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08 DESIGN STRUGGLES

Nov 28, 202529 min read

RETHINKING MIDCENTURY MODERN

A View from Postcolonial India

Sria Chatterjee

When, at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, India woke “to life and freedom” 1 and was inaugurated as a sovereign nation-state after two centuries of colonial rule, hopes for a new postcolonial India were both feverishly optimistic and deeply troubled. The carnage of the Partition of India that followed this inauguration, and the unsettled aftermath of World War II that formed the background to it, meant that the founders of the new nation-state did not have an easy task on their hands. While nationalist rhetoric claimed that this was indeed a new period of history, this claim was not founded on any real revolutionary defeat of the old colonial structures, especially in the realms of social order, economy, law, and bureaucracy. What emerged for the founding figures and constitution-makers of new India (a constitutional republic and a democracy) as the utterly vital component in the reconfiguration of a colony into a nation-state was a strong, centralized state, and its requisite: a sturdy, unified national identity. This was not an easy task for a country so diverse.2

The National Institute of Design (NID) – officially established in Ahmedabad in India in 1961 and spearheaded by Gautam Sarabhai and his sister Gira – was, among other things, a product of newly independent India’s attempt to create both a centralized national identity and a democratic public. After independence in 1947, the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had an optimistic and socialist vision to transform the country from a rural society to an urban state. His Industrial Policy Resolution of 1953 aimed to establish training and development programs that would accelerate the growth of small industries, which in turn would lead to a broader improvement in working and living conditions for the masses. It was in this context that the first steps towards the NID were drafted. It was funded and supported by the Indian government and the largest private US philanthropic foundation of the Cold War era, the Ford Foundation. In the first two decades, the Foundation supported governmental programs and initiated a stream of institutional recommendations researched and written by technical experts from the United States and Europe. Among these was Charles and Ray Eames’s 1958 report on Indian design, which would become the basis and blueprint for the foundation of the NID.3

Towards a New School of Design

In 1956, Charles Eames was invited on behalf of the Ford Foundation by Monroe Wheeler, Director of Exhibitions and Publications at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to tour the country with the aim of recommending a design training program that would aid smallscale industries, and “that would resist the present rapid deterioration in design and quality of consumer goods.”4 The Ford Foundation worked closely with MoMA, drawing especially on their Good Design exhibitions of the 1950s, which defined and disseminated so-called good design in an attempt to shape postwar consumer culture through exhibitions at home and abroad.5 This resonated with the Foundation’s India representative Douglas Ensminger’s claim that one of the principal problems of midcentury Indian industry was its lack of “competence in design.”6 The Eameses spent five months traveling in India, photographing widely, to arrive at a sense of “those values and those qualities that Indians hold important to a good life.”7

The outcome of this tour, the Eameses’ India Report, which started with a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, stressed that the role of design should lie in defining and elevating “standards of living” through everyday objects and services rather than through a focus on “industrial standardization.” The report, as Pupul Jayakar reiterates, “focuses on India’s tradition and philosophy that is familiar with the meaning of creative destruction and stresses the need to appraise and solve the problems of our times with tremendous service, dignity, and love.”8 It is useful here to turn briefly to Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India. Written in 1946, a year before independence, this book brought an almost outsider view on the country’s people and places and is a text with which the Eameses would no doubt have had some familiarity. It presents “Indian culture” as emerging out of a conflict between what Nehru terms India’s usable past and disposable past. For Nehru, the usable past comprised aesthetic or cultural products (i.e., “heritage”) expunged from their “value context” and made usable for the present prerogatives of modernity, national unity, development, etc. The disposable past, therefore, consisted of ways of life, value systems, or hierarchical social structures (located particularly in the Indian village and the figure of the peasant).9 To build the “house of India’s future, strong and secure and beautiful,” as Nehru sought, required cutting away these entrenched social systems that might constrain the path to a cleaner, fairer, more efficient modernity.10 The concept of the usable past was first introduced by American cultural critic Van Wyck Brooks in his widely read 1918 essay, “On Creating a Usable Past.” “What is important for us?” Brooks asks in his quest for a national usable past.11 If Brook’s quest was that of the modernist literary critic hoping to clear away the useless aspects of the past to find “the desire, the aspiration, the struggle, the tentative endeavor, and the appalling obstacles”12 that would give a deeper significance to the spiritual history of America, then Nehru, writing as both alien observer and invested politician, looked to symbols to do part of the work of recuperating and reinnovating India’s usable past. While Brooks’s call united American critics, artists, and designers of the 1930s such as Lewis Mumford, Arthur Dove, Alexander Girard, and Alfred Stieglitz (with the help of his friend and curator of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Ananda Coomaraswamy) in seeking linkages with earlier folk forms to guide contemporary practice, Nehru’s devising of a usable past brings us back full circle to the Eameses in India in the late 1950s.13

