Future of Design Education within the Changing Cultural-Economy of India

Working Paper towards - Humanizing Design panel at  WDO Research and Education Forum on 10 October 2019.

Abstract -
"This paper explores challenges and negotiations faced by Indian Design education as it is poised to locate itself within the changing cultural economy of India, and the wave of globalisation that is sweeping higher educational structures. Design education in India is struggling to meet multiple inadequacies brought about by changes in the global culture and economy. The discipline is coping with the lack of sufficient theoretical knowledge base, the lack of major inputs on ecological sustainability, erratic exposure to design management and a struggle to keep up with digital-based technologyⁱ. At the same time, the process of privatisation has led to a readjustment of stakeholders, redefining the aims and functional realities of these design institutes. This is in parallel to the growing globalisation of education that is bringing about structural changes in pedagogy and assessment. As we grow and adapt into this flux, it is imperative to re-situate design education within the zeitgeist of a 21st century India.

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Once India became a signatory to the World Trade Organisation, (1994) , it became inevitable that the cultural; economy of India will be affected and inflicted by globalisation. This integration was not a sudden all encompassing process, but a change that came slowly, negotiating through the layers and structures of Nehruvian socialism. One of the sectors deeply affected by the socio-economic and political shifts has been the sector of Higher education. In the year 1995 World Bank published “Higher education: Lessons of Experience”. In many ways this report has had a long term impact in how higher education has been conceived, policed and funded. The report termed higher education as “a private and quasi- private good which allow students-consumer to command a better market for their skill”. A first step towards the implementation of this policy agenda has been the introduction of Establishment and Maintenance of Standards in Private Universities Regulations, 2003, UGC. By this time, the World Bank had revised its position and tabled the “Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education (2002)”¹. In this report higher education was again classified as a “public Good and there was a strong push to initiate public private partnerships while future through the Privatisation of Design education began after the 2002-3 era has begun to expand rapidly. This expansion makes it important for us to focus on its commitments to its stake holders and how design education today understands its cultural-economical role.

Though globalisation has brought in a strong need to de-localise educational methods, at the same time it becomes imperative to remember that different cultural-political-economic contexts need different responses and adaptations to globalisation. It important to acknowledge that though the technological and structural spread of globalisation has been all encompassing, its economic, technological and ecological impact on cultural economies has been varied. The largest private design universities in India are very new and in a constant struggle to refine curriculum, define systems and arrive at a sustainable pedagogy.² The first world economies had gone through this transition in the 80s through the 90s, and it was almost natural that many of the new design schools would be looking at universities in Europe and America to guide this transition. In India, Design itself was a new discipline , institutionalised only in the 1970’s. At that point, design was considered important to shaping a modern nation state and crucial for India’s search for self sufficiency in urbanisation and industrialisation. The scope of National Design Policy (2007) is much more ambitious. Among many goals it states it’s objective being “Making India a major hub for exports and outsourcing of designs and creative process for achieving a design-enabled innovative economy.³”

This policy is a good refection of the confusions in imagining design and design education , and a lack of roadmap in how the objectives and goals are to be attained. The NDP mirrors the aspirational culture of ‘new India’, but fails to theorise solutions. The word ‘innovation’ is used all over the document without quantifying, calls for a tremendous expansion of infrastructure and knowledge base without mapping the resources needed for an expansion. The document does not acknowledge that the discipline is coping with the lack of sufficient theoretical knowledge base, the lack of major inputs on ecological sustainability, erratic exposure to design management and a struggle to keep up with digital-based technology.

One of the key debating points of neo-liberal education has been around learning for learning sake and learning for employment's sake. As academic fees increase across board, education has become an economic investment (a shift away from its earlier existence an a knowledge and economic investment). Many design educators feel that an employment focussed design education takes away from long term concept building by promising immediate hard and soft skills requirements of the market. In a sense this a continuation of the older clashes between ‘technical education’ and ‘university education’. However, this takes a different meaning in the present scenario because in most scenarios, the structural/ institutional differentiations between universities and technical education institutes have lapsed into a composite whole. The problem has been compounded by us continuing to look at answers from the first world where neo-liberalism is older and infrastructural and cultural realities and completely different. However one very important thing that the National Design Policy does achieve is to align the needs of design education in India with the “Knowledge for Development,” World Bank 1998 report⁴. In the Indian context the push towards design as capital (away from design as function of manufacturing) is significant and crucial to the future design and its cultural-economic value.

