Ashoke Chatterjee
A Recorded Lecture from FRAME Conclave 2019: Modern Heritage
In this lecture, Ashoke Chatterjee talks about the inception of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, its formative years, the pedagogy provided to the students, the experiments with the curriculum, the challenges, successes, and failures it faced in becoming the ‘world-class’ institute it sought out to be today.
Edited Transcript
I am delighted to have this opportunity to be back in Goa after forty-one years. The last time I came here, it was to assist the Government of Goa with a clue on what was called ‘carrying capacity in the tourism business; how will Goa manage its tourism prospects in those years?’ I need not tell you that my report was trashed well before the Hall of Nations, but it is good to be back, and I am grateful to the organisers, to FRAME Conclave for inviting me.
I need to start, however, by indicating what this brief talk will not be about. This is a very personal view of one part of contemporary Indian design history around the experience of one institution, the National Institute of Design, its educators, and those who studied there. This is part of a very interesting story. The NID had a catalytic effect, so it is quite valid to use that example.
But there are many other stories that need to be told; not just of other design institutions, but also perhaps of the stories of the architectural institutions, the engineering colleges, and the schools of Fine Arts, all of which have contributed to the story of design and design education as an expression of Modernity. Strangely, in the years that I have worked with the design community, we have never used these terms like Modernism and Modernity. I guess they were always there in the background like a tanpura playing, but we were engaged with contemporary problem-solving. For us, to be modern was to know what the problems are and what we could possibly do to resolve those problems or to analyse them intelligently. So, the use of the word ‘modern’ and particularly things like Modernism is not something that I have very much experience with. What I do have experience with is the experiment which came to India as one of the first of its kind anywhere in the world through the building of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad.
I will tell this story as briefly as I can, trying to divide it into decades and what each of those decades may have taught us and where we might be now. The early years of design education were very tough because the word was understood by most Indians to mean either engineering or fine arts, and occasionally architecture. But something that was not either of these three was an animal, which nobody quite understood. The story of the NID and this experiment is one of, therefore, addressing a situation of almost total ignorance, trying to create awareness, trying to create a sense that this profession was relevant, and of the experiment being tested over and over again in one place, which is the marketplace. The marketplace was where our values were to be tested and demonstrated, and the marketplace was also the place for many years where a student of design either passed or failed. There were no other benchmarks of excellence. It was whether you had understood a client’s need and you were able to address that need with a degree of credibility that could enable you to leave NID, not just as a graduate, but as a young professional with a body of work to prove that you had a competence that could stand on its own feet in the marketplace. Within this experiment, and it has been a journey of a number of challenges, difficulties, barriers, failures, but successes as well. But within the success, perhaps, are some of the seeds of the kind of destruction that we are witnessing today and which others have spoken about.
[05:58] Throughout what I am going to say, there may be two threads that you can hang onto. NID did not teach architecture. It was the intention that it would, but it did not. The School of Architecture came up in Ahmedabad, but the earliest projects at NID had a lot of architecture in them, and many of those who taught and many of the things that we did at NID were within the framework of architecture.
The other thread that I would like you to hang onto is exhibitions. You saw the Nehru exhibition there, and as Ram Rahman mentioned, that is where we started. That was where NID began. Working on the job to create that exhibition, which then became world famous. But architecture, design, fine arts, and craft come together in this exhibition space in an extraordinary way, and perhaps it will be time to develop on that later. My own personal journey is not either as a designer or as a design teacher. I had the privilege to be at NID and to lead it for many years, not as a designer but as a member of a design team. My career began in an engineering industry in Calcutta where we did not use the term design, but we were actually in a design company. There, the term was product development. Years later, I left and I went to work overseas and I was in Washington. That was where my experience with NID began. At that exhibition, that Ram showed, when it came to Washington, the Indian community was asked to volunteer to help put it up, and that is where I met Charles and Ray Eames, they became dear friends of mine. But I never anticipated that one day I would be part of that institution they were telling me about in Washington DC in 1965-66, about this extraordinary experiment that was taking place in Ahmedabad, which they believed had global significance.