The NID was not only a product of the surge in institution building in India at the time, but also drew on a long history of debates and initiatives around industrial design initiated by the British in colonial India more than a century prior to independence. The NID was enlisted under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which in many ways followed the conception of industrial design in relation to rural reform already set up by the British.14 The first Five Year Plan (launched by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1951), following up on the Report of the Committee for Art Education (1947), called for the setting up of Regional Design Centres in Bombay, Bangalore, and New Delhi. Modeled loosely on Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan school’s craft and design unit, Silpa Bhavan, these centers, led by artists such as Pran Nath Mago in Delhi, were seen as training centers for artisans.15 Soon after independence, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce established two bodies that would provide financial and technical subsidies and otherwise promote India’s textile industry and crafts heritage: the All-India Handicrafts Board (which oversaw all crafts except weaving) and the All-India Handloom Board (which oversaw weaving).

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, a UK-educated nationalist and feminist Gandhian, headed the All-India Handicrafts Board, while Pupul Jayakar, a feisty theosophist and cultural advisor to a generation of Prime Ministers (Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi), led the All-India Handloom Board. Jayakar’s political career began when she was appointed assistant to the Indian National Congress activist Mridula Sarabhai in the Kasturba Trust in 1940.16 This was also the beginning of Jayakar’s long association with the Sarabhai family and their industrial and cultural stakes in the promotion of Indian textiles. In the 1950s, both Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and Pupul Jayakar were apprehensive about the introduction of factory-based mass production in India as a part of Nehru’s vision for Indian development, of which they formed a crucial part. Although worried about how Western mass production techniques might affect the artisan groups, they looked, odd as it may seem at first sight, to the United States for a practical and theoretical approach to contemporary material culture.17

Based in Ahmedabad, a city dubbed the “Manchester of India” for its proliferating textile mills, and home to Mahatma Gandhi’s Sabarmati ashram, the NID was spearheaded by brother and sister Gautam and Gira Sarabhai, heirs to the wealthy mill-owning Sarabhai family. Gautam had a Ph.D. in mathematics and was, at the time, chairman of Calico Textile Mills, while Gira had lived in New York and trained at Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio in Arizona. In 1951, it was agreed with the Ford Foundation’s newly appointed representative in India, Douglas Ensminger, that the Foundation would provide funds and expert assistance to expand and improve the new Community Development Program, upon which the government of India placed high hopes for village-level social and economic development.

Objects and Exhibitions

As critical writing on the Eameses’ India photographs has shown, the American designers relied on a superabundance of images, just as they would go on to do in their exhibitions and installations, where sensory overload acted as the necessary stimulus for processing certain threads of information.18 For Charles, the possibility of finding patterns and making connections between “apparently dissimilar phenomena” became essential to this photographic excess.

While in India they focused on the form and function of objects of daily use and processes of craft and textile making, and their approach to cultural specificity was embedded in a larger midcentury American notion of democratic cultures and a celebration of folk objects. The Eameses, like their friend and collaborator Alexander Girard, foraged other cultures for objects to use both as decoration and as sources for film and exhibition projects, where objects were stripped of their cultural contexts and meaning-making capacities and were redefined to make meaning in a different context.19 For example, the Eameses’ 1969 film Tops, almost a decade in planning, features 123 tops spinning through the length of the film (accompanied by a score by Elmer Bernstein). These tops were sourced from all over the world – India, China, Japan, the United States, France, and England. While it functions at one level as a celebration of the physics of motion, this unifying physics runs through the culturally and visually diverse objects, producing an ideological crescendo in the universalism of science and a celebration of liberal humanism in the difference and similarity of all cultures. The Eameses’ film counted, therefore, on the ability of the human eye and mind to make the intellectual leap between cultural symbols (here, tops) and the ability to both distinguish them and regard them in a longer continuum of human experience and design.

