report was not well received when it was first presented. According to Kirkham, ‘the Eameses failed to grasp the magnitude of the problems facing the vast majority of Indians during a period of massive upheaval, and underestimated the drive for profit and disregard for quality among some of India’s manufacturers, the depth of divisions within Indian society, and the complexities involved in the supply of food and shelter.’(5) It was evidently found to be too abstract for implementation by the new NID too. Contrary to expectations, the report provided no specifics other than urging the founding of an institute for training designers. The bureaucrats of the Nehruvian government were looking for a way to develop India through modern industries. This for them would lift the nation from a third-world to a first-world country. The report was further marred by references to the Bhagavad Gita,(6) which made it read like an essay on design philosophy.

What the India Report also lacked were any connections to the existing pedagogical methods of design in India, such as the work of Rabindranath Tagore at the Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan in West Bengal.(7) Tagore’s approach to pedagogy was an experimental one and a conscious repudiation of the system introduced to India by the British. It was open to ideas of international modernism in the form of art, music, and dance, and explored these in relation to local and national traditions of craft and the natural environment.(8)

While being quite didactic in its structure, the India Report had a rather romantic view in its assessment of how design could help small-scale industry and its problems. The incorporation of Western ideas into the Indian system by the report triggered debates, discussions, and experiments.

My research has revealed that it is viewed by some contemporary designers and academics as the vital groundwork on which to set the foundation for design. Hardik Gandhi, a furniture designer who studied at the NID, said that the India Report ‘envisaged an institute of design, research and service: each term vital in its interrelation. Design grew out of research into the real problems and needs of society, and by finding solutions at the big scale that India needed, it served a broader social purpose.’(9) A similar perspective is held by an American designer working out of Mumbai, Samuel Barclay, who also spoke about the reverence that Charles and Ray Eames invoked through the India Report.(10) Pradyumna Vyas, former director of the NID, concurred by saying that the Eameses, through this report, had ‘understood the DNA of the country to know what it needed’.(11) In summation, I believe that despite divergent viewpoints, the India Report is a critical element that underpins the contemporary design discourse in India.

References

(1) Pupul Jayakar was an Indian cultural activist and writer, best known for her work on the revival of traditional and village arts, handlooms, and handicrafts in post-independence India.

(2) Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the 20th Century. Cambridge: Mass: MIT Press, 1995, p.281

(3) http://nid.edu/Userfiles/Eames..., p.6

(4) Saloni Mathur, Charles and Ray Eames in India, Art Journal, Vol. 70, No. 1, Spring 2011, College Art Association, p. 52.

(5) Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames, p.283.

(6) The Bhagavad-Gita is an ancient Brahminical text, the holiest scripture for Hindus.

(7) Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath who reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art, with contextual modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1913, he was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The university was founded by Tagore, who called it Visva Bharati, which means the communion of the world with India. The curriculum included music, painting, dramatic performances, and other performative practices.

(8) http://www.visvabharati.ac.in/... and Ajit K. Neogy, The Twin Dreams of Rabindranath Tagore. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2010.

(9) Email interview with Hardik Gandhi.

(10) Interview with Samuel Barclay.

(11) Interview with Pradyumna Vyas.