I would also like to indicate two important issues here. One is that the term design, as I told you, was a cause of confusion. To teach design in India, in a country, perhaps the only country in the world with an unbroken history of design going back thousands of years, without any break. Yet, there is no word in any of our myriad languages, that defines design as the profession that NID was entrusted to bring to this country. So, you can understand one of the confusions we had to battle with. We had to use a term that did not make sense or did not have an equivalent in any of our languages. There is a story to that because one of my experiences in NID was a sharp rap on the knuckles from the Hindi Committee of Parliament to say “You will immediately stop calling yourself the Rashtriya Design Sansthan” and you will use a proper Hindi word. And we never found one because when we did call ourselves the Rashtriya Kala Sansthan, after consultation with some very wise people, we got an even ruder letter. This time from the Lalit Kala Akademi housed in one of the buildings that Ram’s Papa (Habib Rahman) made, saying, “We do not know what you blighters do there in Ahmedabad, but kala you are not, and you will stop using this term immediately”; only fine arts is kala.
[09:52] But what we did know right from the beginning was that this was a value-based profession, and that is what is at stake today. A value-based profession in which you are not an artist, your job was not to make a personal statement. Your personal inspiration was only valid if it helped somebody else to resolve their problem. So, you had to learn that your first task in design was to care for others and to see the world through somebody else’s eyes. So, tradition and modernity became those resources from which problem-solving and problem-analysis could take place. And in this, the profession, the education, and the pedagogical system we were trying to build did have a legacy.
One could go back to those 5,000 years, but I do not have the time to give you a design history of India. But the legacy that we were immediately connected to, perhaps in the public understanding was the history of the art schools in India, the colonial period that came with that, and then the real beginning of contemporary design in India, which we are only now beginning to understand and appreciate, Visva Bharati, established in 1919, the Silpa-Sadana, the same year that Walter Gropius establishes the Bauhaus. Two years earlier, Gurudev (Rabindranath Tagore) had gone to Germany and met Gropius at the Bauhaus, and then he came back and started Silpa-Sadana, where some of the most extraordinary experiments in design were to take place. So, we have Tagore making this first connection with the Bauhaus, and then of course we have the great Gandhiji, who was a designer par excellence and who perhaps gave India and the world the greatest design story of the 20th century, which is the Handloom Revolution, the Swadeshi movement. Neither Tagore nor Gandhi used the term ‘design’ very much. In fact, I have struggled in my research to find them actually using that term, so that I would have a quotable quote, but not very much of that is there. But they are the background, and then comes the influence of the World Wars. In other parts of the world, the oxygen of the design profession is market competition. And before the War and during the Independence movement and after we became free, perhaps you will not remember, this was a highly protected economy. Competition was not the lifeblood of setting up the National Institute of Design, something else was, and that was Nation-building. This had never been tried anywhere else in the world.
So, the World Wars gave an impetus to the consumer goods industry and to industries like communication, printing, and advertising, to which, later, the design movement was to be closely linked. Now I am going to show you a few slides, if I may, of the legacy that we belong to.
I want you to just see these slides. I want to avoid speaking to slides because I do not want to get into a hassle with them. Now look at this (referring to image 01), it was a hundred years ago at Visva-Bharati. Take a look at the table and the chair. Does that tell you something?
Gandhiji and Swaraj; here he is working on a spinning wheel (referring to image 02), which he had designed so that it could be portable and so that he could carry it with him easily, particularly on trains and into jail. This is a chair that he designed (referring to image 03). This legacy is a backdrop for setting up the National Institute of Design.
Then comes the freedom, I am leaping ahead here, and Partition. This perhaps you might call the most important catalyst for what was to follow.