The universalizing tendencies of the Eameses were directly valuable for India’s coming of age. Nehru’s copious writings about the country’s underlying unity despite the existence of widespread ethnoreligious, linguistic, and regional diversity often placed the dream of unity in “the mind of India” at “the dawn of civilization.” This unity “was something deeper, and within the fold, the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practiced and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged.”20 The striving for a unified national identity is central to the debates and decisions around art, design and nation-making in this period., nature, and nation that have run and continued to run throughout this entire thesis. The overall effect of US-based international networks (which operated across international boundaries) was to consolidate US hegemony in economically or strategically important areas of the world through the nurturing of pro-US “modernizing elites,” of whom the Sarabhais were a key example.

In the newly independent India, the currency of the utilitarian object was rapidly accruing value. In the closing years of colonial rule, the Indian National Congress pushed for a Committee for Art Education and investment in the transformed realities of contemporary India, which included both ideological and practical realities (i.e., the forging of a holistic national culture through a common aesthetic vocabulary, and the domestic and lived experience of the new Indian citizen who would inhabit this national consciousness).21 The possibilities that the Indian government and the network of international elites that it mobilized saw in American design overlapped with US interests in India. “Soft-power” initiatives such as foreign aid and so-called knowledge transfers for economic and social “modernization” were among the diplomatic strategies applied by the US to win over nonaligned countries; in particular, the US sought to cultivate newly independent India as a democratic counterweight to China.22 As Greg Castillo writes in his study of the cultural diplomatic politics of Cold War midcentury design, “from World War II through the 1960s, what US foreign policy analysts found problematic was not the rapid pace of worldwide Americanization but the lack thereof. In response, they called for aggressive overseas propaganda programs.”23 In addition to familiarizing American audiences with Indian design and vice versa, exhibitions played an important role in establishing cultural ties and collaborative programs between countries. For example, the 1955 Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India exhibition at MoMA, curated by Alexander Girard and Edgar Kaufmann Jr., then Director of MoMA’s Good Design exhibitions, collected a vast number of textiles, crafts, and decorative objects from India and Indian collections around the world.24 As Mary Staniszewski has insightfully noted, “fine art’s other – popular culture, advertising and the mass media – was supplying the universal language of international communities.”25 Both Girard and Kaufmann were well known as collectors of folk arts, and the show was preceded in the fall of 1954 by a six-week tour of India by Girard, meant as a survey and collecting trip. The purpose of the exhibition was to improve Indian-American relations by arousing enthusiasm in the US for the splendor of Indian achievements. This goal, Kaufmann reported,

was part and parcel of the museum’s program of international artistic exchange … and took its point from the urgency with which India today, independent and industrially burgeoning, was being courted by both parties in the cold war contest of world influence – the US and Russia.26

Charles and Ray Eames were invited to make a film at the exhibition. They used 35 mm slides in film form, a technique they had recently developed. In the film, the objects of the exhibition become the central figures and nodes of the moving slides as the camera glides and pulses in rhythm to Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s “Morning Raga.” The film opens with a meditation on color in Indian fabrics by Alexander Girard and continues with Pupul Jayakar narrating off-screen a prose poem on the symbolism of color in India. The importance of the object as at once a commercial entity and tool of soft diplomacy can be seen in the collaborative work of Alexander Girard, Charles Eames, and George Nelson in the Herman Miller firm (e.g., the Textiles & Objects shop that opened in New York in 1961) and the exhibitions they designed, especially for the Good Design series. For MoMA, the shift of focus from painting to object, all for the dissemination of “good design” in the mid-twentieth century, founded on the modernist precepts of functionalism, simplicity, and truth to materials, urgently promoted a modernism of everyday things, an astute and coordinated effort at creating consumer taste.27