Our excessive focus on the first world to guide our tryst with design education has lead to us ignoring the parallelly looking at models and experiences from Japan, China, Brazil, Mexico, South-Africa and other dominant-emerging economies where privatisation and neo-liberalism in higher education, particularly in design has been closer to our journey and have been going through their own journey balancing between delocalisation and localisation of design pedagogy⁵. Even today almost all private universities are focussed exclusively on Euro-America and do not engage with China, Japan or Brazil, countries who have made shaping design to be an effective tool for manufacturing as well as an independent capital accumulator. Our entanglement into the technical versus university debate has kept us away from important issues like the need to to rethink knowledge flow in a data saturated world and the need to reconfigure the position of craft in the future of design.

The modernist idea of design has been governed by the idea of a ‘significant form’ and aesthetic unity. The National Institute of Design formed its pedagogical practice based on these principals, and this perpetuates how design is taught and evaluated even today. This approach limits the role the design process into trying to arrive at a form-function harmony working within the principals of aesthetic unity. This model has a little understanding of design thinking as being separate from design process and is incapable of responding to the heterogeneity of taste cultures in post colonial societies. What we see as short term demands of the market could be the demand for a more diverse and non modular understanding of design itself and a simultaneous need to different approaches to form and concept.

Working within large scale privatization of policymaking creates challenges in situating the future of design education within the zeitgeist of the nation⁶. Yet, in a diverse nation like India, the solutions might come from moving away from the notion of a singular zeitgeist and instead to focus on a sustainable relationship between key stakeholders. Design education needs structural interventions through design thinking as there is an urgent need to reimagine business models and long term development goals of key institutes. A failure to do so risks loosing the recent growth of design education to an economic bubble and more dangerously to fail in our goal to become a country that exports design and design based solutions. Almost all institutes look at students as service consumers building their revenue models of increase of intake and fees.

A cursory deconstruction would lay bare the insubstantiality of this model as a business proposition and the tremendous continuous pressure it puts on infrastructure and resource building. Design schools can only become sustainable in terms of business models if they shift from an admission based to a content based revenue model. The kind of value incubation centres, patents and content design can achieve has the potential to surpass earning potentials of the admission and fees based model. However, this would require design schools to re configure their approach and focus on research, analysis and intellectual property rather than on employability creation. We need to understand and respect the market as the supreme appropriator and realise that it will in any case appropriate the training/education of design school graduates to meet its demands and there is more sustainability in centring design as a more conceptual and structural context. 

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1Neo-liberalism and Higher Education in India, Dr. Marami Goswami, Quest Journals Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Science, Volume1 ~ Issue 3 (2013) pp: 32-37

2 Chatterjee, A, Future of Design Education within the changing cultural economy of India, Design in India: The Experience of Transition. Design Issues, 21(4), 2005.

3National Design Policy , 2007

4 World Development Report, Knowledge for Development, World Bank, OUP, 1998.

5 Barbosa, Ana Mae. "Art Education in Brazil: Reality Today and Future Expectations." Visual Arts Research 16, no. 2 (1990): 79-88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20715734

6 Jayandhaya Tilak, The Privatisation of Higher Education, Prospectus, Council for Social Development, 1991.

i Chatterjee, A, Future of Design Education within the changing cultural economy of India, Design in India: The Experience of Transition. Design Issues, 21(4), 2005.

ii World Development Report, Knowledge for Development, World Bank, OUP, 1998.

iii Barbosa, Ana Mae. "Art Education in Brazil: Reality Today and Future Expectations." Visual Arts Research 16, no. 2 (1990): 79-88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20715734

iv Jayandhaya Tilak, The Privatisation of Higher Education, Prospectus, Council for Social Development, 1991.

A Magician and his offerings | Notes on Tambulam

Still, I Love You  -  Exhibition View 

I have been visiting Shridhar Iyer's studio over some years now, and every time I realise that it a very different kind of space, a kind we are not used to these days.  Most established artists have a very clear home studio distinction, and in this distinction, their homes have become much-sanitised spaces. However, every time I visit Shridhar Iyer's studio, I feel as if I have walked into a magician's house where life, art and spiritualism come into one melting pot, and a spell is being cooked or being imagined. The studio is an intrinsic part of his practice and his exploration of abstraction.  Over the years, the artist has taken up studios, built them from scratch, lived in them, produced shows, and then just let it all go...moving into a new place with just a suitcase and starting all over again. This reflects an artistic philosophy exploring the journey  between the possibilities of assimilation and letting go.  Over the last decade, Iyer has been working around the disconnect between nature and civilization, a disconnect which for the artist symbolises our inability to understand the forces of the universe and our place inside it. Tambulam, his new body of works is his offering to nature, as well as healing touch to the bonds which are on the verge of being lost forever.  

