A RCHITECTURE HE IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT JAWAHARLAL HAS HELD FELLOWSHIPS AT OF INDIAN IN 2001. THIS OXFORD AND SOAS (LONDON), BRITISH BOOK RESULTS FROM THE EXHIBITION BY THE SAME TITLE HELD UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE NEHRU MEMORIAL MUSEUM HE CURRENTLY HOLDS A AND LIBRARY, WHERE FELLOWSHIP. Devi Prasad’s ideals in art and in political activism, shaped though they may have been on Indian soil, led him to crisscross international borders. In 1962 he migrated to London to become Secretary General (later Chairman) of the War Resisters’ International, perhaps the oldest Pacifist organisation in the world in order to spread the Gandhian way of life internationally. Here his artwork underwent another transformation, cognisant of the realities of Western living. On his return to India in 1982, he began to work more concertedly on pottery: developing a community of studio-potters, their studios, tools and equipment. This book reveals, against a backdrop of Modern Indian history and international peace movements, how the worlds of ‘design’, craftsmanship and studio art were negotiated via a philosophical quest to bring about social change. devi prasad the making of a modern indian artist-craftsman: AND Apart from the making of his personal history and his times, this book leads us to why the creative act of making art itself takes on such a fundamental philosophical significance in his life — an ideal derived directly from his absorption of Gandhi’s principles. The purpose of art and life as they came to be realised by him, needed a change in the very approach people have toward work, which could only be achieved through a new philosophy of education. This book argues for an aesthetic basis for India’s freedom movement whereby the Arts and Crafts Movement’s pioneers like John Ruskin, William Morris, Charles Ashbee and William Lethaby impacted the writings and work of Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy as seen in the ideology of ‘Swadeshi’ — India’s rallying cry for Freedom and the artistic milieu of Santiniketan. Devi Prasad’s story, then, exemplifies the importance of the Arts and Crafts Movement in shaping the nature of Modernism in India. L ALIT K ALA the making of a modern indian artist-craftsman: devi prasad A KADEMI AND NEHRU UNIVERSITY, NEW DELHI. AND CURATORSHIP OF INDIAN SCULPTURE AT THE MUSEUM A RT ahuja NAMAN P. A HUJA Devi Prasad (1921–2011), India’s pioneering artist-potter, visionary educationist and pacifist, joined Santiniketan, India’s premier art school in 1938 when founder Rabindranath Tagore was still involved with the institution. At Nandalal Bose’s suggestion and following a correspondence with Gandhi in 1944 he joined Sevagram, Gandhi’s ashram, as Art Teacher, where he taught for nearly twenty years. His political consciousness saw him participate actively in the Quit India Movement in 1942 and in social reforms such as Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan — the land gift movement of the 1940s and 1950s. naman p. ahuja ` 2495 ISBN 978-0-415-60229-7 912 Tolstoy House 15-17 Tolstoy Marg Connaught Place New Delhi 110001 9 780415 602297 jacket design by incarnations For  sale  in  South  Asia  only Illustration 4. Cover Dreaming Watching Lizards detail Tempera on paper Dehra Dun 1944 Illustration 111. Back Cover Vase detail Earthenware Sevagram Early 1950s PREFACE      |      3 the making of a modern indian artist-craftsman devi prasad naman p. ahuja with contributions by krishna kumar, kristine michael, bob overy & sunand prasad LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI PREFACE      |      3 PREFACE      |      5 First published 2011 in India by Routledge 912 Tolstoy House 15-17 Tolstoy Marg Connaught Place New Delhi 110001 IN ASSOCIATION WITH Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park Abingdon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business CONTENTS PREFACE     9 CREATING  THE  SENSIBILITY  OF  THE  MODERN   INDIAN  ARTIST-CRAFTSMAN:     SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT 11 MAKING  A  GANDHIAN  UTOPIA:  ART,  DESIGN  &     PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM   65 With an essay: A THEORY by Krishna Kumar This book has been published in conjunction with an exhibition with the same title held at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi in May 2010 © 2011 Naman P. Ahuja of the text except that of individual authors where cited OF EDUCATION FOR PEACE ON ART: THE BASIS OF EDUCATION AND ON GANDHI’S SATYAGRAHA by Devi Prasad A  PEACEFUL  WORLD  IS  A  CREATIVE  WORLD:   ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL 135 With an essay: A PACIFIST EXPERIMENT: DEVI PRASAD’S YEARS WRI IN LONDON by Bob Overy WITH © Devi Prasad of all artwork including his paintings, photographs and pottery included herein, reproduced here with permission ON A NEW SOCIETY, ON PEACE, EDUCATION & CREATIVITY ON WAR RESISTANCE by Devi Prasad AND All original photography of Devi Prasad’s artworks by Sukhad and Naman Ahuja A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT   All dingbats and printer’s ornaments come from Devi Prasad’s graphic design sketchbooks ON Typeset in ITC Garamond by Incarnations Printed and bound in India by XXXXX All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-415-60229-7 Illustration 1. end papers Vase two views Semi porcelain with painted brushwork of three women with baskets H 30 cm Ireland 1971 (on a visit to John ffrench’s studio) Illustration 2. inside end paper Platter detail of Illustration 204 Stoneware with slip trailing Diam 27 cm London 1974 Stamped ‘dp’ on base Illustration 3. page two-three Plucking Jamun detail of Illustration 52 Tempera on paper 18 x 26 cm Santiniketan 1939 Illustration 4. TEKIJSYV½ZI Self-portrait Dreaming Watching Lizards Tempera on paper 73 x 43 cm Dehra Dun 1944 Illustration 5. this page Darjeeling a postcard Brushwork and watercolour on paper 7.75 x 13.75 cm Darjeeling circa 1944 223 by Kristine Michael THE INDIAN POTTER by Devi Prasad COMING  FULL  CIRCLE   279 APPENDICES   289 Further Extracts of Select Writings of Devi Prasad: ON TAGORE’S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION ON TAGORE AND EDUCATION ON CHILD EDUCATION ON CHILD ART ON PEACE EDUCATION A  BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF  DEVI  PRASAD’S  WRITINGS   301   ON  THE  EXHIBITION’S  DESIGN   307 SELECT  BIBLIOGRAPHY   310 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS   313 A  NOTE  ON  THE  AUTHORS   315 INDEX   316 PREFACE      |      9 PREFACE The Arts and Crafts Movement threw up several personalities whose works have been often revisited by scholarship. While most works on the legacy of this Movement in the Indian context have looked at how it guided Government policy, or the creation of the Arts Schools of India, little exists by way of the contribution of individual artists. Devi Prasad is one among them. His work has been panoramic both in terms of the variety of the mediums he used in art, as well as his achievements in the fields of education and political pacifism. They arose from seemingly divergent streams of thought: one emerging from Santiniketan, the other being Gandhianism. It is proposed in this book to show that, apart from any other philosophies of the time which have been discussed by several others, both these streams owed also as much to the Arts and Crafts Movement. Devi always sought to integrate elements of these ideas which were not contrary, but mutually complementary. This book strives to present that complementariness. Devi does not approve of the intellectualisation of art making, the very project of this book. He does not believe in the ‘isms’ that art history creates, problematises and ends up critiquing, while bracketing an artist’s peaceful joy of making one way and then another! And yet, for an art historian, art practice once contextualised lends light equally to history and to the very context itself in which an artist’s work exists. My endeavour in the following text is to hopefully provide a sympathetic reading of the context in which Devi’s work may be appreciated. In accepting that ‘India’ has never had any singular notion of ‘nation’ as it has no singular notion of ‘tradition’, artists have elected differing notions of these constituents in their modern and contemporary art practice. For Devi, art experience was most concretely formed out of the Sevagram and Santiniketan philosophies that comprised the most persuasive brand of ‘national’ language and one to which freedom fighters like him turned. His quiet determination and spirit for peace has seen him actively shape the political voice of conscionable human activism for the past sixty years. Devi Prasad is known as one of the great Indian artist-potters. He is also well-known as an activist, pacifist, educator and writer. His ceramic works have been collected and shown in India and Britain. However, few are aware of the variety and extent of his work. Devi has rarely shown his paintings in public, although he was trained as a painter by India’s foremost modern artists. He has only exhibited a small fraction of his prolific work as a photographer, and as yet there has never been compiled a comprehensive bibliography of his publications on matters concerning education, pacifism, Gandhian thought, art and politics. Illustration 6. facing page Palash Flowers with a Bird Tempera on paper 14 x 22 cm Santiniketan 1940 As we move toward concretising a national policy on culture for a liberalised India, we can look upon the period from the 1930s to the 60s with historical hindsight. Gandhian and Tagorean definitions of cultural practice, even in the latter’s cosmopolitanism, was avowedly located in philosophical bases at the grassroots, with roots that stretched via Coomaraswamy and others to the context of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The resulting ideology for artisanship and design was founded in a structure of educational pedagogy which certainly stands buried today, even if its mandate has not been achieved. In this book, I trace one man’s journey across this terrain. 10      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      11 CHAPTER  I CREATING  THE  SENSIBILITY  OF  THE  MODERN  INDIAN  ARTIST-CRAFTSMAN:   SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      13 INTRODUCTION In the history of modernism in India there is a neglect of the role of Arts and Crafts and, paradoxically, even in the international arena there is almost an omission of the modern histories of the legatees of the Arts and Crafts Movement’s pioneers in India. This, after all, was the very Movement that was profoundly impacted by Eastern (Chinese, Japanese and Indian) art, artisanship and aesthetic philosophy. The foundations of the Arts and Crafts Movement looked to models of art practice in places like India, and that the impact of their polemics formed a basis for modernism itself is well known. Sadly, major international exhibitions in recent times on the Arts and Crafts Movement have rarely engaged with it beyond the Euro-American sphere. Examination of the constituents of this Movement in India has been a matter overlooked by scholarship. In her monumental 2005 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Wendy Kaplan set out the history and ideals of the Arts and Crafts that showed the inexorable link between ‘Design and National Identity’ that arose from the philosophies of ‘Art and Industry’ and ‘Art and Life’.1 As that exhibition’s catalogue demonstrates, in all countries involved, the idea of ‘the land’ was a potent force; one to be reclaimed as industry and urbanisation were destroying time-honoured social modes and relations of production, and destroying also a pastoral (if, as some argue, a ‘medieval’) idyll. Equally, the currency of the Movement gained as the emerging ideas of ‘nationhood’ depended on holding on to some essential place considered the heart of the nation. Tagore and Gandhi both tried to locate that essential ‘place’ in their ideologies and in each of their ashrams – Santiniketan and Sevagram – places with which Devi Prasad was intimately connected. I would like to extend an interpretation of his work here to trace a specific lineage to the Arts and Crafts Movement and Devi Prasad’s construal of it on Indian ground. Several art historians have explained different facets of the new ‘Nationalist’ claims being made of Indian art in the early twentieth century and how the intellectual gravitas for this at Santiniketan, at least, came variously through Tagore, Coomaraswamy, Okakura, Sister Nivedita and E.B. Havell. But Indian art history seems surprisingly content in exploring these matters through a narrow definition of ‘art’ as being oil painting and then other high art practices which seldom go beyond painting and sculpture, and more recently, to cinema and the performing arts. The way early modernism affected craft has Illustration 7. previous page Baul Tempera on paper 19.5 x 27 cm Santiniketan 1944 Illustration 8. facing page Self-portrait Coloured pencil on paper 8.75 x 14 cm Santiniketan 1941 1 Wendy Kaplan’s goal is to shed light on how artists in what she calls the ‘peripheral’ countries of Europe used handmade craft and the vernacular not just to ward off industrialisation but also to promote local political identity and autonomy. Wendy Kaplan (et al.), The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America: Design for the Modern World, Thames and Hudson, London, 2004. 