In 1959, following the Textiles and Ornamental Arts exhibition, Design Today in India and America, an exhibition of exemplary design objects housed in a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, opened in New Delhi.28 On entering the dome, the viewer was met with an Indian-style brick courtyard with variously shaped matted platforms leading towards the center on which objects were placed, each tagged with a number. The exhibition included chairs, lamps, china, glassware, kitchen utensils, textiles, and tools from thirteen countries, and would stay on as a permanent design collection at the National Institute of Design, then still in its incubatory planning stages.29 Speaking of the exhibition, Pupul Jayakar claimed that the “purpose of her government’s invitation was to focus attention on the vital problem of product design in terms of rapidly developing small-scale industry.”30 While MoMA selected 350 objects for the show, it was the architect and designer George Nelson (and his New York-based firm) that designed the installation and catalog.31 Citing socioeconomic transformations, Jayakar continued to say that

improved communications, the breakdown of caste barriers, the carrying of an urban civilization through radio and cinema to the small town and distant village, the availability of power, the introduction of new machines, new materials, new tools, and new techniques, have led to a breakdown of the traditional pattern of production, altered the relationship between producer and consumer, and pose a challenge to the forms that underlie production and distribution in this country.

However, she was adamant that the exhibition should serve not as an invitation for the imitation of the outward appearance of its objects, but only to “stimulate inquiry and to focus attention on the urgent problem of product design and the comprehension of the nature and place of materials, tools, functions and disciplines, in the creation of objects of daily use.”32

At the NID

In their India Report, the Eameses stressed the need for rural India to develop an “alert and impatient national conscience – a conscience concerned with the quality and ultimate values of the environment.”33 “NID’s concern is with the quality of the physical environment and its relevance to human needs,” Gautam Sarabhai claimed. “The endeavor is not only to respond to existing demands with discrimination and without preconceptions, but to create an awareness of problems of contemporary significance that are as yet generally unrecognized.”34 Gautam Sarabhai’s emphasis on the professionalization of design was in part beholden to his interest in psychology, organizational behavior, and education (the Sarabhais collaborated with and hosted the educator Maria Montessori, the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, and A. K. Rice of the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations in Bloomsbury, London). Over the first nine years, the Governing Council of the NID included the craft revivalist Pupul Jayakar and members from government organizations and private companies such as New Delhi Cloth & General Mills, the Ministry of Industrial Development, the Government of Gujarat, the Gujarat State Fertilizer Corporation in Baroda, Ambica Mills, Tata Industries Private Limited, Tata Oil Mills, Bombay, and so on. This diversity of industrial and state interest in the administration was to be reflected in the kinds of projects the early NID faculty and students would take up. There were, therefore, competing approaches to the environment, human needs, agency and social composition, industry and technoscience in the mid-twentieth century.

The central interlocutors of Guatam and Gira at this time included their brother, the physicist Vikram Sarabhai; Shona Ray of Calico Mills; Dashrath Patel; the London-educated Indian expat from Uganda, H. Kumar Vyas, who joined NID as faculty in 1962; Douglas Ensminger from the Ford Foundation; and James Prestini, the visiting consultant from the University of California, Berkeley. At the same time, Gautam maintained close correspondence with his European expat designer friends in the US, such as Walter Gropius and George Nelson from Harvard and MIT.35 While a portion of the sizeable Ford Foundation funds given to the NID was to be used for materials, equipment, and books, a larger portion of the funds was mandated for the “employment by the Institute of three foreign design experts,” each of whom would serve as a teacher-consultant for two years, and four more foreign experts, each of whom would serve for one year as frontline supervisors as well as short-term consultants.36