[15:08] The first impetus was the tragedy of Partition. Thousands of people moving in from East Bengal and West Punjab into a new India. What was to be done? In the Purana Qila, refugee camps were set up; Nehru in desperation asked Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay to do something, not just to keep these hands and minds busy, but to restore sanity for people who had seen what no human being should have seen and endured, but also to provide a livelihood.
Kamaladevi walks into the Purana Qila with needle and thread and cloth and asks the women in Purana Qila to make something. To make something that reminded them of the home they had lost, to make something that gave them hope for the future. And the first products that emerged were embroidered phulkaris. These embroidered phulkaris would have to be sold, and that was the beginning of the Central Cottage Industry Store on Janpath. And that store then became the catalyst for the pioneering designers of this country, some of whom Ram has mentioned.
This is the tragedy (referring to image 05) and this is the Purana Qila (referring to image 06) where Kamaladevi was asked by Jawaharlal ji to start to do something. This conversation leads (referring to image 08) to the Central Cottage industries on the left. On the right is Panditji (referring to image 08) at Cottage Industries with his sister, and Mrs Prem Bery, and others who were the pioneers who set up that important store, which has had a huge influence on contemporary design history, almost none of it recorded. It became world-famous as a store but also became a place that was going to give opportunities to the pioneers (referring to image 09).
And one of the saddest things is that the work of these pioneers is almost forgotten. You saw one of them Riten Mozumdar, there is a movement presently to try and bring Riten’s work together so that his work is not forgotten. And there were many others – Mini Boga, Ravi Sikri, Ratna Fabri, Shona Ray, it just goes on and on, but some of us are trying desperately before the resources are lost, that these names should not be forgotten. The design students in this country should remember their legacy from this period. Riten Mozumdar here (referring to image 10). This is Mini Boga’s furniture (referring to image 11), which Riten also worked on.
All this while, three people were thinking about the future of design in India. Many people were, but among them were these three, Gautam Sarabhai, Gira Sarabhai, and Mrs Pupul Jayakar (referring to image 12) who with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, was the other great lady of Indian craft and design. I will come back to them later, but remember that they were there and they were watching and thinking about what should come.
Among the people who were in Delhi at that time, was a journalist called Romesh Thapar (referring to image 13) who recently had moved to Delhi from Bombay. Romesh was one of the first and perhaps the greatest design thinker we have so far had in this country. As a journalist, as a thinker, he was conscious about this new discipline and what it could do to lift the quality of Indian life. He was there and the man on the right Ravi J. Matthai (referring to image 14), at that time, setting up the Indian Institute of Management. Familiar with the rumblings that we are going to create NID, interested in this talk about design as a discipline, wondering where management and design might be able to come together in the future.
[20:17] Pupul Jayakar was active in the craft movement and not much later, in 1955, she was asked to take to New York the first expression of Indian cultural diplomacy. It was an exhibition called Textile and Ornamental Arts of India (referring to image 16), which was sent in 1955, to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and the story of NID starts there in New York. The exhibition arrived, and Alexander Girard, the famous textile designer, was asked to design the exhibition by MoMA. He asked his friends, Charles and Ray Eames to come to New York and help him to put up this exhibition (referring to images 17 and 18). Mrs. Jayakar arrived and together, they put up this extraordinary Textile and Ornamental Arts of India. The exhibition was not only the first expression of its kind, it was also important because it brought with it two great Indian artists, the legendary Shanta Rao (referring to image 19) and Ali Akbar Khan. It was also the place where Pather Panchali had its first screening; the rough-cut flown from Calcutta to New York in a Pan Am flight even before Satyajit Ray saw it. So, this exhibition was no ordinary exhibition, but at that exhibition, Charles Eames asked Mrs. Pupul Jayakar a question. He said, “These products, these incredible textiles, and crafts that you have brought to New York, are they about India’s past, or are they about her future?”
From that question emerged a conversation that led Pupul Jayakar to report back to Panditji in Delhi and to the invitation that brought Charles Eames and his wife Ray to India a couple years later. And from that visit came the great India Report (referring to image 22), a classic in international design literature, and from that report came the National Institute of Design.