14      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      15 to be understood in light of the combination of features of the artistic development of its early protagonists or pioneers. Modern art historians’ debates around nationalism take readers down the route of Swadeshi2 artisanship and the polemics of traditionalism vs. modernism, but rarely is the legacy of this debate articulated on how it was turned into art practice either by the traditional artist, by those working in art and design and, as we will see here, those working in ceramics. This, despite the fact that it was the extolling of worlds of traditional art and craft that had provided the intellectual stimulus for Swadeshi. Thus we find in the historiography of Indian artist-craftsmen a curious gap, particularly for the period between the 1940s and 70s. The period preceding it is historicised as being rich in a ‘national’ discourse. ‘Culture’, ‘craft’, ‘artisan’ and ‘village industry’ had been catch-words since the 1851 Great Exhibition, through the Arts and Crafts Movement and even through the arguments on fashioning the art schools of India.3 Yet while most celebrated students of those art schools became canonised in India’s history of modern ‘art’, the Arts and Crafts inheritance via Swadeshi and Gandhian values became matters glossed over: without individual histories of artist-craftsmen. Instead, their domain remained one studied under craft revivalism or authenticity that was at the level of Government policy for handicrafts and artisans. Nationalist art, for example, as Kristine Michael says later in this volume, promoted the use of traditional or indigenous motifs much as the Indian art school craft revival for the early Great Exhibitions where ornamentation and form of extant styles was revived to be marketed as a separate category for urban consumers as against a living craft form for a people who used it every day of their lives. Devi Prasad, however, is neither a traditional craftsman, nor is he the type of modernist with an immediately visible signature style. His early pottery at Sevagram was in terracotta – a choice governed by the ethos of Gandhi’s education philosophy and the use of local materials, resources, and market within the needs and availability of the locality whence it comes. Several practitioners of the early twentieth century studio pottery movement have believed they were both craftsmen and artists, combined in the one ceramist or potter who tries to strike a balance between the unselfconscious functional vessel-making tradition of pottery and the acceptance by the established hierarchy of the ‘high art’ mediums of painting and sculpture. 2 Swadeshi, literally ‘born of one’s country’ or ‘indigenous’, became a movement in the Indian struggle for Independence. It promoted an economic programme to make India self-sufficient. It was committed to the promotion of Indian industry and culture. For Gandhi it became a means to achieve self-rule; for Coomaraswamy, it was founded in an aesthetic movement that drew from the ideas of the Arts and Crafts milieu. Illustration 9. A Woman Sketch 9 x 13.9 cm Santiniketan 1939 Illustration 10. facing page A Javanese Dancer Woodcut print 12 x 18.5 cm Santiniketan 1940 3 A recent critique of the effects of the colonial enterprise in Indian crafts by looking at the lives of the individual celebrated Indian craftsmen in the Victorian era is to be found in Saloni Mathur, India by Design, Colonial History and Cultural Display, University of California Press, 2007. 16      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      17 In his exhibition catalogue essay on Dashrath Patel, one of the founders of the National Institute of Design, Sadanand Menon notes the diametrically contrary trajectory Indian design took to the whitepaper submitted to the Government by Charles and Ray Eames who had come to assess the path and state of Indian design at Nehru’s invitation.4 In his recent effort to address the declining state of the ‘creative industries’ in India, Rajeev Sethi has argued that the many disparate administrative and ministerial heads under which they lie presently are coalesced. He lists the fractured nature of Indian development: ‘Our founding fathers, enthused by the challenge of setting up a modern industrialized nation, could not ignore the scales of development initiatives and the “layering” of delivery systems, impacting a country with five lakh villages. Since independence we have tried various combinationprescriptions. The Ministry of Industries fostered a Department of Cottage Industries.... Textiles had to look after Handlooms… the Department of Handicrafts came under the then Ministry of Foreign Trade, and now for some reason is under Textiles…. Khadi, seemingly autonomous, was tossed around in an attempt to nurture a dream blurred by subsidy and sentiment…. The food processing industry, another giant where decentralized, artisanal production is a systemic strength, still hasn’t come into its own… indigenous cosmetics and pharmaceuticals go here and there... and there is little that the Ministry of Urban Development and Poverty Alleviation has been expected to do to nurture traditional building arts skills... the ad hoc, multiwindow approach of the past has not yielded the kind of impact that this huge sector deserves.’5 The root of Sethi’s present dilemma is one that has actually been at the forefront of the very expectation of artisanal industries in India and other parts of the world, i.e. how they can be rid of Government subsidy, retain tradition and be married to commerce. One must recall that while commerce is a determinant in today’s economically ‘liberalised’ discourse on artisan practice, its needs and relevance were quite differently perceived in Gandhian terms, and in the period from Independence onward when those ideals defined the handicraft industry at least until the end of the 1970s.6 But why is any of this relevant to a contextualisation of Devi Prasad? I mention it for two reasons. First, he talks of these matters himself and I shall quote him extensively 4 Sadanand Menon, In the Realm of the Visual: Dashrath Patel, Exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 1998, pp. 86–89. Charles and Ray Eames had famously extolled the shape of the Indian lota and terracotta ghara as a quintessential design classic: functional, aesthetic, organic/renewable and universally affordable. 5 Rajeev Sethi,‘Towards a National Policy’, Seminar No. 553, September 2005. 6 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was one of the principal guiding forces behind the crafts policy of Independent India. Her assessments of the crafts sector can be found in Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Handicrafts of India, ICCR Delhi, revised edn. 1985; her autobiography called Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces, Navrang Publishers, Delhi, 1986; and The Glory of Indian Handicrafts, revised edn. Clarion Books, Delhi, 1985. For a summary biography of her work in the crafts sector, see Jasleen Dhamija, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, National Book Trust, Delhi, 2007, pp. 66–98. Illustration 11. Fetching Water Tempera on paper 23 x 30 cm Santiniketan 5 May 1943 Illustration 12. facing page Rajput Painting Malwa style Tempera on paper 23 x 30 cm Sevagram 1955 18      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      19 in this book, and second, because I wish to highlight the difficulty in positioning his work. Because of his reluctance to present his work for sale in ‘galleries’ until the late 1970s, he never entered the economy of Indian art. Because of the eclectic internationalism of his work, he remained out of the economy of traditional craft. Even when he started pricing and selling his pottery, he was always careful to price his work extremely modestly – far below the expected standards of his contemporary art market. This was very much in keeping with his philosophy, and perhaps can act as an exemplar for the contemporary artist-craftsman milieu, a liminal space between the expected worlds of ‘artisan’ and ‘modern artist’. Like Devi, there exist a slew of practitioners whose learning and making may be founded in gharanas/traditions and yet has individual expression and individualised studio-practice. Thus the work of an artist such as Devi Prasad cannot be compartmentalised in an arena of Indian artisanship and traditionalism alone, nor is it to be judged only in the arena of the modern with its concomitant onus of individualism. His work at the grassroots, especially during the eighteen years he spent at Sevagram, exemplified the aspiration for implementing Gandhian models. While Gandhi considered the change in handicrafts as a means for mobilisation, economic freedom, empowerment of the people, Coomaraswamy or Tagore had of course never thought of it in that way; even if in the kernel of the concept of Swadeshi they shared some similarities. At Sevagram, Devi realised self-sufficiency in the ashram’s artwork. He ‘taught’ by sharing the processes, means and fruits of making ‘art’ or ‘craft’. And yet, in that context continued his own private work as a contemporary potter, photographer and painter who continued receiving at Sevagram the cosmopolitan international spirit that his almamater Santiniketan had opened up to him. This may, at first glance, seem disconsonant: is he a traditional artisan, working in Gandhi’s ashram, or a modern studio artist? In the following pages we see how the pressing nature of this debate was articulated and negotiated by Devi both as an art practitioner and equally as an activist who expresses his beliefs through his work as a War Resister, an educator and writer. As any conscionable artist knows, this negotiation is never just a theoretical one. At some stage, even the most highthinking artist must contend with commerce – procuring mediums, tools, and pricing, exhibiting and marketing his works – processes which define the art/craft divide. These questions are perhaps more easily resolved in the Western and Far Eastern contexts where the status of the artist-craftsman has a more secure footing; but what was the practical translation of the Arts and Crafts Movement’s ideologies on Indian soil? Illustration 13. Dancing Peacock Copy of a Japanese woodcut print Watercolour on paper 14.5 x 34 cm Santiniketan circa 1940 20      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      21 As Kristine Michael says, ‘Modernist discourses in Indian art have constructed a paradoxical view of such artworks – a “double” discourse, sometimes seeing them as progressive signs, at other times condemning them as conservative, traditional and not sufficiently progressive to shift the craft into the realms of “high” art. This paradoxical position is regarded as typical of India’s particular form of modernism and cultural development. In understanding the synthesis of Devi Prasad’s relationship with both “high” and “low” art as well as “design”, we can follow the story of the ceramic object into twenty-first century India.’ 7 As mentioned, these questions were not lost to Devi and he himself articulates his position: There surely is a great confusion in our country about industrially produced pottery and studio pottery. There is even greater confusion about the Khurja type of pottery and studio pottery. Let me try to explain what I think the difference is between industrialised pottery and studio pottery... each piece of a set made by the studio potter, although similar in general looks, even if it is not of a high quality, will have its own individual personality. Generally, when one, who is familiar with the art of pottery, picks up a pot, she or he will try to see its individuality, which it has imbibed from the spirit and hands of the maker. This also enhances the monetary standard of the items. The fact that in our case we are bound to handle each piece during every process of its coming into being has its own importance. Even if one considers only the labour factor our work involves much more work and attention by the time it is completed, hence it does and should fetch a few more paisas for the maker! And if the work is really of good craftsmanship and of aesthetical value it must be treated with greater respect. ... As part of the modern renaissance, the revival of arts made an influence, although late, on “handicrafts” too. At the same time Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy and active programme of total liberation covered almost every aspect of the life of the people. To begin with the art of textile in the form of khadi became a symbol of national freedom. Gradually it developed into a grassroots revival of nearly all the handicrafts. After the attainment of freedom new organisations like the Cottage Industries and the Khadi and Village Industries Board came into existence. These bodies helped the crafts and craftspeople to engage in activities with all sorts of available raw materials. Many dying crafts were revived. In particular, textile, which remained at a high qualitative level. It took some time for other crafts to rise out of their graves.... Pottery also drew attention from these organisations. On the one hand it was important to help the traditional potter who made everyday household items such as gharas, surahies and votive artefacts. And on the other hand there were [already] some traditions of low temperature glazed pottery which had come to India via the 7 Kristine Michael, in the original unedited version of the chapter ‘Full Circle’ written for this volume, 2010. Illustration 14. A Face Study Watercolour on paper 9 x 14 cm Santiniketan 1944 Illustration 15. facing page Fetching Water Over a Pond Tempera on paper 31 x 22 cm Santiniketan 1941 22      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      23 Middle East. The major centres of this category of pottery were Khurja, Chunar, and Jaipur. These were nearly dying, but with the new spirit they also got some patronage and were brought to life again... I need not and should not go into the historical and technical details here. But I should mention something about the process of the deterioration of standard of these handicrafts. Two things happened. Gradually handicrafts were transformed into dollar earning industry, thus changing their social and aesthetic value. At the beginning, when the handmade pottery industry drew the attention of the revivalists, it received serious attention and the movement tried to help the potter with significant success. It tried to improve the economic conditions of the artisan families. It [i.e. their intervention] was more or less limited to the technical aspect of the craft, not so much its aesthetics. Looking at the socio-economic aspects of national development it was quite understandable. But, with the indiscriminate growth of industrialisation, not only pottery but also every handicraft became a commodity for the rich and profit-making exporter. It tended to become mechanical and therefore it engaged more labourers than artist craftspeople, some fairly skilled ones. The crucial question now is: Which way do we want to go? Continue with the present development policy which has little appreciation of the creative genius of the traditional potter. Or, revolutionise the development philosophy by marrying technology with socio-political change. Understand the importance of the Indian potter’s creativity. Help him win back his raw material, his market, his dignity. Help him with the technological know-how which will minimise the drudgery involved in his profession and that will improve the quality of life for his family. Give him ideas and strength to produce new things without becoming dependent on centralised agencies and which will not require fundamental alterations in his way of operation... Looking at the ceramic magazines one can understand the temptation of the studio potter to imitate and be attracted by the novelty aspects of such items created in