As is well known, Louis Kahn, who was invited to design another Sarabhai-led institution, the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, ran seminars at the NID for faculty and students. His 1962 architecture lecture “Form and Design” was followed by training courses, the first of which, Basic Design, began in April 1963.37 Kahn, Prestini, and Frei Otto remained regular consultants and visitors. In the early days, the Swiss-born photographer Christian Staub came for three years, while longer- and shorter-term visitors to the graphic arts section included the Swiss Armin Hofmann, Peter Teubner, and Hans-Christian Pulver from Basel. Through these networks, young faculty members I. B. Patel, Mahendra Patel, and Vikas Satwalekar were sent to Basel for training. Hans Gugelot and E. Reichl from Ulm visited the product design department and established a way for senior NID staff such as H. K. Vyas and M. R. Date to work with Diener and Lindigner in Ulm and continue their collaborations after they returned to India.38 The efforts of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (Ulm Design School) in Germany towards postfascist cultural regeneration and political reformation struck a particular chord with the young democratic Indian republic. Contrary to the belief that India served as a passive recipient for knowledge transfers from the US in its Cold War cultural diplomatic schemes, Saloni Mathur has shown how India framed Charles Eames within its postcolonial effort to establish design institutes and reform small-scale industry. She makes visible a set of interconnections between a postwar modernism and a postcolonial one.39 Farhan Sirajul Karim similarly frames the NID’s connection with the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm as less of an institutional collaboration and more of a permeation of ideas back and forth through Indian academics and designers such as H. K. Vyas and Sudha Nadkarni.40 The NID in many ways embodied both the national and international fronts of the newly independent country. Despite the apparent emphasis on cultural specificity and the vernacular on which the institute was built, the nature of its commissions and collaborations often proved much more internationalized and mechanized.

The filmmaker Mani Kaul’s 1968 documentary Forms and Designs, co-scripted with the artist and designer Akbar Padamsee and commissioned by the Films Division of India sets up an opposition between functional forms of industrial design and decorative arts in India. Making no secret of the fact that Kaul did not think that the future of design lay in the integration of form and function, the film served as a critique of the NID’s role in reconceptualizing craft and village industries. By visualizing the strange and surreal transformations of products of everyday use into sleek electric gadgets, the camera enters the courtyard and studios of the NID: “For the younger generation,” it says, “responds to the call of modern professions which concede to a universal system … where mass production overshadows art. Where function is sacred and form secondary.”41 Kaul’s film coincided with Douglas Ensminger’s lament that the NID was perhaps not “evolving as an indigenous Indian institution,” to rectify which he invited the American Eameses back to do a follow-up report.

The early, heady years of the NID as an alliance of governmental, elite, and US technocratic impulses was resisted by Indian intellectuals even before the institute’s inception. Concerns about a top-down designed environment arose early on within the political and cultural sphere. As Mulk Raj Anand pointed out in the June 1967 issue of Marg magazine:

In the year 1952, the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, accepted a memorandum from the Marg group about the formation of an All India Council of Design. He was aware of the fundamental problems of our agro-industrial civilization, which is in transformation from the agriculture to industry through the introduction of the machine as an important part of our development. He believed that the machine is dangerous if it is not controlled, adjusted, and made a tool for progress towards economy, precision, and refinement in our lives.42

This council was never formed; but by the late 1950s steps towards the establishment of the National Institute of Design were well underway.

Conclusion

What followed for the NID in the late 1960s and 1970s was not a story of singular success but rather a complicated story. This is perhaps unsurprising if we go back to the design school’s well-intentioned but paradoxical beginnings (between tradition and modernism) that this essay started with. Over the course of the 1960s, the NID would, in many ways, move away from the original investment in vernacular cultures and objects and move towards a curriculum that mirrored the program at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm. In 1970, J. S. Sandhu, a designer and teacher at the Royal College of Art in London, wrote a follow-up to the Eameses’ India Report, which in no uncertain terms claimed that the Eames report had been cast aside and that the impetus towards raising standards of living and supporting and improving village industries, as the Eameses had suggested, had been entirely lost. In Sandhu’s opinion, the NID had spiraled instead into producing knock-offs of Western designs, and the heavy borrowing or copying of the Bauhaus and Ulm models was not only “injudicious” and “ill-considered” but would in fact hinder rather than promote development.43 While Sandhu’s report prompted a change of guard at the NID in the following years, it is important for this essay because it highlights the underlying tensions that characterized India’s modernizing ambitions, its commitment to India’s “usable past” and its international relations during the Cold War.