But what was special about that report? It was in many ways a meditation on design. It was a meditation on what must change in India and what should not change in India. It provided no formula, but it asked a basic question, “How will choices be made? Who will make choices and will India’s tradition of creative destruction be the way in which choices are made?” And a symbol was used to represent design, and that was a symbol of the lota, which Charles and Ray Eames said was the greatest industrial design product that they had ever encountered. And they went on to analyze the lota and finally said, that the reason for and the hope for such an institution, as we suggest, is that it would produce the future lotas of India. By this, they meant the products and systems that would serve India with the same service, dignity, and love that the lota had served India for countless generations.
So, the Institute starts with ‘that’ idea of service, dignity, and love. And years later, I asked Charles Eames on his last visit to India; I said that the students asked me, “What is all this love business? Service? We can understand. Dignity? We can understand, but where does love come into this?” And he mentioned that love is the ability to see the world through somebody else’s eyes. That is what design service is all about. To be able to see the world through somebody else’s eyes. The question of these exquisite items about India’s past or about its future, which still remains with us as in this great photograph of Shanta Rao by Herbert Matter (referring to image 19). Charles and Ray Eames come to India (referring to image 20).
[25:10] This is the India Report (referring to image 22) and the object, which they decided was the symbol of industrial design (referring to image 23). This is the quotation (referring to image 24), which then became the value system for NID, a very difficult value system to live up to and still very, very challenging.
If I look at the early years of the Institute, in the sixties was the foundation. It was a time when the Institute began, and we were given a floor in Corbusier‘s museum building, which was built for the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and the planning of the institute started. It came to Ahmedabad over other places, Hyderabad, Bangalore, even Fatehpur Sikri was considered, but it got to Ahmedabad because of the presence of Gautam and Gira Sarabhai and good Gujarati entrepreneurship. The curriculum was developed; at least the start of the curriculum was developed. The Eames report gave an idea of what kind of equipment would be needed.
During that decade, the building of NID started. Gira Sarabhai had just returned to India after practising with Frank Lloyd Wright, and her iconic building began to come out of the ground on the banks of the Sabarmati. Charles Eames came back to India to train the first teachers of Industrial Design, and they had a project to work on. The project is the Jawaharlal Nehru Exhibition. Later in that decade, there would be other exhibitions, the Montreal World Trade Fair, the New York World Trade Fair, Gandhi Darshan, and so on. And the first postgraduate programmes began to be introduced in product design, textiles, ceramics, and furniture.
This is when the problem started because the teachers found that the young people coming into postgraduate studies already had tunnel vision, and so the Institute made a phenomenally important decision that design education had to start at the school leaving level. It had not been done anywhere else in the world. In the sixties, while the curriculum and development were going on, professional practice moved into the Institute as a non-negotiable core of design education. One worked in their studios and in their workshops on actual assignments, from actual clients, with their teachers as practising designers, and with the learners as apprentices. And the relationship between the educator and the student was between a practitioner, an apprentice, and a mentorship, and hopefully, this distinction would disappear. And what was serving the client was a team that had come together to create a product or a service that would meet the client’s requirements. Some of the important companies of that era were L&T, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Cistronics, Cooper Engineering, these are some of the companies that started giving jobs to NID and work began to flow out of NID into the marketplace.
In the sixties, you will find that some of the work that NID did in those early years was architectural. Louis Khan came to NID to start the work on the IIM building; it was a NID project. The poor man thought he was supposed to be designing the Design Institute and he was gently told, no, you are not to be designing a design institute, you are supposed to be designing the IIM-A. Gautam and Gira were there as the founders (referring to image 27).
Jawaharlal Nehru sends us a message of encouragement (referring to image 28).