North America and some European countries. We seem to be catching up fast. If that kind of creativity can entice even the Japanese it is understandable that the Indians do the same! …I must say in haste, lest I am misunderstood, that to deviate from one’s tradition can be very creative, but how do you do that is my question. By imitating or by discovering? May be both! Illustration 16. Flowers Watercolour on paper 19 x 30 cm Dehra Dun 1944 Illustration 17. facing page Sketch for a Painting Watercolour on paper 8.5 x 13.25 cm Santiniketan 1944 Style is an increasingly personal matter, specially today, when the strict application of traditions of schools is becoming less and less important for self-expression. Even within the musical gharanas in India following the set traditions is becoming 24      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT increasingly lenient. A creative musician deviates from the set traditional style, adds something of his or her own, which enriches the style of the gharana. Whatever a musical genius produces becomes an integral part of that gharana itself. Same is true to a great extent about visual arts such as painting, pottery, sculpture, architecture or blacksmithy etc. I think the pre-set traditional forms of gharanas and their styles will become less and less rigid making the path of the genuine artist wider and wider all the time. I am too orthodox to believe that the individual’s personality will no longer have anything to do with his or her creativity. I hope that the creativity in the art world will always enhance all the beautiful aspects of the traditional forms of art. Nonetheless, I know that the most important criteria of good art are the sensibility of the individual artist, his or her creativity and the way of looking SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      25 and feeling about the vast world we live in and our behaviour with it.8 Clearly, Devi upholds both, a fetishistic aura for the artistcraftsman’s work in contradistinction to that which is even made in large-scale workshops, yet, in positioning his work as being monetarily commensurate with his efforts equal to his modest needs, he self-consciously implements Gandhian ideas. The terms ‘craftsman’, ‘heritage’ and ‘tradition’ are as fraught as defining what is meant when people use ‘artist’, ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’. How are these terms to be resolved in the context of Devi Prasad? This question itself forms a sort of sub8 Devi Prasad, ‘Clay my Friend’, unpublished in its entirety, but an edited version accompanied his Exhibition catalogue at Art Heritage, 1997. text to this book, providing yet another, perhaps less studied, trajectory that India has taken to ‘Modernism’. Devi, who was a diligent student, copied, sketched and photographed art historically significant sculptures and paintings from museums and sites all over India. But that does not mean that labels of ‘heritage’ and the ‘traditional craftsman’ can never be applied to his work or to him. He respected both; both, after all, helped him develop a practical method for living a life that looked toward Gandhi for its values. In this book we will see how Gandhi himself came to define these terms from a wide variety of impulses, significant among which were the social, cultural and economic philosophies of the late nineteenth century. And whereas the ‘craftsman’ became squarely involved in the politics of Freedom in the early twentieth century, Devi was certainly not the type of ‘Indian craftsman’ who found himself as a preserver of heritage, paraded in exhibitions all over the world. Nor was he bound by time-honoured methods of production that were encoded in religion and nor was he afraid of embracing machinery and technology. It is the path he tread of interpreting studio art-practice via Gandhianism, ballasted by strong and articulate writings on his ethical philosophy, that allow art historians to witness an important interstitial definition of Modern-Artisanship for India between the modernising pacifist, secular and social imperatives for a New India and the harnessing of the localised traditional knowledge and practice of art and craft. Illustration 18. A Bridge Over a Canal Watercolour on paper 30 x 23.25 cm Santiniketan 1943 Illustration 19. facing page Rainy Day Watercolour on paper 30 x 23 cm Santiniketan 1943 Illustration 20. next page Baul detail of Illustration 7. Tempera on paper 19.5 x 27 cm Santiniketan 1944 Illustration 21. Fetching Water Over a Pond detail of Illustration 15. Tempera on paper 31 x 22 cm Santiniketan 1941 26      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      27 28      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      29 EXCAVATING  AN  ARTS  &  CRAFTS  IDEOLOGY  IN   DEVI  PRASAD Devi Prasad was born on October 8, 1921, a second son to Ramanand Bajaj and Ramkali Ramanand in Dehra Dun. His father was a successful cloth merchant who died when Devi was only four and his elder brother Brijendra Kumar seven. Devi went to the local school which he hated and on completing the sixth standard he joined lower secondary section of the DAV Intermediate College. He did not care much even for his bi-weekly drawing classes, though the weekly carpentry class excited him. But the real story of Devi’s joy in making things starts by noting his mother’s sublime proficiency in domestic crafts. She was, as their family lore has it, a brilliant cook, and made the most perfect choolhas, the charcoal burning stoves made and remade in the kitchen. She would also fashion implements like brooms. It seems that the young Devi was a natural too and loved helping out, for example, with the clay decorations for festivals. When he was ten or eleven, wandering in the bazaar he and his brother found in a junk shop a bucket full of perforated coloured metal strips and plates with assorted brass wheels, little nuts, bolts, clips and connectors. Printed on some of the pieces was the word ‘Meccano’ and somewhere the address, Binns Road, Liverpool 13. Devi in particular became a zealous maker of Meccano and would send off for parts to make up whole kits with assembly instructions. He says that this was an early element in his lifelong love of ‘making’. Encouraged in his increasing interest in art by his elder brother, Brijendra Kumar, Devi soon decided to apply to art school and received many rejections. He had not however applied to Santiniketan because after reading Tagore’s My School, he gathered the impression that it must have been a special place for rishis and rajas and would almost certainly never receive him. It was a complete surprise thus when the Kala Bhavana prospectus arrived in the post one day, unsolicited. A classmate had told his uncle, a Hindi teacher at Santiniketan, of his friend’s interest in going to art school. He applied, but here too, Devi received a letter informing him that there was no place in the University. A few months later, Devi received a hand-written postcard from Nandalal Bose saying a place had become available and that he must reach Santiniketan by November 15, 1938. Devi’s mother had brought her sons up in an environment of freedom. Unlettered, but wise and by all accounts a true artist in spirit, she watched with love her sons take their independent and deeply politically charged paths. At Santiniketan the naïve young Deviprasad Gupta [sic] was personally received by Acharya Nandalal Bose who showed him round the art school. Almost at once he encountered the compassion and wisdom of the great artist and teacher and this instant demolition of conventional hierarchical assumptions is one of a number of formative encounters that Devi had with some towering figures of twentieth century Indian art and politics whose influence he consistently acknowledges: Tagore and Gandhi above all, but also Nandalal Bose, Benodebehari Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij, Vinoba Bhave and Jayprakash Narayan. From these diverse currents he has formed his own all-embracing theory of culture and a just, creative and peaceful society. Brijendra Kumar, Devi’s elder brother, was by this stage already entrenched in the Communist Party. He was instrumental in forming the Saharanpur and Dehra Dun chapters of the Communist Party and led the movement for the independence of Tehri Garhwal. Devi and Brijendra Kumar had both dropped their surnames as an anti-caste move. Brijendra Kumar retained a close identification with the political struggle of the hill regions of UP, going underground for several periods to avoid arrest and at times even succumbing to arrest. It was much later in 1972 that P.C. Joshi would recognise the role Brijendra Kumar would be able to play in the creation of ‘Uttarakhand’ as a separate state in India, something that only came to happen in 2000. Much of the motivations behind Devi’s actions and convictions can perhaps be traced to his close rapport with his brother. Their’s was a relationship built on a profound respect for each other’s beliefs even if one personally disagreed with the other’s: one had after all become a major communist leader and the other an active Gandhian. Disagreements were several, but debates, however heated, were always without rancour. In Santiniketan he studied drawing and painting while the independence struggle, from which no thinking young man could be separate, came to a fever pitch. He took six months out from college in 1942–43 to join the Quit India Movement launched by Gandhi with a stirring call to all freedom, exhorting Indians to leave work and study to ‘Do or Die’. The movement brought him into direct contact with the Gandhian world and he heard about Sevagram, the self-sufficient experimental educational community founded by Gandhi near Wardha (Maharashtra) at the geographical centre of India and the junction of the north-south and east-west railway trunk routes. Devi worked under Mahatma Gandhi from 1942 to 1947 and participated in various non-violent social reform movements such as the Quit India Movement and Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan Illustration 22. facing page Ramkali Ramanand Devi’s mother Carding cotton Dehra Dun circa 1950 30      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      31 Illustration 23. Three Postcards from Nandlal Bose to Devi-Prasad Obverse and Reverse 8.75 x 14 cm 1940 and 1947 /Gramdaan Movement amongst others, both before and after Independence. In 1944, he joined Gandhi’s ashram, Sevagram, where he spent eighteen years as an artist, an art teacher, worked on a philosophy of child art and educational practice and also edited Nai Taleem 9 till 1962. significantly, became a potter. And for this he was a disciple in equal measure of local Indian kumhars and Bernard Leach’s influential A Potter’s Book. Leach, as we know, was one of the most celebrated exponents of the Arts and Crafts sensibility, harnessing the traditional worlds of Japan (with Shoji Hamada) and the lost traditions of England, to create elegant, utilitarian wares. His work as an artist was ballasted by his many writings that established his pottery practice as part of a wider ideological means for designing a lifestyle.11 Nandalal Bose’s parting message to Devi at Santiniketan was a drawing of a horse and cart [illustrated above] with the explanation ‘One of the two wheels of the cart is made by Gurudev (Tagore) and the other by Mahatmaji (Gandhi). You are in the driver’s seat. The horses are your energy and the reins are your mind.’10 Devi steered his horses to the Hindustani Talimi Sangh (Indian Education Society set up in 1938 to provide basic education) at Sevagram which offered the perfect field for putting into practice emergent ideas about not only education but the shape of the future India and Devi’s special contribution would be to promulgate a neo-Tagorean vision of art, a field hitherto virtually absent, as we have seen, from Gandhian thought. It was also in Sevagram that Devi took his work as an amateur photographer more seriously: he became a Life Member of the Federation of Indian Photography shortly after the society was launched in 1953 and a Life Member of the Royal Photographic Society (UK) in 1959. He started a carpentry workshop, continued painting and perhaps most Leach was to become a significant influence in Europe and America in the 1950s and 60s counter-culture, the very period that Devi too was affected by him.12 Devi says that the providential finding of A Potter’s Book in the Sevagram library was a turning point in his life. He embraced it with ease. Devi would not actually get to meet Leach until much later in life in 1972, but both men were products of very similar intellectual milieus, finding tremendous commonality in their respective practice suited to their environments. Leach’s practical absorption of Japanese art was not so different from how Santiniketan had itself developed such ‘Eastern’ aesthetics; this, and for all the other reasons, is why we can situate Devi within the paradigm of a modern-artist craftsman, an inheritor of the Art and Craft design movement in an Indian context. 9 The tenets of Nayee Taleem or ‘New Education’ are explained in the following chapter. Widespread usage has made ‘Nai Talim’ and ‘Nayee Talim’, both, strictly speaking mistransliterations, acceptable. It should, correctly, be ‘Nayı- Ta-lı-m’. I shall use the rather old-fashioned: Nayee Taleem in my own text, and refer, in others’ quotations to the spelling they have used. 11 Bernard Leach, A Potter’s Book, Faber & Faber, London, 1978 (reprint of 1940); Beyond East and West: Portraits and Essays, Faber & Faber; London, 1985 (new edition). 10 Widely quoted in Devi Prasad’s writings including Art:The Basis of Education, National Book Trust edition, Delhi, 1998, p. xxxxi. The drawing made by Nandalal Bose during that conversation is visible on this page. 12 A similar history can be seen in the work of the potter Gurcharan Singh. See: Lal, Anupa and Anuradha Ravindranath (eds.), Pottery and the Legacy of Sardar Gurcharan Singh, Delhi Blue Pottery Trust, New Delhi, 1998. 