Shridhar Iyer is one of the rare modern masters whose works have been trendsetters for postmodern and contemporary art practices in India. Known to be one of the greatest living abstractionists in India, Iyer's art practice has always gone beyond pictorial abstraction and he is one of the earliest artists from the subcontinent to embrace installation and video as an integral part of his practice.  The artist explores pure contemplation on a spiritual level, almost as a window to the unknown energy and force of the universe.  His ability to rasp philosophical abstraction is extraordinary and his works show his painterly deftness as he juxtaposes strong and fragile colours in complete harmony.

"The lines and forms of tribal art always play with the idea of meaning and reality; the forms invent their own geometry based on their context, play and rhythm.  I realised that to be an artist, one has to go beyond mirroring reality and only through developing an extremely personal language, and one can generate new forms and meanings for the world.... what tribal art taught me is that through spontaneity and rhythm, lines could be transformed into something magical.  You could say that since then, the 'line' has become key to my artistic practice; it helps me to explore and understand my own imagination. Over the years I have grown to realise that possibilities of new forms and ideas are deeply embedded in the exploration of 'line'."

Shridhar Iyer

In Iyer’s artistic practice, there has always been an attempt to propose an alternative to the contemporary fascination with the spectacular image. Since his early days at Bharat Bhawan, though his paintings, drawings, videos and installations, Iyer has been a part of aesthetic trajectories which nurtured painterly abstraction as a mode to develope languages different from the figurative, data dense visual culture with images that are designed to jump at you, craving for that attention that bounces off into the recesses of your overfed conscious. His works have explored between chaos and calmness with an emphasis on tactility and playfulness.  This life lived in an overdose of spectacles has numbed our senses forever. When we travel we are busy clicking and hardly ever just seeing. Our eyes cannot rest and are constantly bored. In these times Iyer's works have offered us a different mode of seeing. This mode of seeing is not only operational in the viewer, but has had to be first digested by the artist.  The painted surface is not just a residue of pictorial mark making and rendering, it is also a reflection of the artist own gaze, the way he engages with the world, and how images form inside our head.  

                The manner in which he mixes his media, the self-consciousness about the aesthetic values of Form and possibilities of play, and the manner in which he appropriates the spiritual and the political into the ‘painterly’; speak of a deep entrenchment into the history of visual vocabularies. Deeply influenced by modernism and tribal art Iyer extends awareness of the historical/aesthetic frameworks of social consciousness and the subversion of the spectacular. This consciousness is significant it a time when aesthetic consciousness become marginal in the globalised imaginations and desires. The works celebrate a resistance to the homogenization of the human condition. It is this postmodern critique of contemporary, which strongly marks Tambulam as an artistic intervention.

The installations in the show are layered with prayer, wishes, nostalgia and love.  'Still, I Love You' and Ámia and Champa Trees are steeped in a sense of deep loss and endless hope.  This dialogue between hope and loss is a layering of Iyer's relationship with assimilating and letting go. Wood becomes an important metaphor and so do shadows. It is difficult to understand whether they stand in anticipation or in defeat, but both contain prayer and a song.  They are attempts of the artist to remind himself, stretch the envelope of his spirituality to be able to retain hope even as one remains a witness to the Anthropocene.  Yet, for the artist, there are no gaps between the personal, the spiritual and the political, he seeks to negotiate the space through beauty, balance and hope.

Tambulam is a complex body of work, a lot of it is in continuation of the artist's explorations over last five to six years, yet in this body, there are also seeds of the new directions where Iyer's practice is heading towards. His art is becoming more conceptual and one can see a conscious attempt to experiment with pushing the boundaries of drawing and painting as separate forms.  In his paintings, leisure and hints of boredom become fundamental to the experience of time and problems of meaning, creating that hint of tension between notions of existence, consumption and taste. The artist is able to arrive at the visual language that goes beyond exploring the self with the paint and the line as the primary tools, here we see artist trying to communicate the thin, almost invisible state of interdependence and order that guides all transitions of life.