Footnotes

  1. Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1983), 25. It was in his stirring “Tryst with Destiny” speech that Nehru made this proclamation ↩

  2. For an excellent account of the fine balance between state power and democracy and the adoption of a strong central state, see Gyan Prakash, “A Fine Balance,” in Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 38–75. ↩

  3. The suggestion that an Indian higher education institute might “serve as a center for creative studies in design and fashion” was first floated in 1954 in an earlier Ford Foundation report, which was chaired by Sven Hagberg of Stockholm’s vocational craft school and which sought to evaluate the potential of village and small industries in India. Douglas Ensminger, unpublished report, “Planning Team on Small Industry Makes Its Report, India, Report No. 40,” quoted in Claire Wintle, “Diplomacy and the Design School: The Ford Foundation and India’s National Institute of Design,” Design and Culture 9, no. 2 (May 4, 2017), 208, doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2 017.1322876. ↩

  4. Charles Eames, The India Report (Ahmedabad: National Institute of Design, 2004), iii. ↩

  5. “What Was Good Design? MoMA’s Message, 1944–56” (Department of Communications, Museum of Modern Art, May 2009). ↩

  6. Wintle, “Diplomacy and the Design School.” ↩

  7. Eames, The India Report, 2. ↩

  8. Pupul Jayakar, “Extract from Tribute to Charles Eames,” in Eames, The India Report, 16. ↩

  9. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet Press, 1946), 39, 43, 46. ↩

  10. “I approached her [India],” Nehru wrote, “almost as an alien critic full of dislike for the present as well as for many of the relics of the past that I saw… I was eager and anxious to change her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity… There was a great deal to be scrapped, that must be scrapped.” Nehru, 30–31. ↩

  11. Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial, April 11, 1918, 337–41. ↩

  12. Brooks. ↩

  13. Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012). Art historian Lauren Kroiz explores how US-born painters such as Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe used the techniques of collage to assemble a “usable past” from the regionalized cultures of African, Hispanic, and Native Americans. See also Preston Thayer and Alexandra Lange, eds., Modern Design/ Folk Art, Exhibition Catalogue (New Mexico: University Art Gallery, New Mexico State University, 2011). ↩

  14. The Department of Science and Art (DSA), for example, was set up by the British Government as early as the 1850s to introduce superior design and artisanal sensibility to industrial workers. See Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006) for how the DSA exerted a powerful influence on the growth of museums, design schools, and architecture throughout the British Empire. ↩

  15. In the early 1900s, Rabindranath Tagore started a school for young children that grew into an educational experiment and an artistic and intellectual hub in rural Bengal. An exchange with the Bauhaus in 1922 has been well documented in Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg, eds., The Bauhaus in Calcutta: An Encounter of Comsopolitan Avant-Gardes (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013). ↩

  16. See Reena Nanda, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: A Biography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Elise Hodson, “Pupul Jayakar’s ‘Great Conversation’: The Roles of Design, Craft, and the United States in Transforming Indian Identity and Industry, 1952–1965” (master’s thesis, Bard Graduate Center, 2009). ↩

  17. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, At the Cross-Roads (Bombay: National Information and Publications, 1947); Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, America: The Land of Superlatives (Bombay: Phoenix Publications, 1946); Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). This is particularly evident in the two books published by Chattopadhyaya in the 1940s. Also, in terms of US-India relations, Nico Slate argues that Cedric Dover worked to fulfill Nehru’s promise of India as a “bulwark for the rising colored world” through his use of history and culture. If Cold War politics provided the potential for a push for equality in the United States among “colored cosmopolitans,” Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya played a similar role with her 1946 book on America as a land of superlatives. ↩

  18. See Sria Chatterjee, “Postindustrialism and the Long Arts and Crafts Movement: Between Britain, India, and the United States of America,” British Art Studies no. 15, doi.org/10.17658/ issn.2058-5462/issue-15/ schatterjee. ↩

  19. Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 184. ↩

  20. Nehru, The Discovery of India, 9. ↩

  21. Report of the Committee for Art Education, 1947 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1948), 4. ↩

  22. For example, Inderjeet Parmar shows how Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations were key to the “elite dominance of U.S. foreign affairs” and to “creating national and global networks of intellectuals committed to a Progressive-era state-building project for globalist ends.” See Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). David Engerman shows how foreign aid as a Cold War tool for the superpowers unravelled domestic politics and policies in India; see David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). See also Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); and Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). ↩