32      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      33 THE  AESTHETIC  ROOTS  OF  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  IN  SWADESHI   AND  INDIAN  NATIONALISM Devi Prasad is to be located in the milieu of the aesthetic philosophies of Coomaraswamy, Tagore and Gandhi, and he was personally in touch with the latter two. But here we must realise that in their details, the nature of these three individual’s ideas were in fact at variance, and could not be accepted all together without consciously seeking out a common rationale. Tagore’s philosophy and Santiniketan were borne of a wide range of intellectual discourses; Gandhi and Coomaraswamy’s no fewer. Yet it is this triumvirate’s negotiation that impacts the creation of at least one type of Indian national Modern. Devi Prasad is born of that negotiation, refracted as it was directly through Nandalal Bose. Defining the nature of Indian Modernism has concerned several academic tomes; often the contentious definition of Modernism in India comes out of the questioning of the expected cultural and socio-economic conditions necessary for it as defined in the West. I will argue in this section that the nature of the truck between modernity and tradition in the Indian context is equally, if not sometimes better located in a continuation of the polemics of the Arts and Crafts discourse. Clearly, Devi Prasad was not alone in this negotiation. In fact, these strands were significant for all Indian artists of the time, and a close relationship in the specifics of the questions they grappled with can especially be seen in Devi’s Santiniketan contemporaries: K.G. Subramanyan would make an appropriate comparison, although he joined Santiniketan as Devi Prasad was leaving the institute, and dealt with many of the same issues in his writings.13 Prabhas Sen, Sankho Choudhury, Dinkar Kowshik, Haku Shah, Gurcharan Singh and Dashrath Patel14 would make equally valid comparisons.15 Biographical works on these artists and their retrospective exhibition catalogues each detail their adapting modernity while valorising traditional sensitivity, means and methods of production. By the mid-1940s, the national movement had thrown up these issues for some forty-odd years, and 13 Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism?, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2000 (re-printed 2007), p. 271. Geeta Kapur notes that, ‘In the actual practice of artists like K.G. Subramanyan, heir to this nationalist culture in the postindependence era, the residual romanticism vanishes completely. His practice accommodates, self-consciously and with considerable wit, a series of modernist mediations so as to arrive at a strategic notion of the contemporary.’ Illustration 24. Gandhiji and Ba with Rabindranath Tagore seen here on their last visit to Santiniketan 1940 Illustration 25. C.F. Andrews at Sriniketan Illustration 26. facing page Portrait of Nandalal Bose at work by Devi Prasad Watercolour on postcard 8.75 x 14 cm Santiniketan 31 December 1941 Illustration 27. Nandalal Bose, self-portrait in a crowd during the Quit India Movement Postcard painted for Devi Prasad 30 March 1942 14 See Kristine Michael,‘Constituting a Republic of Elements’, in Sadanand Menon (ed.) In the Realm of the Visual: five decades 1948–1998 of Painting, Ceramics, Photography, Design by Dashrath Patel, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, 1998, pp. 60–69; note, interestingly, in the same book how Menon discusses Dashrath Patel’s disillusionment with the processes and philosophies of the modern studiodesigner to revert, after nineteen years of running the National Institute of Design, to Gandhian work with NGOs, (pp. 86-89). 15 Josef James, Cholamandal: An Artist’s Village, Oxford University Press, 2004: KCS Paniker’s setting up of the Cholamandal artists’ village outside Madras in 1966 would be another (although much later) attempt at founding a cooperative which sought to address similar issues. 34      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      35 the politicians and academicians of the newly independent India of the 1950s were extremely sensitive to them. Perhaps what sets Devi most apart from his contemporaries is the specific nature of his engagement at Sevagram where his work as an artist happened in a measure equal to the social and political realisation of Gandhian values. The implementation of Gandhi’s views on craft and village industry, and Swadeshi which rested, ultimately, on the ethic of svavalamban (selfhelp/self-sufficiency), became primary in his mind; whereas the approach of his contemporaries had a greater truck with being ‘modern’ artists. The philosophical milieu of the Santiniketan artists’ in the 1930s and 40s had some historical precedents, which have been detailed in several histories, a summary of which is perhaps worth retreading here. A transformation in the artist’s status, the mechanical reproduction of art and the introduction of formal art schools and exhibitions were well in place in India at the end of the nineteenth century.16 The formal presentation of Indian design and craftsmanship in the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London had so enthralled its audience that the seeds were sown for an argument on the loss of that cultural heritage and handicraft tradition at the altar of industrialisation and British commerce. Tapati Guha Thakurta writes, ‘The new nationalist ideology of Indian art, its aesthetic self-definitions and its search for a “tradition” had strong roots in Orientalist writing and debates. British Orientalism produced and structured much of its notion of an Indian art tradition.’ The fact-finding missions this was based on included the meticulous Survey of India, the recording of India’s archaeology and art history, craft and industry. ‘In the first decade of the twentieth century,’ Guha Thakurta notes, ‘E.B. Havell and A.K. Coomaraswamy emerged as the two most influential spokesmen of the alternative front in Orientalism. They pioneered an “Indian defence” in reaction against a “Western bias” that had dominated the European view of Indian art.’ 17 The craftsmanship debate and historiography generated by William Morris was well in place in England which was also the year when Coomaraswamy’s monograph on The Indian Craftsman was published. The end of the Victorian Era in 1901 had been a moment of reflection on the dramatic technological revolutions that had impacted daily life in Britain. The Arts and Crafts Movement began as a reaction to social and economic anxiety after nearly a century of intense Illustration 28. Shri Mahadevan Pen and ink on paper 21 x 13 cm Dehra Dun 1944 Illustration 29. In the Light of a Lantern Postcard pen and ink on paper 8.75 x 14 cm Santiniketan 1940 Illustration 30. facing page Faces Pen and ink on paper 8.5 x 13.75 cm Santiniketan 1941 16 Partha Mitter provides a detailed view of the decisive role played by Indian craftsmanship in guiding the aesthetic pedagogy of Victorian Britain, and impacting, later, the Arts and Crafts Movement. He says,‘...because designers like [Henry] Cole struggled to achieve and eventually succeeded in establishing their ideas on how to run art schools in Britain, they were also able to spread their new theory of design on a wide scale. Eastern design, and Indian design in particular, received wide diffusion through their efforts, for it became the model to be emulated by students of design all over the country during the second part of the nineteenth century.’ Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, University of Chicago Press, 1977 & 1992, p. 224, and further, pp. 225 - 251, 277-286. 17 Tapati Guha Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 146, 148–184. 36      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      37 industrial modernisation. Great Britain, the most industrialised country at the turn of the century, became the initial hub of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was founded in 1887 in London on the belief that a culture’s applied art was as vital to that culture as its fine art. Individuality in a crafter’s piece, along with innovation and creativity, moulded the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society into a significant artistic movement that later grew into one of a philosophical, political and cultural nature. Members of the Society, including John Ruskin and William Morris, advocated the improvement of working conditions, the reintegration of art into everyday life and the unification of all forms of art. Craftsmanship became a mode of thought and in fact, a way of life. The Movement’s principles were widely spread by the start of the twentieth century and had developed into a language of democratic phrases including ‘joy in labour’, ‘unity in design’, and ‘fidelity to place’. These potent phrases allowed the public to visualise the Arts and Crafts Movement’s many ideologies. Havell and Coomaraswamy were able to successfully translate the Arts and Crafts ideology into a battle cry for aesthetic nationalism in India. As Superintendent of the Government School of Art, Calcutta (1896 - 1906) E.B. Havell reorganised its curricula to focus more on Indian design and craft as the basis of all education. He appointed Abanindranath Tagore as the Vice-Principal of the School in 1905 and this helped him strengthen his base in critiquing British art policy in India. Upon his return to England, Havell began to publish even more prolifically on Indian art and its spiritual bases. Coomaraswamy was at the forefront of intellectualism with the roots of his aesthetic philosophy located in the Arts and Crafts Movement. He had purchased William Morris’s Kelmscott Press18 where some of his works were published. In his Foreword to Coomaraswamy’s 1909 book, The Indian Craftsman, C.R. Ashbee says, ‘...change we are certainly bringing, and bringing unconsciously, but it is a curious and suggestive thought that the spiritual awakening in England, which goes now by the 18 In 1898, Charles Ashbee’s Guild had purchased from the executors of William Morris’s estate his Kelmscott Press, which was transferred along with the presses, its experienced compositors and printers and the contents of Morris’s shop to Chipping Campden where it was rechristened the Essex House Press. In 1907, a time of financial depression, it was purchased by Ananda Coomaraswamy, and was transferred to his house at Broad Campden. The aura of owning Morris’s press was not lost on Coomaraswamy who published his first major and famous work, Medieval Sinhalese Art with it. In his Foreword to the book (p. ix) he concludes, ‘this book has been printed by hand, upon the press used by William Morris for printing the Kelmscott Chauser.The printing, carried on the Norman Chapel at Broad Campden, has occupied some fifteen months. I cannot help seeing in these very facts an illustration of the way in which the East and West may together be united in an endeavour to restore the true Art of Living which has for so long been neglected by humanity.’ Roger Lipsey, Coomaraswamy: vol. 3, His Life and Work, Princeton University Press, 1977, pp. 44 – 45. On the strength of the relationship between Coomaraswamy and Morris, Lipsey notes that although Coomaraswamy was only nineteen when Morris died, and even though there is no evidence that they had met; ‘[Coomaraswamy] was a Morris person through and through’. (ibid. p. 259). Illustration 31. Himalayan Landscape Watercolour on postcard 8.75 x 14 cm Santiniketan circa 1944 Illustration 32. Himalayan Landscape Watercolour on postcard 8.75 x 14 cm Santiniketan circa 1942 Illustration 33. Himalayan Landscape Watercolour on postcard 8.75 x 14 cm Santiniketan circa 1944 Illustration 34. facing page Girdhkoot Rocks, Rajgir Tempera on paper 9.5 x 6.0 cm Rajgir 1940 Illustration 35. Himalaya Lino print 11 x 6 cm Santiniketan 1941 38      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      39 name of the higher culture, now by the name of Socialism, which has been voiced in our time by Ruskin and Morris, which has expressed itself in movements like the arts and crafts, or is revealed in the inspired paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, demands just such a condition as in India our commercialisation is destroying. The spiritual reawakening in the West is appealing for a social condition in which each man shall have not only an economic but a spiritual status in the society in which he lives, or as some of us would prefer to put it, he shall have a stable economic status in order that he may have a spiritual status as well. It is such a condition that exists still in India, where society is organized, as Dr. Coomaraswamy shows, upon a basis of “personal responsibility and co-operation,” instead of, as with us, upon a basis of contract and competition.’ 19 The obvious connection with Gandhian ideals will not be lost here. Ashbee further quotes an 1878 address by English artists, which bore the names of Morris, Burne-Jones, Millais, Edwin Arnold, Walter Crane and others, who appealed to the Government on behalf of Indian Arts and Crafts against the effects of English commercialism upon the production of Indian craftsmanship. ‘At a time,’ said the signatories, ‘when these productions are daily getting to be more and more valued in Europe, these sources are being dried up in Asia, and goods which ought to be common in the market now are becoming rare treasures for museums and the cabinets of rich men. This result aims to be the reverse of what commerce ought to aim at.’ Charles Robert Ashbee was the famous propagator of the successful Guild for Handicrafts. Along with William Morris, John Ruskin and W.R. Lethaby, Ashbee was a leading theorist of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The School attached to the Guild taught crafts. The Guild operated as a co-operative, and its stated aim was to: ‘seek not only to set a higher standard of craftsmanship, but at the same time, and in so doing, to protect the status of the craftsman. To this end it endeavours to steer a mean between the independence of the artist – which is individualistic and often parasitical – and the trade-shop, where the workman is bound to purely commercial and antiquated traditions, and has, as a rule, neither stake in the business nor any interest beyond his weekly wage.’ The parallels in their thought to the increasing Indian basis for Swadeshi will be evident to a reader of modern Indian history. What the extent of their role was in giving a functionalist aesthetic to modernism is debated by academics in art history circles, but certainly their arguments hinge merely on accepting 19 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Indian Craftsman, Probsthain & Co., London, 1909, p.x. Illustration 36. A Portrait Crayon on paper 27 x 18.5 cm Santiniketan 1940s Illustration 37. Portrait of a Friend Pen and ink on paper 9.5 x 14 cm Santiniketan 1942 Illustration 38. facing page A Portrait Crayon on paper 18 x 26 cm Santiniketan 1942 40      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      41 the extent of the acuteness of the driving forces behind modernism which were, after all, already being noted, if less sharply, by the leaders of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Coomaraswamy’s monograph of 1909 was followed immediately by his 1910 address at the Fifth Annual Industrial Conference at Allahabad on Swadeshi, True and False. In it, he said, ‘... if we are to judge from the wreckage of her (i.e. India’s) Industrial arts remaining to us – we must rank the civilisation of India indeed highly, for it could have been truly said that in her homes, whether of rich or poor, there could be found nothing that was not either useful or beautiful. In exchange for this world of beauty that was our birthright, the nineteenth century has made us a dumping ground for all the vulgar superfluities of European over-production; and all that the Swadeshi movement of the twentieth century has done is to provide us with many spurious imitations of these unlovely inutilities. ... Never have I seen in any Swadeshi literature the wish expressed to preserve Indian manufactures on account of their intrinsic excellence, or because of the presence amongst us of these highly skilled craftsmen still worked under conditions of life still infinitely superior, physically and spiritually, to those of the European factory-slaves. ... I know no sign more ominous for the future of the Indian civilisation than our utter indifference to social industrial idealism, and the heartless callousness with which we have cast aside the services of those who built our homes, and clothed and wrought for us in the days before we learned to despise our own culture, – leaving them to eke out a precarious living by making petty trivialities for tourists, curio-collectors, and for Anglo Indian bungalows, or to drift into the ranks of menial labourers or factory hands.’ 20 Interestingly, much of his active nationalist writings came at a time when Coomaraswamy was driven to make his collection of Indian art. The year 1909 was also when Tagore expanded his idea of a rural retreat in his seminal essay The Hermitage or Tapovan in which he describes a rural site where man and nature can join in a mystical communion in renunciation of Western materialism. Apart from The Indian Craftsman, in 1909, Coomaraswamy also published Essays in National Idealism, and his collected talks on Indian handicraft and artisanship were published in Art and Swadeshi in 1912. Swadeshi, in his interpretation, certainly provided an aesthetic rebuttal to industrial capital, and the only way to preserve a national culture. It was not, however, an overtly political movement seeking decolonisation. That leap was to come from Gandhi, who, it must be remembered, also first published Hind Swaraj in 1909. The Arts and Crafts Movement’s impact on Gandhi himself was not small and it is well-known amongst Gandhian scholars that Ruskin’s Unto This Last was one of Gandhi’s favourite books, translated by him into ‘Sarvodaya’. Illustration 39. Three studies of Chola bronzes – Nataraj and two Parvatis Pen and ink on rice paper Santiniketan Early 1940s Collection of Sunand Prasad Nataraj 121 x 152 cm Standing Parvati 53 x 135 cm Seated Parvati 68 x 122 cm 20 A.K. Coomaraswamy, ‘Swadeshi, True and False’ in Art and Swadeshi, Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi, (repr. 1994), p. 7. An equally important element that makes a tripartite link between political freedom, craftsmanship and basic child education was the influential demand for compulsory education by Gopal Krishna Gokhale in 1910. Gokhale reintroduced the Bill to the Imperial Legislative Assembly in 1912 where it was defeated. But something more important had been won: a nationwide awareness of the need for basic education, for salvaging craftsmanship that lay at the bedrock of a civilisation to be able to achieve a self-sufficient and thus free person and nation. It is out of this melting pot that Devi would frame his own ideas in the fullness of time. 42      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      43 ART  AND  CRAFT  IN  DEVI’S  SANTINIKETAN Early in the twentieth century, when India was trying to navigate its way to find its own expression of modernity and nationalism, Santiniketan was set up in the rural locales of Bengal by Rabindranath Tagore. Conceptualised on an alternative mode of education, and inspired by a quest for identity in modern Indian art, Santiniketan’s idealistic artistic worldview was not limited to an art education derived from the Royal Academy as espoused by India’s colonial masters. In finding a global, modern and Indian voice, this institution adopted an art language that engaged with India’s mythical, poetic, historical and contemporary milieu in a globally informed, modern language. We have already noted the extent to which Indian, Chinese and Japanese art histories and production techniques were being valorised by the growing Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe. In her essay for this volume Kristine Michael notes that, ‘small individual workshops began to make a comeback as a part of the growing Arts and Crafts Movement in the nineteenth century, to re-humanise the industrial product and lifestyle. This started being called “studio ceramics” and broke with the notion of being artisan-based only. The makers tried to return to the artistic unity of conception, technique and design which in the case of the potter meant doing all aspects of the clay object production himself: clay making, hand building or wheel throwing, glazing, decorating and firing.’ She continues, ‘Bernard Leach’s meeting with Shoji Hamada in Japan in 1919 is considered one of the crucial events in twentieth century ceramic history. Together they started the concept of the studio potter which spread throughout the world. Leach fused his viewpoint of the revival of the pre-industrial, hand-made wares that were capable of re-energizing a quality of life, to the Japanese and Asian reverence of the simple pot.’ Leach’s exposure to Indian and Asian art was not only through the Great Exhibitions of traditional Indian craftsmanship held in London and Europe, but also to Ananda Coomaraswamy himself, whom he compared to Yanagi in importance as the ‘only one creative critic of Eastern religion and art.’ Soetsu Yanagi’s famous work, The Unknown Craftsman, extolled the work of the humble, ordinary artisan who crafted the most beautiful works that everyone used and had escaped from the ‘imprisoning net of individualism’.21 This was to become an influential ideal for followers of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and not one lost on Devi Prasad. 21 Leach says this in his 1964 ‘Farewell Letter to Craftsmen in Japan’, where he continues, ‘Such men are rare and very important for the whole world, for they lead the way forward to the next stage of evolving human life.’ Bernard Leach was also acquainted with Ethel Mairet (née Partridge), Coomaraswamy’s ex-wife in Ditchling in the mid-1930s. Bernard Leach, Beyond East and West, Faber & Faber (repr. 1985): pp.299, 212. Ethel Mairet was a weaver who had, in fact, been extremely close to the entire Arts and Crafts community. She had even woven the cloth given to the potter Shoji Hamada for his wedding suit. It is no doubt true that in the intellectual battle with colonialism, Santiniketan’s teachers and visionaries found allies among the Western avant-garde critics of urban industrial capitalism. However, for Tagore, the seeds for a discourse on an aesthetics of cosmopolitanism were already strengthened by, amongst other contributions, his interactions with Okakura Tenshin, the Japanese art historian and curator, in Calcutta in 1902, even though they had never met.22 Tagore’s own early views on Swadeshi certainly underwent a change by 1910 when his voluminous Gora was published. It is important to note that the nationalism resulting from the notion of Swadeshi was in some senses antithetical to the cosmopolitanism in which spiritual freedom was to be founded. Yet, the conceptual basis of the noblest in Swadeshi, the notions of seva (service) and atmashakti (self-empowerment/self-reliance), 22 Kakuzo Okakura’s camaraderie with Tagore and espousal of an ‘Asia is One’ art philosophy, was certainly one that sought its own safeguarding of traditional means of craft/ art production and was thus impacted by the wider critiques against industrialisation. See Rustom Bharucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin, OUP, Delhi, 2006 (pp. 5–7 and 52–62 for more on his and Tagore’s take on nationalism, Swadeshi and self-reliance); T. Guha Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 167–175; Roger Lipsey, Coomaraswamy: His Life and Work, vol 3, Princeton University Press, pp 130–132. Illustration 40. Subhashchandra Bose’s visit to Kala Bhavana Devi standing at top left Santiniketan 1938 Illustration 41. Rabindranath Tagore with Harendranath Chattopadhyay Santiniketan 1939 Illustration 42. facing page Dinkar Kowshik and Devi Prasad with a visiting Japanese student Santiniketan 1940 Illustration 43. A Kala Bhavana Picnic seated in the foreground: Devi Prasad on extreme right, Anil (with spectacles) and second from left Mrinalini Swaminathan (later Sarabhai) December 1938 Illustration 44. Nandalal Bose and Gurdial Malik Santiniketan 1939 Illustration 45. Prasanna and Devi leaving for a trip Santiniketan 1938 44      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      45 the notions of universal love, communitarian ownership and sharing were ideas that Tagore continued to share with Gandhi. In the 1920s and 30s, a shift in the Santiniketan aesthetic sited rural India as the antithesis to colonialism. This ‘abode of peace’ was set up as a space for learning, where students could learn under trees, beneath the open sky, away from the confines of closed classrooms, a learning process that laid emphasis on a revived guru-shishya parampara. It is also worth recalling that in 1925 the Bauhaus had published Piet Mondrian’s views on neo-plasticism that elaborated how abstract art need not even begin from the representational. And the Bauhaus exhibition organised in Calcutta in 1922 by Tagore had, as is all too well known, a significant influence in shaping the ‘modernist’ sensibility in that region. The spirit of the Bauhaus had obviously entered the Santiniketan milieu and was not lost on Devi. Later in life, in an exhibition catalogue of his work, he traces its impact on the history of studio pottery: The Bauhaus sought to end the 19th century schism between the artist and the technically expert craftsmen by training students equally in both fields. An important contribution of the Bauhaus movement was in giving functionality a place equal to that given to aesthetics. [The] Bauhaus movement was responsible for the concept that functionality and aesthetics are the two sides of the same coin. It meant discarding the superficial elements and details if they did not contribute to the functional aspect of the object. This movement made a profound impact on pottery, furniture, machinery, in fact every creativity. 23 Sometime in the early 1930s, before Devi had joined Santiniketan, Tagore received two German refugees who were experts in the techniques of pottery. They set up a pottery workshop in Sriniketan, the Rural Institute of Santiniketan. Devi remembers this workshop functioning and training some village potters in the 1930s. They produced low-temperature glazed earthenware at that time. When he was there in 1978 as a Visiting Professor for a year, he tried to revive and update the work of the department as much as possible within many limitations. Santiniketan’s environment had always been sympathetic to such art activities. Devi Prasad says, Gurudev’s presence was very much there when I joined Santiniketan in November 1938. It was the most inspiring factor for me as a student of Kala Bhawan under Acharya Nandalal Bose, who we addressed as Master Moshai - the great guru. Ravindranath Tagore’s philosophy initiated me into a genuinely global approach to life. Nandalal Bose gave me an eye to understand art in general and Indian art and culture in 23 Devi Prasad,‘Clay my Friend’, Exhibition catalogue, Art Heritage, Delhi, 1997. Illustration 46. Romance preparatory sketch Pen and ink on paper Santiniketan 1944 Illustration 47. Romance Pen and ink on paper 22.5 x 17 cm Santiniketan 1944 Illustration 48. facing page Romance Crayon and watercolour on paper 22.5 x 16.5 cm Santiniketan 1944 46      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      47 particular. I had two very special occasions to spend some time with Master Moshai. Once, for a month, when I was chosen to be one of the two senior students accompanying him to Baroda when he was doing the murals in the Kirti Mandir in 1943, and later, again for a month in 1945, in Santiniketan when I felt the need of his guidance for my future work as the art instructor in the Nayee Talim Institute in Gandhi’s ashram, Sevagram. I remember those two experiences with gratitude and joy. On average, he spent a couple of hours every day for me talking about almost everything under the sky that concerned art and culture, life in general and Gandhi’s work and philosophy. 24 Writing of their time in Santiniketan together, shortly before he died, the sculptor Prabhas Sen noted that Devi worked on two major wall painting projects there. One was for the newly built Kala Bhavana hostel, the other for the Cheena Bhavana. He worked under the general guidance of Benodebehari; Nandalal had coordinated the projects. ‘Devi especially revered Nandalal as his guru and had acquired his perfectionist attitude towards work from him.’25 Devi’s strong friendship with several of his Santiniketan contemporaries 24 Devi Prasad,‘Clay my Friend’, Exhibition catalogue, Art Heritage 1997. Illustration 49. facing page Painting the Santiniketan Murals Pencil sketch on postcard Santiniketan 1943 Illustration 50. Self-portrait Pencil on paper 10 x 14.4 cm Santiniketan 1942 25 Prabhas Sen, ‘Devi Prasad – His Santiniketan Days’ in A Celebration of Creativity, Exhibition catalogue, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 2001. such as Prabhas Sen, Dinkar Kowshik and his wife Pushpa, Madhukar, Pritish Neogi, Jaya Appasamy, Nivedita Jiten Kumar (née Paramanand) and Prasanna was to remain for the rest of his life. It was here that he also interacted closely with all the others now counted in the illustrious list of Santiniketan’s alumni. Devi had always imagined that he would eventually retire to Santiniketan; he bought some land there which he held on to for decades and only gave up the idea much later sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Returning, however, to the specific nature of the impact of the Arts and Crafts Movement at Santiniketan demands a greater exploration of the life and work of Nandalal Bose.26 His significant co-option by Gandhi in organising art and craft exhibitions at annual Congress sessions from 1934 onward was a direct influence on Devi Prasad. Nandalal had been a ‘teacher’ whose method was to be a student’s companion in exploring the varied art traditions of the world (with a greater preponderance of Indian and Far Eastern traditions). 