As the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad gets ready to celebrate its 50th year, Sadanand Menon wonders if the institute has missed the opportunity to realise its initial goals, and looks back at the life and work of one of its founding directors
Of course, Dashrath had resigned from the NID in 1981 and for the last thirty years had nothing to do with the Institute. Indeed, at an alumini meeting a couple of months ago in Ahmedabad, he had proclaimed that, after fifty years, the ‘design idea’ at the Institute had regressed beyond repair and that it was now “time to demolish the building and plough the land”. In fact, the story of the first two decades of the Institute is vastly different from what it has become today.
In the beginning
The high ideals that accompanied the setting up of NID actually begin around 1958, when the celebrated American design couple, Charles and Ray Eames, presented to the Government of India a document, later to become famous as the ‘Eames Report’. It was the blueprint for a new contemporary design school. Today their tone sounds prophetic: “In the face of the inevitable destruction of many cultural values — in the face of immediate need of the nation to feed itself — a drive for quality takes on real meaning. It is not a self-conscious effort to develop an aesthetic, it is relentless search for quality that must be maintained if this new Republic is to survive”. “The objective of the design school”, the Report emphasised, “may be restated as a desire to create an alert and impatient national conscience concerned with quality and the ultimate values of environment”.
NID was established in 1961 by the Central Government, under the Ministry of Industry, as an autonomous national institution for advance training, research and service in product design, visual communication, structure and planning, architecture and other allied fields. It was located in Ahmedabad due to the initiative and efforts of industrialist Gautam Sarabhai and his architect sister Gira. By the late fifties they had heralded a new consciousness about design through their tastefully conceived Cali-Shops to retail the Calico Mills textiles.
They had a definite vision of the role of design-intervention in Indian industry. To actualise their plans, they handpicked Dashrath, already well-known for his work in diverse media like painting, photography and ceramics. Interestingly, another name being considered then for the job was of architect Charles Correa. Legend has it that NID began with one table, one chair and one Dashrath Patel. During the 19 years that Dashrath was associated with NID, he was instrumental in launching professional industrial design practice in a range of products, establishing departments of graphics/photography, ceramics and exhibition design, and training the first crop of teachers of design in preparation for the professional design education programme that was to be launched a decade later. All in all, Dashrath’s stint at the NID was an unmitigated ‘success story’. Yet he resigned from there in 1980, with many regrets and questions. A few years later, he was to involve himself in a diametrically opposite activity with basic technology and meagre resources at the Rural Design School at Sewapuri, near Varanasi. The tension implied in this move is worth being problematised.
The silent majority
It is a fact that the NID has been lax in writing up an honest history of its own. There are a very few publications in the public domain that speak of that formative decade. Successive directors since 1974 (almost none of them from a design background) have tried to air-brush the past. The names of Gautam and Gira Sarabhai and Dashrath are hardly part of the historic memory of at least two decades of students. None of those early projects executed by Dashrath are openly acknowledged with any dignity. In 1961, NID was only the third design school in the world after Bauhaus and Ulm — both of which did not enjoy any longevity — but it is unfortunate that there is such a mindless black hole in NID’s self-narrative.
There is an interesting story to how Dashrath left the Institute he had built over two decades. There were newspaper reports, during the harvest season in 1979, of piteous scenes in Delhi hospitals, where peasant lads from Haryana and UP had been admitted with badly damaged hands. They were victims of newly-introduced mechanical threshers that tried to save costs by dispensing with safety devices. When the young boys fed the sheaf into the machine, they found their hands sucked in and chopped off at the wrist. The hospital corridors echoed with the pleas of over 400 farm labourers: “Doctorsaab, we are peasants; please save our hands”.
Dashrath carried the newspapers to the NID faculty meeting that morning. He suggested the Institute should be able to immediately intervene in such situations where bad design was injurious to people. He proposed a team of designers go to the location as ‘firefighters’ to carry out spot rectification. This practical suggestion was met first with stony silence. Then, many accused him of confusing the issue. One opinion was that the illiterate peasants were at fault as they were ignorant about the use of the machine. Another opinion held that the personality of the machine could not be faulted and neither could its design. Dashrath was harangued for posing it as a ‘design issue’. This almost became his last day at NID. Though he formally left only a few months later, that day he knew he could not continue there.
It was ironical that he would be quitting the NID on the heels of being honoured with the first Padma Shri for Design and Design Education in India. He was to comment later, “In 1961, when NID was conceived, Indian industry was only thirty years old. We thought design education would make a major difference to the country. In the rest of the developed world, the gap between industry and design was nearly a 100 years. In that sense, we had an advantage. But it led to nothing.” Interestingly, the issue of design in the early 1960s was not an exotic one in the life of the young nation.
A necessary discipline
Along with the struggle for a new, decolonised and free society, the national movement had also thrown up issues of values, lifestyles and the relation between man and nature, man and technology. Alongside was the tension between tradition and modernity, rural and urban, swadeshi and videshi, craft and technology, labour and automation.
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Nehruvian India was not averse to the idea of design and, in fact, saw it as a crucial fulcrum of development. There was also the underlying need to establish a design vocabulary and syntax compatible with modern techniques of mass production, use of new material and a conscious shift from the old to the contemporary. However, three things obfuscated the debate.
Blocks on the road
The NID philosophy got trapped in a ‘modernist’ utopia of design revolutions and ideal societies, entangling design with individualism, hedonism and elitism. Good design merely became, in Raymond Loewy’s words, “an upward sales curve”.
Second, the NID-led design movement in India never really addressed the cultural disruptiveness of technology. This may primarily have been due to insufficient research on the cultural base upon which the new institution was being established. Even though the Eames Report had idealised the lota as the best example of “integrated cultural design”, modern Indian designers seemed to have entirely abandoned the cultural plank. This would keep them at the elite margins of society — of fashion, advertising and promotional work for corporates and government.
Third, Indian industry copped out by getting into cozy joint-ventures with MNCs and inundating us with a tidal wave of brand names that do not breathe the air of this sky.
No wonder design in India is an idea gone sour. Dashrath’s quest seems, on hindsight, a Camelot-like moment. Understanding the context of ‘needs’ within our country during the process of design was the basic expectation from NID graduates. From 1963 to 1972, the Institute focused on conceptual development and implementation that addressed social priorities such as school furniture, smokeless chulah, public toilets, hospital trolleys, etc. However, since then NID’s direction has altered and it seems to have missed the opportunity to realise its initial goal.
The passing away of Dashrath confronts us with the hard reality of Indian design being trapped in a blind alley from which it will have to struggle to find the light. As Prof. M.P. Ranjan, among Dashrath’s early students, who just retired from the NID faculty writes in Pool magazine, “Dashrath’s passing heralds the end of an uncharted era of design action in India... The history of this epic journey is unfortunately yet to be written.” Ironically, top on Dashrath’s wish-list was to be able to write and tell his story. Perhaps now, it is his students and friends who can collectively narrate his story and restore that gap in the institution's memory in its fiftieth year.
The Dashrath Patel Museum in Alibagh, near Mumbai, houses his collected works. Created with the help of designer Pinakin Patel, it is open on weekends.
(Sadanand Menon is a writer and critic based in Chennai)