Abstraction, for Iyer is not just a visual language, but a strategy that initiates dialogue compassion and understanding. In this respect, 'Tambulam' is not just a body of works, but a space which the artist offers, pushing us to rethink our relationship with the Anthropocene. The show presents drawings, paintings and installations stylistically ranging from gestural to minimal.  Iyer has always made art as a way of connecting to the cosmos, as an endeavour to expand his spiritual self. Yet nature is an integral part of the cosmos, and as the artist realises how fragile it has become, it brings out of Iyer a mellow, tender reaction, almost like singing a song to an ill parent, sad yet hopeful.  A large set of very fine drawings, largely monochromatic, aesthetically anchor the show. They are like gentle drifting, the marks on paper become a residue of the artist's process of seeing, hiding, masking, and preserving. The exhibition is carefully constructed through interplay of form, colour and media centered on the conceptual metaphors of nature and hope.  

Rahul Bhattacharya

Spring 2019

New Delhi

A Young Girl and the Moth Eaten Fakirs

A young girl, stood under a tree admiring the splendour, as a droopy battalion with an inflated phallus walked past the forest of moth-eaten fakirs. 

The moth-eaten fakirs stayed in the forests to be safe from the golden priests. 

Keeping the phallus on the spirit of the moth-eaten fakirs, the battalion wanted to march on.

The phallus needed to be kept safe as the battalion could not carry it anymore

The moth-eaten fakirs knew that this was the army of the golden priests. but they knew no anger, jealousy or fear. 

Yet, the battalion marched on, the neighbouring villagers feared that they need to learn how to make doors. 

The wars went on for long, raging high, especially on the nights when rains stroked the inflated phallus.

The battalion returned, with slaves and riches, they lost many men but those they will forget 

They wanted to reward the moth-eaten fakirs for keeping the phallus safe and inflated.

But the silken ceremonial shawls pricked their moth-eaten skin; this reward they could not take. 

Trained never to loose, the battalion lost control; 

The fearless moth-eaten fakirs were massacred. 

The forest wilted in shame and in rage, the phallus was swollen and ready to burst

A droopy battalion with an inflated phallus walked away from the forest of moth eating fakirs. 

The phallus had to be carried back home, it had become heavier with all the slaves and riches. 

Carrying the phallus proudly on their backs they marched towards the land of golden priests.

Carelessly plundering on the way, men, women, animals even children

Such stories go far and old, as gold lives longer than moth-eaten skin

But the land and the forest could take it no more

A young girl realized that she needed to learn how to make doors.

Carving a New Language : Indira Purakayastha Ghosh in Conversation with Rahul Bhattacharya

Publised in Art & Deal Magazine, Jan -  Feb 2019 

Over the last twenty years Indira Purkayastha has been practicing and evolving a sculptural language deeply engaged with nostalgia, materials and narration. Through these engagements she has developed a personal articulation of contemporaneity which is alternate to the neoliberal aesthetics which largely defines it. Purkayastha brings into focus our continuing engagement with modernism and its dialouge with the evolving contemporaneity in visual culture. Her works carry a memory of our folk cultures and their visual language without being overtly derivative if those traditions. There seems to be inherent connect with folk traditions and their idea of sympathetic magic. Purkayastha’s forms and their silence speak of an artist who is aware of the forces and memories that inform her work..... Rahul Bhattacharya speaks to her, mapping her practice, artistic journey and future directions.

R B: Could you please share with us your experience of practicing sculpture in the period of first five years after your completing your masters.

I P: After completing my Master from Benaras Hindu University, I moved to Kolkata and joined the Lalit Kala Regional Centre. I got the National scholarship (1994-96), then Junior Fellowship (1997-99) from Minis. of HRD. That helped me to stay and work form Kolkata for five years. These years were very important for me. Limitation of life – in bondages of space and time, of nature, of morality, of society, of tradition, of custom and religion – become imminent, which found a vent through my sculpture For a Place.

These five years was the fore step to shaping my experiences. My focus was towards experiments and learnings. I experimented with mediums. I visited villages of Kolkata & Chhattisgarh and arranged small camps. Fenced In & Cage were two of my works made that time.

In 1997-98, I worked with Vivan Sundaram in his large installation, Journey Towards Freedom at the Victoria Memorial, Kolkata.

R B: What were your early artistic inspirations?

I P: As a child I grew up in the foothills of Chhattisgarh playing with adivasi children.