  23. Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiv. ↩

  24. Saloni Mathur describes the exhibition as an “imaginary bazar” and provides a fuller account of its conception and reception and the role of the Eameses in it. See Saloni Mathur, “Charles and Ray Eames in India,” Art Journal 70, no. 1 (2011), 40–42. ↩

  25. Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 257. ↩

  26. Quoted from the Museum of Modern Art Archives, Record Citation ICE-D-5-54 (1/5). “Preliminary Report on the Indian Voyage from Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. to Porter Mcray, Nov 30 1954,” in Donald Albrecht, ed., The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Library of Congress and the Vitra Design Museum, 1997), 33. ↩

  27. For other instances of this, see Gay McDonald, “The ‘Advance’ of American Postwar Design in Europe: MoMA and the Design for Use, USA Exhibition 1951–1953,” Design Issues 24, no. 2 (March 1, 2008), 15–27; Takuya Kida, “Japanese Crafts and Cultural Exchange with the USA in the 1950s: Soft Power and John D. Rockefeller III during the Cold War,” Journal of Design History 25, no. 4 (November 1, 2012), 379–99, doi.org/10.1093/jdh/ eps033. ↩

  28. The USIA used Fuller’s domes for erecting exhibition pavilions within short periods of time and they became symbols of US engineering marvels. See “A Splendid Pleasure Dome,” in Jack Masey, Cold War Confrontations: US Exhibitions and Their Role in the Cultural Cold War (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2008), 58–67. ↩

  29. “MoMA Press Release No. 77” (MoMA Press Archives, October 24, 1958). ↩

  30. “MoMA Press Release No. 31,” 1. ↩

  31. United States Congress House Committee on Un-American Activities, The American National Exhibition, Moscow, July 1959: The Record of Certain Artists and an Appraisal of Their Works Selected for Display. Hearings (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959). The same year, George Nelson and his office mounted the massive American National Exhibition in Moscow. ↩

  32. “MoMA Press Release No. 31.” ↩

  33. Eames, The India Report, 10. ↩

  34. “National Institute of Design: Internal Organisation, Structure and Culture” (Ahmedabad: National Institute of Design, 1972). ↩

  35. National Institute of Design, 50 Years of the National Institute of Design, 1961–2011, 30, 31; “MoMA Press Release No. 85” (MoMA Press Archives, December 17, 1958). Others included the architect and city planner Dean J. Luis Sert; the Philadelphia-based artist and filmmaker Leo Lionni, who in that period worked in advertising; and in New York the Danish architect Erik Herlow, who was responsible for the 1958 MoMA exhibition, 20th Century Design from the Museum Collection, which was the first of its kind entirely devoted to “useful objects.” ↩

  36. “Letter from Douglas Ensminger to Gautam Sarabhai,” February 27, 1962, Ford Foundation Grants Reel 3022, Ford Foundation Archives, New York. There was also a large sum set aside for foreign travel and study fellowships for Indian members of the Institute staff. In February 1962, the Ford Foundation granted the NID 200,000 that they had given in October 1961. The Ford Foundation supplemented these funds again in the late 1960s and the Institute received further assistance from the Government of India. ↩

  37. National Institute of Design, 50 Years of the National Institute of Design, 1961–2011, 37. ↩

  38. “Letter from Prabhakar B. Bhagwat (Dean of Studies, NID) to Samuel E. Bunker (Assistant Representative, Ford Foundation),” December 13, 1966, Ford Foundation Grants Reel 3022, Ford Foundation Archives, New York. ↩

  39. Mathur, “Charles and Ray Eames in India,” 34–53. ↩

  40. Farhan Sirajul Karim, “MoMA, Ulm and Design Pedagogy in India,” in Western Artists and India: Creative Inspirations in Art and Design, ed. Shanay Jhaveri (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013), 122–39. ↩

  41. Mani Kaul, Forms and Designs (India, 1968), 1:32–1:38 min. ↩

  42. Mulk Raj Anand, “Design for Living,” Marg: A Magazine of the Arts 20, no. 3 (June 1967). ↩

  43. Report by J. S. Sandhu, sent to Charles and Ray Eames, September 16, 1970, 1:44, Folder 2, The Papers of Charles and Ray Eames, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. ↩