26 Debashish Banerji says that Nandalal created a ‘communitarian habitus’ which was a directly connected to the ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement, ‘Havell, Abanindranath, Nandalal: Towards a Utopic Postmodern Culture’ in S.R. Quintanilla, Rhythms of India, SanDiego Museum of Art, 2008, pp. 58–71; also in the same volume, see a further exploration of this theme by K.G. Subramanyan,‘The Nandalal–Rabindranath–Gandhi Connection’ pp. 98–99. 48      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      49 Although he was not formally his student, Devi also built up a close rapport with Ramkinkar Baij.27 One of the first projects Devi was involved with on joining Santiniketan was to help Ramkinkar with the making of the Santhal Family in 1938. Santhal Family was one of Ramkinkar’s most celebrated outdoor sculptures that dignified its larger-than-life bodies of Santhals built out of common concrete, even as it touched on socio-economic issues such as displacement, gender, urban migration and caste.   This was his first exposure to the scale of Ramkinkar’s imagination. It was instrumental in exposing him to the joy shared between the students and teacher in the process of building an artwork together. He recalls how this was all they focused on at the time rather than romanticising the sculpture or theorising its place in the expression of modernist developments in India. Ramkinkar’s magnetic personality came from an immediacy and freedom of spirit that none of the people who were touched by him can forget. He recalls also how Ramkinkar and Nandalal experimented tirelessly with new materials and tools not just for their ‘art’ practice but for making just about anything.28 Nandalal experimented in making mud buildings water-resistant and impervious to white ants by developing a construction material that was a mixture of mud, cow-dung and coal-tar. The ‘Shyamali’ building in which Rabindranath spent his last years and the ‘Black House’, Devi remembers, are two buildings that remain of these experiments. Both also painted watercolours together and the many wash paintings of the broken trees after a storm in the Sal forest by Ramkinkar have a direct bearing on the ones that Devi executed under his guidance. Parallels can also be drawn between his other works and what his masters were painting or sketching at the same time. Thus the watercolour of the bridge over the canal is reminiscent of so many like it that Benodebehari painted [Ill. 18], the 1944 painting of a boar [Ill. 53] is also the time when Benodebehari made (although more modestly) sketches and a woodcut of boars.29 In his earliest works Devi demonstrates proficiency in all of the painting techniques Santiniketan taught him. Perfect life drawings in several sketchbooks, explorations in verisimilitude and enlivening of his self-portraits with fine lines 27 Devi Prasad, Ramkinkar Vaij: Sculptures, Tulika Books, Delhi, 2007, p. 24; In 1978, as Visiting Professor at Santiniketan, Devi made a photographic study of Ramkinkar Baij’s sculptures. Ramkinkar was delighted with these photographs and personally inaugurated their first unveiling in Santiniketan in 1978/79. These photographs, along with Devi’s sterling personal collection of Ramkinkar’s works were the subject of an exhibition at JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) that I curated in 2007. While the focus of that exhibition was Ramkinkar, it permitted us equally, an evaluation of Devi Prasad’s vision as a photographer and collector. More importantly, it brought out the nature of the studentteacher relationship in Santiniketan, and their deep involvement with each others work. See, Naman P. Ahuja, Ramkinkar Through the Eyes of Devi Prasad, exhibition catalogue, School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, 2007. 28 K.G. Subramanyan, ‘The Nandalal – Gandhi – Rabindranath Connection’, in Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose, San Diego Museum of Art, 2008, pp. 92–102. 29 Compare Benodebehari’s works in Gulammohammad Sheikh and R. Sivakumar, Benodebehari Mukherjee, Exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2006, Nos. 10–13 (p. 313), 124 (p.321). Illustration 51. Boar preparatory sketch Crayon on paper 19 x 15 cm Santiniketan 1944 Illustration 52. facing page Plucking Jamun Tempera on paper 18 x 26 cm Santiniketan 1939 50      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      51 building up volume [Ill. 8], are accompanied by a Rajasthani miniature that copies on Mewar and Malwa Ragamala traditions [Ill. 12], a textbook perfect Far Eastern painting of a white peacock beside another recumbent one dancing under a red maple [Ill. 13] and line-drawings of Indian sculptures [Ill. 39]. His exposure to varied art traditions is already evident in his student works at Santiniketan. However, our study of his art would be incomplete if we were not to be aware of the active choices that he was making even within the universe that Santiniketan opened up. Devi, the Benodebehari and Ramkinkar student, doesn’t, for instance, really engage with mythological or religious subject matter (save a few references, even though Nandalal and Abanindranath did). At the same time, he does make several Ramkinkar-like watercolours: emotive, expressionistic paintings of the broken trees in the forest after the storm at Santiniketan and the landscapes at Shillong and Kohima [Ill. 56-59, 61-63]. He works also on two major murals with Benodebehari and Nandalal, assists Ramkinkar with Santhal Family and several other sculptural works, and is also a keen photographer. One of the most charismatic paintings marking the end of his student days is his outstanding tempera on paper showing an excited uncontrollable horse on his back [Ill. 64], frothing at the mouth in a fit. It is no doubt in the finest Santiniketan style: at once harking back to Japonisme as much as it does to the extremely fine and laboured modelling of the Mughal miniaturist. He painted this on his 23rd birthday and it really marks Devi’s departure from being a student and his start as a professional artist. The Santiniketan exposure to different artistic languages sees a proficiency develop which is so sophisticated that Devi can just about craft anything in any style. In fact, the adopting of a particular style becomes the very act of his artistic choice, as crucial and as relevant as the content of the painting. Moods can determine the artistic style through which he chose to express himself. This was to remain a constant feature for the rest of his career. At the same time, his Santiniketan works or those done until the end of 1944 at home in Dehra Dun after he graduated, show a greater absorption with the self and the use of metaphors and allegories. For instance, he only ever drew one self-portrait in Sevagram [Ill. 73], while there were several in his Santiniketan days [Ill. 4, 8, 50]. His paintings at this stage are redolent with metaphors: the one of a horse mentioned above [Ill. 64] is an example, or equally, his final painting at Santiniketan of the boar in the red landscape [Ill. 53] where he changed its gender in the final work into a heavily pregnant sow, her anticipation perhaps alluding to his own. Illustration 53. A Landscape Tempera on paper 37.5 x 75.5 cm Santiniketan 1944 52      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      53 AND  WHAT  OF  THE  SPIRIT(UAL)?   Devi does not declare his religious inclinations with any ease, but I suspect the impact of the spiritual multi-denominational atmosphere of Santiniketan and Gandhi has not been small. The environment was rich with all those progressive movements which believed in one God, universal love and brotherhood of man. Quaker and Unitarian movements of the West, Theosophy and Brahmo Samaj movements in the East, the Sufi cult of Iran and Sindh, the Bauls of Bengal and the Bahai movement and above all in Nature, the greatest teacher and artistic ideal. Gurdial Mallik30 frequently led the prayers at Santiniketan. Devi says that Gurudev (Tagore) referred to him as the greatest living mystic. Gurdial Mallik also published four books on spiritual matters, each concerned with Unity in Divine, compassion, love and the pursuit of Beauty.31 Gurdial Mallik was known for his rapport with children and had first introduced the idea of working at Sevagram to Devi. Once Devi was there, he visited Sevagram on several occasions. While the nature of the spiritual at Santiniketan is perhaps easier to understand, the Gandhian appreciation of the matter is undoubtedly more complex. This is all the more so since it really has to be lived to be understood, and Gandhi’s own writings on it are, as many have noted, obfuscating. A modestly simplified understanding of it may be32: God is a principle, that principle is truth, truth is everywhere, truth is beyond rationalism – and while it may be moral, those morals are away from ‘principles’ and criticism (and hence ‘hate’) and that truth may be explored by following the path of satyagraha and ahimsa. One’s convictions and morals must be held modestly (so as to allow them to change, since we can never be sure if we have actually found truth). Criticism, however, is not to be confused with resistance. One is negative, and the other can be done with a pure heart. Akeel Bilgrami (2001) argues that studies on Gandhi where his political thought is separated from his moral/religious/spiritual thought he is presented incompletely: as a shrewd nationalist politician using 30 Born in Dera Ismail Khan (on the southern borders of the North West Frontier Province, NWFP) in 1896, Gurdial Mallik had harboured a wish to join Santiniketan since his student days in Bombay in 1914. He had become acquainted there with the works of Tagore and met C.F. Andrews and eventually reached Santiniketan in August 1919 where an infirm Rabindranath accepted him saying, with a touch on his head ‘I have known you since ages.There is a place vacant for you in my ashram and you can now occupy it’; Mallik stayed at Santiniketan until 1946 as an English teacher. He also made his first personal acquaintance with Gandhi in 1919 after the Jalianwala Bagh massacre. An important relationship was forged there too, and Mallik spent much of the next thirty years between Sabarmati ashram and Santiniketan. Gurdial Mallik also wrote a book, Gandhi and Tagore, to seek the common ground in the aesthetics of their ideologies where he said they ‘deepened the inherent human urge for perfection, as against what passes muster under the protean term “progress”.’ Gurdial Mallik, Gandhi and Tagore, Navjivan, Ahmedabad, 1963. Illustration 54. Epping Forest London circa 1965 Illustration 55. Sal Forest Santiniketan circa 1942 Illustration 56. facing page Trees Watercolour on paper 23 x 30 cm Santiniketan 1943-4 31 See for instance, Gurdial Mallik, Divine Dwellers in the Desert (Mystic Poets of Sindh), Nalanda Publication, Baroda, 1949 (third edn. Indian Institute of Sindhology, Adipur, Kutch, 2008); Gurdial Mallik, “The Masters as I Know Them”, The Theosophist Magazine, 1934–35, p. 205. 32 See Ananya Vajpeyi, ‘Notes on Swaraj’ in The Republic of Ideas, Seminar, No. 601, September 2009. 54      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      55 religion strategically. Instead, he feels Gandhi really offered a ‘theoretical consolidation in his writing which may be lost on his readers because it is buried in a porridge of saintly rhetoric of “purity of heart”.’ 33 This theoretical consolidation goes right to the heart of the matter linking conscience, action, feeling. Bilgrami continues, ‘In Gandhi’s writing there is an implicit but bold proposal: “When one chooses for oneself, one sets an example to everyone.” That is the role of the satyagrahi. To lead exemplary lives, to set examples to everyone by their actions. And the concept of the exemplar is intended to provide a wholesale alternative to the concept of principle in moral philosophy... the point is not that the idea of the “exemplary” is missing in the intellectual history of morals before Gandhi. What is missing, and what he brings to our attention, is how much theoretical possibility there is in that idea... if exemplars replace principles, then it can no longer be the business of morals to put us in the position of moralizing against others’ forms of behaviour (criticism) that have in them the potential to generate other psychological attitudes (resentment, hostility) which underlie inter-personal violence...’34 Bilgrami notes further, ‘Humanism and inclusivity takes centre stage instead, with the purpose of being accommodating of difference.’ He concludes that only if truth is so conceived, ‘then we have knowledge of the world, a knowledge that can be progressively accumulated and put through continuing enquiry building on past knowledge.’ 35 Yet Devi was as much shaped by Tagorean philosophy as the ambience of Santiniketan, and the adaptation of Gandhian ideals to art practice which entailed a negotiation, a synthesis that I believe needed a synthesis. Interestingly, Devi’s solution would, I believe, have found favour with Coomaraswamy. Devi held a number of his volumes in his library, and spent considerable time documenting ancient and medieval Indian sculpture and architecture, a subject that he gave talks on up until the 1970s.36 Coomaraswamy’s views that ‘Craftsmanship is a mode of thought’37 were in fact articulated right at the start of his career and later tacitly manifest in almost all aspects of his 33 Akeel Bilgrami, ‘Gandhi the Philosopher’, 2001, pp.4–5 has appeared in multiple iterations, including Economic and Political Weekly vol 38 (39), 2003: 4161–4163; and Devi Prasad, ‘Education for Life and Through Life: Gandhi’s Nayee Talim’, IGNCA, http:// ignca.nic.in/cd_0618.htm, accessed online: April 2, 2010. 34 Bilgrami, op cit. p. 7. 35 Bilgrami, op cit. p. 10. 36 These talks included, most notably: 1971: Sanchi to Sikri, Faculty of Architecture, Cambridge; 1972: Indian Architecture, College of Architecture, Medellin, Columbia; 1972: Indian Art and Architecture, Gold Museum, Bogota, Columbia; 1972: Indian Art and Architecture, Bryn Mawr College, Penn., USA; and 1979:Tagore the Painter,Whitechapel Art gallery, London. Correspondence from 1960 with the noted Indian art historian/litterateur Mulk Raj Anand reveals that Mulk was keen to have Devi translate Coomaraswamy to Hindi, obviously believing that Devi was the appropriate person to do so, but copyright issues prevented this from happening. 