This the experience grew seeds inside me, which grew to always connect me with the notion of purity and a beautiful sustainable relationship with the environment that comes to as an almost primordial language. My love for the subconscious innocence, the playful, and the narrative took roots within me during my childhood.

When I was fourteen I made my first collage and since then my works continues to be inspired by what I find around me. A defunct piece of furniture in my house was the starting point for my imagination in my quest to give visual form to my life experiences.

R B: Could you elaborate on the effect Banaras Hindu University had on shaping you as an artist.

I P: My ideas of outdoor large scale sculptures focused on skill and craftsmanship are inspired from the time I spent in the Faculty of Visual Arts at the Banaras Hindu University. My constant urge to improvise and narrate deep social stories coupled with the ability to conceptualize and craft the images, which manifest through my sculptures, have been imbibed by my guru, the legendary Balbir Singh Katt. My initial creations Gathering, Mob, Queue and Fenced In have been profoundly influenced by the lanes and the ghats of the mythological river Ganges, where I spent years doing sketches and indulging in addas.

R B: This year you have won the first prize at the Lalit Kala Nationals, sometime before that you had a large solo show – can you tell us a bit about your artistic expression in this period of your journey? Especially in terms of you working as a teacher and based in Raipur.

I P: The show Epiphany is a large body of work produced over seven years after I become an art teacher. Teaching exposed me to the power hierarchies of the knowledge industry, but also to the great power of the sub conscious mind and the vast power in children to explore fantasies, and create narratives, which are sincere and playful at the same time. The works showcased in Epiphany contain many such explorations and stories of power, play, inspirations and fantasies. The show is rich container of an adult’s struggle to imbibe to experience and articulate the emotions of children in a representational form.

Being based out of Raipur gives me an edge; it gives me a new imagination of contemporary life which is difficult to access from the centers of Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata. Chhattisgarh being a tribal state, has its own aesthetic tradition and visual culture, as a sculptor, I feel anchored by it. Being a teacher keeps me connected with children, playfulness and fantasies. The sculpture on which I got the National award this year is Assembly of Angels shows a factory like building representing an institution. One conveyor belt is goes through the building, on which baby ants are entering into the building from one door and coming out from another door of the building like grown up robotic ants.

The sculpture is a manifestation of my involvement with children. Ants have been used as a metaphor for the future denizens. Each one is endowed with differential abilities, but the education system fails to recognize the same. The result is assembly like production. The wheel with the handle is a depiction of systematic control driven by ideology.

R B: You seem to have a special relation with wood.

I P: When I was in my master some defunct pieces of old furniture brought uniqueness to my work. Wood has been preferred over other mediums because of its different colors, textural quality, monochromic impression and its amenability of space division. I started making shapes with wood pieces, pasting it according to the texture and different colors together, which make me very appealing. Still, I feel there are lot of possibility to work with wood, both as a concept and as a medium.

R B: In terms of how you blend your use of medium and concepts...

I P: In my works, medium and concept develope simultaneously, each exploring the other. I have always been interested in giving aesthetic forms to abandoned objects. I work with wood scraps of different colors and different textured, pasting together according to the shapes and concepts, in playful manner. I use metal scraps, wires, metal dust in many of my works. I blend metal to show strong sentiments and assert my feelings. These are the manifestations of the inherent strengths within all of us, which mostly lie dormant. I depicted the character of bird through Bamboo roots. Sometimes neglected parts of woods arouse in me significant thoughts. With gourd somewhere I tried to show lightness and sometimes i have used it to show heaviness too.

R B: Your works seem to have connection with folk and tribal elements.

I P: As a child I grew up in the hills of Chhattisgarh playing with adivasi children. The pure and fresh environment in all its phase took roots in my sensibilities and perceptions were naturalistic. This experience grew seeds inside me, which grew to always connect me with notion of purity and a beautiful and sustainable relationship with the environment that’s come to as an almost primordial language. Thus my works carry a memory of our folk cultures and their visual language.

The travails of pursuing my work in an alienated rural setting give a tribal impression to my sculpture.

Most of the tribal and folk art forms have been confined locally.I envisage spreading my works of art deep into Chhattisgarh in a contemporary manner. My vision is that, through my sculptures the folk art and tribal art forms of Chhattisgarhmay live ina global phenomena.

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Interview Publised in Art & Deal Magazine, Jan -  Feb 2019