And in the sixties, we had begun the foundations for learning. I told you about the great teachers who came. One of them was Nelly Sethna (referring to image 30), a weaver, whom Gira Sarabhai brought to NID, and she recommended that her batchmate at Cranbrook be brought to Ahmedabad: Helena Perheentupa of Helsinki (referring to image 31), and she was to emerge as one of the greatest teachers at NID, crossing all the disciplines, doing a huge amount of work in the curriculum design, and one of the greatest mentors that any of us have had.
[30:21] Shona Ray, who had so much to do with Cottage Industries, with Kumar Vyas, who we recognise as the father of Industrial Design education in India (referring to images 32 & 33).
Dashrath Patel, who with Kumar Vyas were the first of the design teachers to be brought into this experiment (referring to image 34).
The Indian Bauhaus in the hope and dreams of the community (referring to image 36) at that time starts coming out of the ground. Here is where the marriage with architecture begins because this building reflecting Gira Sarabhai’s architectural expertise, her apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, and a lot of structural research, partnered by the Structural Engineering Research Centre in Roorkee. That was what it finally came out to be, and more or less, what it looks like now (referring to image 37).
This was a building in Bombay, which is one of the earliest ones (referring to image 38). The idea that Gautam Sarabhai had was, NID would not train architects, but would give architects an opportunity to work on real-life projects, which would provide them with professional experience, which otherwise they may not have.
And Louis Kahn with B V Doshi at the start of the IIM Project (referring to image 39). The Nehru Exhibition which goes around (referring to images 40, 41, and 42).
Now, what is important about this was (referring to Image 43) that to create this exhibition, you needed to have workshops. The workshops, the classrooms, and the studios became completely integrated so that the students could have access to workshops and studios twenty-four hours to be able to work on projects of the kind that were coming into NID.
This became a part of the culture, and this is part of what is now threatened by the rush for numbers. Is this apprenticeship going to be able to last (referring to image 44)? Can we ever do projects of this kind ever again in the current situation of a rush for numbers?
It is a part of the wonderful equipment that came (referring to image 45). These are projects that were done for real-life clients (referring to images 46, 47, 48, and 49); one gets an idea that by this time the NID was actually working with clients, projects were going out and every one of these was involving students as well as teachers. That is George Nakashima (referring to image 50) from the U.S. who came to make furniture.
The first animation films that were made (referring to image 51), and then following that ethnographic research project started at NID, primarily on the craft sector (referring to image 52). Here, I might point out, like at the exhibition that went to New York, and at the Nehru Exhibition, the foundation, the ground on which we stood was Indian craft. And that relationship became very important and remains very important, both at NID and at all design schools in this country. That bond, that relationship, with crafts and artisans and craftsmanship.
These were some of the graphic design symbols that were also part of that period, which many of you have now become, a part of your background as well (referring to images 53 and 54). These have gone into the landscape of India. So many of these symbols have originated through student and faculty projects at the National Institute of Design.
The seventies were a period of consolidation. The School Leavers programme started. By 1974, some NID faculties had moved out of NID and they had started India’s second design school at the Indian Institute of Technology in Powai, the Industrial Design Centre. But during this period, all kinds of interesting things were happening. Gautam Sarabhai wrote a seminal document called ‘National Institute of Design – Internal Organisation, Structure, and Culture’ to try and articulate what this educational system was, and what this new profession required as its basis? Romesh Thapar wrote his papers for UNESCO – ‘A Design for Living, A Design for Development’ (referring to image 57). NID gets the first International recognition for the quality of its work through the organisation and the International Council for Industrial Design.
[35:36] But something also happened – a crisis, an administrative crisis, which caused such a National scandal that there was talk of closing down the NID entirely. The Sarabhais left NID, and what was happening here now? This talk of closing the experiment, which very few people understood in the first place encouraged Indira Gandhi to ask Romesh Thapar “What happens now?”. And Romesh Thapar put together a group of people in which Charles Correa, Gerson da Cunha, and others were involved to come out with a report, which is a resounding affirmation of what NID was trying to do. And the Thapar committee report protects the Institute and points out that this experiment in education is not only vital to be protected, but must be expanded, must be allowed to grow, and must be allowed to spread. And thanks to Mrs. Gandhi‘s understanding of what was going on, and Pupul Jayakar’s tenacious advocacy for NID, the Institute survived and that is what brought me to NID in 1975.