37 A.K. Coomaraswamy, The Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon, Foulis, London and Edinburgh, 1913 (variously reprinted) p. xii. Illustration 57. Kohima Watercolour on paper 25 x 17 cm Kohima 1946 56      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT work. His 1905–12 youthful impatience and emotive responses akin almost to a bereavement for the loss of craftsmanship in Sri Lanka and India, had gradually become a fait accompli that he had to, by the 1930s, accept, ‘the simple austerity of Indian homespun cloth – Gandhi’s khaddar – the beginnings of a new, modest, but fully Indian artistic environment.’38 Coomaraswamy’s own views had thus come to concur with a Gandhian implementation of the very same ideals. The egalitarian cast of mind underpinning these beliefs could lead to an uncritical or at least a relativistic position. On the contrary, Devi Prasad’s belief in universal access to art via craft strengthens his belief in developing a critical eye that is 38 Roger Lipsey, Coomaraswamy Vol. 3: His Life and Work, Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 42 referring to AKC’s ‘The Part of Art in Indian Life’, originally published in Cultural Heritage of India, 1937,pp. 485–513 (repr. Lipsey, (ed.), Select Papers, vol. 1, pp. 98–100). SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      57 founded more on emotions than intellect. But to him intuitions and emotional response is ‘more welcome’ than intellectual critique, which today is inhibiting the expression of more essential human feelings.39 Although of course indispensable, the intellect is positively harmful unless united with the emotions. In a catalogue piece to accompany an exhibition of his students’ work he describes an epiphany he had talking to a village mushari (bronzesmith) in Kerala in the 1950s. Devi Prasad had commissioned a seven-tier nella-vallakam lamp for his art school in Sevagram. Watching the mushari at work one day he noticed an intact tumbler in the scrap about to be melted down. When pressed to explain what was wrong 39 Unpublished essay, Devi Prasad’s conversation with Sunand Prasad, Delhi 10.09.09. Illustration 58. Spring Watercolour on paper 30 x 23.5 cm Santiniketan 1944 Illustration 59. facing page After the Storm Watercolour on paper 29.5 x 23 cm Santiniketan 1944 58      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT with the piece the mushari eventually and disdainfully replied ‘Bhavam nalla illya’ (its feeling is no good). Devi Prasad concludes: ‘This is what we artists and craftspeople today must learn to grasp – the feeling or bhavam of art objects.’ 40 These principles amount, if not to a theory of art, then surely an ideology. They feed from a stream of post-Enlightenment thought whose tributaries include the philosophies espoused and developed by William Blake, John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, Maria Montessori, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Herbert Read as well as a number of others. Mahatma Gandhi’s influence on Devi Prasad was as great as that of Tagore, but not in respect of art, for Gandhi was a true utilitarian, as illustrated by this reply [Ill. 60] to a letter from Devi Prasad shortly after he had taken up the new post of an art teacher at Sevagram: 40 Devi Prasad, ‘The Art of Making Pots’, catalogue essay, Ten Potters: Students of Devi Prasad, Eicher Gallery, New Delhi, 1995. SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      59 Bread comes first and adornment afterwards…. But since you are here, do whatever you conveniently can. Learn here what true art is. The art teacher should first take up some work which would enable him to earn his livelihood. Later on he may paint and teach painting. Such artist alone will teach true art. You will remember what I had said about the broom. Sweeping is a great art. Where to keep the broom, how to handle it, should there be one broom or different brooms for different jobs, should one stand erect or bend while sweeping, should one raise dust or sprinkle water before sweeping, does one sweep the corners, pay attention to the walls or roof — all these questions should occur to an artist. Only then will he find beauty in sweeping.41 41 MK Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol 79, The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, New Delhi, 1980, pp.193–4. He disagreed with this view of art but he is nevertheless an artist with the broom too in the Gandhian sense and his pleasure in doing and making suffuses all his work. He observes that ‘children do not play, they do’,42 arguing that it is adults who give the name ‘play’ to what children do. Devi Prasad’s own joy in doing and making seems to be indistinguishable from play. Craft alone is not art but for him, being a craftsman is a precondition of being an artist in any art form, be it painting, music, drama or ceramics.43 Devi recounts how he struck an important friendship with Peter Manniche, the famous Danish educationist, sometime in 1943–44 while he was visiting Sevagram. Devi spent several weeks with him discussing rural/folk education, the role 42 Devi Prasad, Art the Basis of Education, Delhi 1998, p.22. 43 Unpublished Essay, Devi Prasad’s conversation with Sunand Prasad, Delhi 10.09.09. of art in education and its ability to shape wider economic and social change. Manniche often spoke of Antoine de St.Exupéry’s The Little Prince, but the Sevagram library did not yet have a copy of it. Six weeks later, however, Manniche sent Devi a copy after returning to Europe. Devi read it twice on the very day he received it; it was almost like an epiphany for him. Though ostensibly a children’s book, with a story told through the meeting of a fox and a young prince as he exits the Sahara desert and with most editions including illustrations drawn by Exupéry himself, The Little Prince actually makes several profound and idealistic observations about life and human nature. The fox says, on an occasion, ‘You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed’; while on another he famously says, ‘C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour Illustration 60. facing page A Letter from Gandhi to Devi Prasad 1st March 1945 Illustration 61. Spring Watercolour on paper 30 x 23.5 cm Santiniketan 1944 60      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante’ (‘It is the time you have lost for your rose that makes your rose so important’). Above all, for Devi, the book held the promise and knowledge that children knew and could see the essential nature of things that adults with their intellectual awareness and rationalised argumentation borne of forced systems of pedagogy had lost completely. The story’s essence is contained in the lines uttered by the fox to the little prince: ‘On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux’ (‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye’). Devi’s friends urged him to translate the book to Hindi, but both the publishers he approached in the late 1940s declined the book, ironically on the grounds that the book was inadequately serious, being merely a pilot’s flight of fantasy of a child! This short-sightedness of the mindsets of the publishers SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      61 further convinced Devi of what was wrong with the spiritual and cultural values of India.44 Indeed a new education system would have to be devised. The book became something of a ‘Testament in Spirit’ and its profound messages cloaked in the child’s voice have remained an enduring influence throughout Devi’s life. Devi’s eldest son Sunand Prasad said he could vividly recall his father quoting Ananda Coomaraswamy during a typical conversation at home about life and politics around about the time when Sunand started studying architecture: ‘The artist is 44 Devi’s translation, still the first and only translation in Hindi, was finally published in 2007 by NCERT (The National Council for Educational Research and Training), after it had been translated into 180 languages and sold over 80 million copies worldwide since its initial release in 1943! not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist.’ The same quote introduces his 1959 book in Hindi, Child Art and Education.45 Nothing better explains Devi’s life in art and his adoption of this dictum in the educational philosophy he espoused. Sunand summarises his father’s credo thus: ‘Art is a pervading force accessible to all of us. It is actualized through self expression, and more precisely, self expression directed towards communication with other human beings. The act of self-expression creates balance within the individual and together with the binding power of its communication, it makes art an agent of balance and peace in society. Society today is fractured because of the over emphasis on intellectual development, which tends to see parts rather than the whole. 45 Devi Prasad, Bacchon ki Kala aur Shiksha, Sarva Seva Sangh Prakahsan, Rajghat, 1959. English Edition: Art: the Basis of Education, National Book Trust, New Delhi, 1998. A fundamental property of art on the other hand, is to make connections, to unify disparate aspects of experience and thereby to transcend, while at the same time embracing, the material facts of existence. That we are all artists is to be taken literally and Devi Prasad would agree wholeheartedly with Picasso’s poser: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” The failure of most modern education, for him, is best evidenced by its refusal to nurture the artist in us, and indeed by its engagement in his ritual murder.’ We therefore now come to the question of how Devi fitted art into the Gandhian concept of education. Illustration 62. Trees Watercolour 29 x 20 cm Santiniketan 1943 Illustration 63. facing page After the Storm Watercolour on paper 29.5 x 23 cm Santiniketan 1944 Illustration 64. next page Horse in a Fit Tempera on paper 34.5 x 21 cm Santiniketan 1944 62      |      SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT SANTINIKETAN  &  THE  ARTS  AND  CRAFTS  MOVEMENT      |      63 64      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      65 CHAPTER  II MAKING  A  GANDHIAN  UTOPIA:  ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ·3RIQE]GEPPMXE9XSTME)ZIV]XMQIMRLMWXSV]EVIZSPYXMSREV]MHIEMWFSVRMXMWÁVWXXIVQIH9XSTME But,  haven’t  we  seen  that  only  Utopias  have  succeeded?’ —  DEVI  PRASAD,  EDUCATION  FOR  LIVING  CREATIVELY  AND  PEACEFULLY,  2005 66      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      67 In Sevagram Devi married Janaki in 1949, having chosen each other against all convention. Janaki was a Sanskrit scholar from the prominent Warrier family of Kerala who were involved in ayurveda. Her great-uncle, P.S. Varier [sic] had founded the famous Aryavaidyashala at Kottakal. Medical work and healing was to be her calling at Sevagram too where she worked as a nurse. Their first son, Sunand, was born in 1950, Udayan in 1953 and daughter Sunayana in 1960. Speaking of their childhood at Sevagram, they say that though it was utopian and anti-caste, Sevagram was culturally conservative. ‘Our parents were regarded as non-conformist in particular for their refusal to join in much of the religious observance.’ Their two-room house with a verandah, a kitchen and a bathroom was built of wattle and daub – timber or bamboo frame with a mud covering which was set in a rose-garden that was Devi’s pride and joy.46 Having branched out from painting and drawing to exhibition design, Devi Prasad took up photography, textiles and pottery in Sevagram, while also editing the Nayee Taleem journal and taking part in Vinoba Bhave’s bhoodan (Land Gift) movement. In 1954 he built a new building, the Kalabhavan art hall – for the now well established art department – on a simple rectangular plan but with unusually hefty timber trusses on which he carved bosses with vivid figures. He also designed the furniture and took special pride in the main door based on the design of brass strap-hinged and studded rosewood doors from Kerala, the home of Janaki. Kalabhavan sits easily amongst the entirely single storey buildings of Sevagram ashram and the Talimi Sangh, distinguished, however, in the proportions of its huge verandah and the dimensions of the main space. The 1948 Jaipur Session of the Congress really was the first testing ground for the young Devi Prasad to cut his teeth. In the first few years at Sevagram he organised and designed a number of exhibitions in connection at first with the art school and then, in a larger way, with the Gandhian constructive programme in general. The Congress Party, which had taken the lead in the Independence movement, used to hold an annual session (ever since 1889) with an exhibition. These exhibitions had begun to take on grander proportions from the early 1930s onwards, when handicrafts and village life began to be showcased. Its Jaipur Session of 1948 would be the first after Independence and was therefore of great significance. It was called Sarvodaya – the rising of all – showcasing the Gandhian constructive programme. In the course of talking to the organisers about showing the work of the Talimi Sangh, Devi Prasad enquired after the rest of the exhibition and was soon taken on to design the whole 1.2 million square feet with its fifteen pavilions, an enclosed maidaan to accommodate 6,000 in front of a stage, rooms for different exhibitions, village industries, an ayurvedic 46 Sunand Prasad, Udayan Prasad and Sunayana Thorpe-Beeston, ‘What Devi Taught Us’ in Kristine Michael (ed.) A Celebration of Creativity, exhibition catalogue, Lalit Kala Gallery, New Delhi, 2001. Illustration 65. Janaki Washing Clothes Sevagram circa 1952 Illustration 66. facing page Landscape Sevagram 1950 Illustration 67. previous page Labourers Pen and crayon on paper 10 x 14 cm Sevagram 1958 68      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM clinic, residential quarters, streets and most notably a large gateway and a huge tower. One pavilion was devoted to Nayee Taleem. The report of the Reception Committee at the conclusion of the exhibitions said: ‘The Sarvodaya Exhibition was the most attractive and successful aspect of the whole Session. That this beautiful exhibition, built with such a huge effort and power of imagination of Devibhai had to be dismantled with the conclusion is indeed a matter of regret.’47 Devi describes the four months of his work on the exhibition as the one of the most memorable and instructive experiences of his career. The design of the pavilions, all made of bamboo, timber and sarkanda (a reed), is loosely based on both sacred and vernacular Indian architecture; not in a studied interpretation, but in the manner of sketches from memory, informed by his study of architectural form in Santiniketan.48 Devi Prasad would draw for and describe to the team of a dozen local carpenters and builders what he had in mind and they would, without hesitation, fashion the forms. The tallest structure was a then amazing forty-eight foot high (to celebrate the year 1948) viewing tower, constructed without any formal mathematics. Its domical roof of dried sarkanda gleamed a golden shade in the sunlight that attracted much attention. People queued to use the internal stairs to be able to get a panoramic view of the city of Jaipur in the distance and of the Sarvodaya exhibition. The Jaipur Exhibition was a dramatic and unprecedented event conjured up seemingly out of nowhere. Its greatest significance for the artist is in the absolute confidence it gave him to experiment freely. He never again did anything remotely similar in form or medium but its spirit of adventure is evident 47 The report of the Reception Committee and other publications of the All India Charkha Sangh, summarised by Siddharaj Dhadha, ‘The First Session of the Congress in the Princely State of Jaipur’, in K. Michael and B. Prasad (eds.), A Celebration of Creativity, exhibition catalogue, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi, 2001. 