With this International recognition that came in the seventies, came an invitation from the United Nations to hold the first and so far, only United Nations conference in design at the NID campus. In order that the world may come there, understand this pedagogical experiment, in the area in which it is being carried out and see its relevance, not just to the developing world, but to the world as a whole. During that very important decade of the seventies, all kinds of other things were happening. NID got a chance to work with the Space Research Institute on the site experiment.
A huge exhibition was held in the Hall of Nations called The Agri Expo 1979, and the entire Institute, every single student except the foundation year, and every teacher worked together to create an exhibition on agriculture, not just as an exhibition on agriculture, but as a training for ourselves to understand India’s largest industry, which is agriculture. All the teaching, everything was done through that one year of work for Agri Expo. At the same time, we were having, in the middle of the seventies, the first batch of students coming out. Would they get jobs? Remember, this was a market where there was very little competition and the first job offers came to us in those three sectors where competition was already a force – exports, advertising, and crafts.
At the same time, NID and IIM under the leadership of Ravi Matthai moved into a desperate corner of Rajasthan for what was to be called the Rural University Experiment in Jawaja, where two institutions set up with taxpayer’s money, decided to work with the community, which was eating once in two days; to find out if there was anything that we knew from our disciplines that could help them to eat twice in one day without being dependent on us.
Although this was not meant to be a craft experiment, crafts moved into the centre of the Jawaja story, and for fifty years we have been colleagues together, learning together, through different generations of teachers, students, and artisans in Jawaja but that is another story. What also happened when the world came to NID and saw this work, is that at this conference, which was called ‘UNIDO/ICSID India 1979 conference on Design for Development’, a declaration came out called the Ahmedabad Declaration for Design for Development, which was a landmark and this year marks fifty years of that declaration. And although that declaration did not get as much attention in India as it should have, elsewhere in the world it did. And this year we have received many indications from designers in all parts of the world of what the influence of that statement actually was. What was important about that statement was that when this think-tank of designers came together, yes, they were sitting in India, but they were not just thinking of India, they were thinking of the world. And the declaration today, if you read it, has the essence of the sustainable development goals that are today the United Nation’s benchmarks for human progress.
[41:11] This is the Jawaja block (referring to image 58). NID faculty and NID students (referring to images 59, and 60), working with the Raigars, leather workers, and the weavers of this particular part (referring to images 61 and 62).
Over the years, after a lot of experimenting, falling on our face, all kinds of problems; iconic products emerged (referring to image 63), which have, become famous, not just in this country, but in many others. But the problems in Jawaja still exist, and these groups of people that we worked with and have worked with for fifty years – it is only five years ago that they got access to the village well. So, here was a learning for design; It is what Romesh Thapar says in his great essay on ‘A Design for Living, A Design for Development’, “But at the end of the day if the design is going to do anything for three-quarters of the globe, we have to be able to lift people to a better quality of life and to dignity”. Back to Charles Eames’s service, dignity, and love.
And in this area, is where the Bauhaus system had its most crucial test. I would say it is the most crucial test anywhere in the world because we were mocked when we went to Jawaja. ‘What are you guys going to do there with your fancy European ideas? You can do nothing’. But that group, working with designers as equals, is today a thriving community, but still at the bottom of our social structure, but that is another long story.
The products they brought out (referring to images 64 and 65). The leather products and the rugs that you see here (referring to image 66) are designs created by the artisans from their own inspiration. And the first kick in the pants we got when these products came out was that they were referred to as Scandinavian designs. “It must be that Helena woman who has gone down and given them designs”, they said. The only one to support this whole thing was John Bissell of Fabindia. He said, “If that is what they are saying to you, that is the sign of your success because your artisans have a palette and they have a vision, which is as contemporary as anything that Europe can give.” So, that is the message for the artisans, and these designs have lasted for years, and that process is still going on.
[45:30] At the same time in the seventies, we moved, and here was the partnership with architects into India’s first experiments in Integrated Area Development Plans for places of archaeological importance. The first was Fatehpur Sikri (referring to Image 67), and that story is linked to an architect called Satish K Davar, who started this project and then died suddenly in London, leaving us stranded with no access to any of his materials that his family would allow. And then Professor Kulbhushan Jain of the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad came on board, and NID made this (referring to Image 68), a series of projects which then moved into the national discourse on conservation through INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) and through other organisations.
At the same time, NID went to the North-East (referring to images 69, 70 and 71). Another incredible opportunity for students and teachers. The 1980s was a time of profound change, because you will remember liberalisation happened, the Asian Games, colour television, and it was in that decade that the term designer moved from a noun to an adjective, and with that semantic move came perhaps the greatest challenge to the ethics and the value on which NID was built. Because then we had designer clothes, designer products. ‘Designer’ as a term, not of service, but for affluence, for style, and for fashion. The fashion industry came in. Soon, other institutions were going to start.
In the eighties and nineties, you had new design schools starting all over the country. When we started, there were two. Today, if you make a search, you get about 250 names, right? Within NID, NID got the mandate to spread out over the country. Where were the teachers going to come from? The pressure was to build up the number of admissions, to build up the number of graduates. Alright, what would be the quality of education when that happened? It was a struggle. NID was declared an institution of National importance. I thought we were that a long time ago, but that declaration was only made fairly recently, giving NID the privilege of providing degrees and not diplomas.
Everything that you saw up to this point, took place outside the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education would never have tolerated what we did at NID because there were no exams, there were no marks, there was no ranking, which made us heretics. We proved that there could be another way, and we proved it through design education. That was the modernity in education that we advocated. Now the kiss of death has come. Because with the so-called privilege of granting degrees, you go back into the University Grants Commission system. So now, will we be able to employ designers who have never been to school? Will we be able to employ faculty who do not have a Ph.D., or who have not published? What is going to happen to ‘that’ quality of education for which the world came to India in 1979? And my last slide on this was the destruction of the Hall of Nations (referring to images 72 and 73) because we have a wonderful way in our country of being like that only. We build up something, it succeeds, and then we try and fix it. And today in design education, there is a terrible word, which has also been the word to bring down the Hall of Nations and perhaps also Charles’s work here, and that is ‘world-class’. You saw that in the hoarding that Ram showed you. We are told today that design education in India must grow to be ‘world-class.’
So, the question that I ask after forty years in this sector is, what the hell were we if we were not ‘world-class’? The world came to us because they saw India as a leader. Today, in 2019, we are asked to follow. Is there a message in that? Thank you. ♦
Prof. Ashoke Chatterjee received his education at Woodstock School (Mussoorie), St Stephen’s College and Miami University (Ohio). He has a background in the engineering industry, international civil service, India Tourism Development Corporation, and 25 years in the service of the National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad) where he was Executive Director, Senior Faculty, Distinguished Fellow, and Professor of Communication and Management. He has served a range of development institutions in India and overseas, particularly in the sectors of drinking water, sanitation, disability, livelihoods, and education as well as worked with artisans in many parts of the country. He was Hon President of the Crafts Council of India for over twenty years and continues to serve CCI. He lives in Ahmedabad with his son Keshav, daughter-in-law Prativa, and grandchildren Kabir and Alisa.
FRAME is an independent, biennial professional conclave on contemporary architecture in India curated by Matter and organised in partnership with H & R Johnson (India) and Takshila Educational Society. The intent of the conclave is to provoke thought on issues that are pertinent to pedagogy and practice of architecture in India. The first edition was organised on 16th, 17th and 18th August 2019.
Organisation and Curation: MATTER
Supported by: H & R Johnson (India) and Takshila Educational Society
MATTER 