48 Nandalal had used similar construction materials first for the 1935 Congress session at Lucknow and the plan was to extend it to make an entire township called Tilak Nagar at Faizpur the following year. ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      69 throughout Devi Prasad’s subsequent career, driven by the belief that it engendered in his own capacity to be original. The contribution of the builders who unerringly turned his imaginings into working structures and places gave him a profound respect for them, and especially for the Indian craftsman. It was a life of the true enthusiast – acquiring Western art books, collecting folk art while on extensive walking tours with Vinoba Bhave of villages all over India, exhorting landlords to give land to the landless, becoming absorbed in Japanese flower arrangement, discovering Bernard Leach’s A Potter’s Book in the library and adopting him as his guru. He joined various photography societies and built a well-equipped darkroom at one end of Kalabhavan, the art centre he created at Sevagram. At the other end he built a wood-fired updraft kiln and launched a full-fledged pottery programme in the school. At the base of this internationalism, however, lies his profound brand of Gandhian ideals. Much of his work was at the grassroots level. His earliest photography is a rich documentation of a rural setting. His darkroom was set up at Sevagram, as were his carpentry and pottery workshops and his painting studio. The process of making the artwork had always to be in tune with its setting and technology; the means for making the artwork have always been a part of the process for him. Paintings were executed in natural dyes, buckets of water were left out overnight in the hope that they may be cool enough to process photographs at dawn, clays were locally found, glazes invented, sophisticated kilns were built, adapted and innovated at the village itself. Selfsufficiency, svavalamban, was both an ideal and a necessity at Sevagram. Gandhi had made it a weapon in the struggle for Independence through the vow to only wear homespun cloth, Illustration 68. Gateway to the Jaipur Congress 1948 Illustration 69. A General View of the Exhibition Space Jaipur Congress 1948 Illustration 70. facing page Watchtower Jaipur Congress 1948 70      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      71 khadi, and to make spinning a central activity of daily life. After Independence, and soon after Gandhi’s assassination, khadi became a cornerstone of the sarvodaya movement; it sought to create a decentralised and progressive society on Gandhian ideals. Spinning was as much a part of daily life as washing and eating in Sevagram. It will come as no surprise to learn that Devi Prasad soon became known as the fastest spinner of the finest yarn.49 In 1947 he hand-stitched a garment for Nandalal from the finest fabric that he had spun [Ill. 23 is of Nandalal’s postcard that acknowledges having received this garment]. Self-sufficiency was a necessity in the matter of obtaining the equipment for making art, although basic supplies like paints and paper were available. Necessity apart, Sevagram was to set an example to rural India with its poor access to materials. So brushes were handmade in the art school, some of the paint was made from vegetables and coloured earths mixed with resin. Fortunately the very rich Indian traditions of folk as well as courtly art and craftsmanship were still available to be documented and collected. Devi met many craftsmen across India during the bhoodan walks. He constructed various experimental potter’s wheels and kilns and eventually achieved a studio with several kick wheels and an updraft wood-fired kiln. Although he mentions it only in passing in his writings, it is clear that Devi Prasad’s art practice is inseparable from svavalamban. It gives an added, perhaps spiritual or moral dimension to his love of making and doing. The joy in doing, indeed in DIY – Do It Yourself – runs strongly through his work. As he says in one of his articles: For the creator, the doing aspect or the process of creating itself is often more important than the object of creation, irrespective of its success with the spectator, who experiences and enjoys the end result of the creator’s effort – a beautiful object, a message, a communication or a combination of more than one of these elements.50 Devi Prasad’s extraordinary life achievement is in living these beliefs with remarkable consistency and a very considerable output, not to mention doing it all while also holding down a day job for a major part of his career. While he has written extensively about his philosophy, what specifically animates and informs his own works remains elusive. He leaves us in no doubt as to the application of art and its value to human society, but says little about what exactly art is or what it is for. His own works, however, provided that they are seen as a whole, like a tree with branches, make clear his own take on these perennial questions. Illustration 71. top and middle Experiments in Making a Potter’s Wheel Sevagram early 1950s Illustration 72. Earthenware Pots by Devi Sevagram circa 1955 Illustration 73. facing page Self-portrait Crayon on paper 18.5 x 27 cm Sevagram 1952 49 I am grateful to Sunand for sharing much of this information with me from his unpublished essay, Devi Prasad’s conversation with Sunand Prasad, Delhi, 10.09.09. 50 Devi Prasad,‘The Art of Making Pots’ in The Studio Potter, Exhibition catalogue, Eicher Gallery, New Delhi, Oct 1995 – Jan 1996, pp. 12–13. 72      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      73 Illustration 74. two photographs Watchtower in a Jowar Field Sevagram late 1940s Illustration 75. facing page Watchtower in a Field Watercolour on paper 29 x 19 cm Sevagram 1948 Illustration 76. next page Jowar Plant Watercolour on paper 19 x 29 cm Sevagram 1948 74      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      75 76      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      77 Illustration 77. Mountainscape Watercolour on paper 24.5 x 17 cm Shillong 1947 Illustration 78. Mountains Pen and ink and watercolour on paper 17.5 x 12.5 cm On a trip from Sevagram late 1940s Illustration 79. facing page Shillong Forest Watercolour on paper 17 x 25 cm Shillong 1947 78      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      79 ART  AT  SEVAGRAM Devi painted two particularly reflective works soon after returning home to Dehra Dun on completing his period at Santiniketan. The allegorical study of an extraordinarily energised Horse in a Fit mentioned earlier [Ill. 64], and a mannered self-portrait called Dreaming While Watching Lizards [Ill. 4], where he is lying beside an open window revealing the evening light beyond, distracted from the letter tucked under his pillow and the open art book held under his hand, gazing into mid space at a wall with a pair of lizards flanking his books arranged on a shelf. News of the position at Sevagram had not yet reached him; the young painter had a future to contemplate. The painting draws on several styles: the flowers in the vase on his shelf surrealistically enchanting him with their fragrance, the tempera execution unmistakably Santiniketan, the shape of his eye, Ajanta. While this painting may be more directly revealing of his existential ennui as a young twenty-two year old, the painting of the horse is perhaps more complex. He was quite aware of Coomaraswamy’s writings and in a later book explains that ‘according to Indian and Chinese aesthetics, it is of supreme importance that the maker should completely identify with the object that he or she makes.’ 51 He agreed with Coomaraswamy’s writing on Chinese painting: ‘The Chinese artist does not merely observe but identifies with the landscape or whatever it may be that he will represent. The story is told of a famous painter of horses who was found one day in his studio rolling on his back like a horse, reminded that he might really become a horse, he ever afterwards painted only (the) Buddha. An icon is to be imitated not admired. In just the same way in India the imager is required to identify himself in detail with the form to be represented. Such identification, indeed, is the final goal of any contemplation, reached only when the original distinction of subject breaks down and there remains only the knowing, in which the knower and the known are merged.’ 52 Perhaps again, we can read a rich metaphor in this painting where he refers to his own self, an interpretation that may be strengthened when one notes that the painting is dated 8-10-44, the artist’s twenty-third birthday. By contrast, Devi’s painted works at Sevagram are about exploring imaginative territory with a critical eye and a sure hand. They feed from the full spectrum of the art that caught his eye, from traditional Bengali alpana, to the photography of Karsh and Cartier-Bresson. The works made in the Santiniketan techniques of tempera and watercolour are now executed with painstaking care; their relatively smaller scale and at times minimal painted area on the surface belies the time spent on each painting. He becomes a master colourist: hidden in his landscapes and nature-studies are in fact a riot of shades and colours. This is 51 Devi Prasad, Education for Living Creatively and Peacefully, Spark–India, Hyderabad, 2005, quoted more extensively in the appendix of Devi Prasad’s writings at the end of this volume. 52 A.K. Coomaraswamy, quoted in Roger Lipsey (ed.) Coomaraswamy: Selected Papers, vol 1, Princeton University Press, 1977, p. 309. Illustration 80. Sarangi Player Watercolour on paper 17 x 22.5 cm Sevagram 1952 Illustration 81. Sarangi Player Crayon on paper 18 x 27 cm Santiniketan 1942 Illustration 82. facing page Sarangi Player Watercolour on paper 9.5 x 22.5 cm Sevagram 1953 80      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      81 particularly evident in his paintings made on visits to the hills around Darjeeling, Kohima and Shillong [Ills. 77-79], as also in the watercolour of the Jowar (Sorghum) plant [Ill. 76]. Jowar, the main Kharif (summer) crop around Sevagram, is not the only referent to the valorisation of the local. The vast open flat countryside and fields around Sevagram [Ills. 84-88, cotton plantations, the homestead and his garden become his inspiration. A clearly Gandhian message can be seen in four other works [Ills. 67, 75, 130, 149]. One of which is a woman sweeping with a jhaadu [Ill. 149]; the erotic labouring woman sweeping was made after Gandhi’s personal letter to Devi on the art of sweeping. Compositionally strong, it is executed only in essential outline, with supremely reserved and effective control of multiple mediums: crayon, ink and paint. The other paintings include the sarkanda watchtower amidst Jowar fields with a woman spinning on a box-charkha [Ill. 75] and We are Gandhiji’s Disciples [Ill. 130]. This last work, a fairly literal view of Devi’s Sevagram shows a woman winding yarn on to a spindle, the naive wall painting behind her referring to the work of the Sevagram children who were part of the Nayee Taleem. And her raised left hand which holds the pooni (spindle) of carded cotton breaks the frame of the painting to lead us to one of the two panels of a text of Tagore’s poem on Gandhi that flank the sides of the painting. Devi and his brother Brijendra had always been extremely fond of Hindustani classical music and Devi had begun to learn the Esraj and later the Sarangi at Santiniketan. He bought his own Sarangi later and continued to practice intermittently in Dehra Dun and early days at Sevagram. The Sarangi player was an enduring theme in his paintings and sketches [Ills. 80-82]. At the same time, the adoption of a folk idiom in painting was in keeping with his political persuasion. Moonstruck [Ill. 93] is as much folk in its naiveté, brushstrokes, chalkiness, white outlines and highlights as much as it is adapts styles and motifs chosen from art history. Reference to the sixteenth century Indian style of the Chaurapanchasika is visible in the lady’s expectant and large fish-shaped eye, in her placement – standing at a threshold before a conjugal bed. Other age-old Indian symbols include a vase of fragrant Champa flowers and a painting of Krishna playing his flute metaphorically placed in the distance to remind the viewer of Radha’s love for Krishna of the raas-leela. The adaptation of styles chosen from art history to his own natural landscape and realities of village India were to evolve at Sevagram into a veritable political statement. A large work Devi made at this time (1956) was a bas relief in cement that occupied the wall of the Kalabhavan at Sevagram. Its composition is strongly reminiscent of his training under Benodebehari while working on the murals in Baroda and Santiniketan. Its shallow relief uses sculptural devices studied through those on the Ancient site of Bharhut while its subject matter of local/folk processions and festivals in the landscape of the region made it appropriate for its location. He says that this was probably the most time-consuming artwork he ever made, not because of its execution, but because of the planning required. Devi also built a large collection of traditional textiles, kitchenware, hats, toys and terracottas initially during his many bhoodan walks in the 1940s and 50s, and to a lesser extent later on. These included things from regions as disparate as Nagaland, Himachal and Kerala. He also re-started Santiniketan-style batik on cloth and leather at Sevagram and composed several large appliqué textiles assisted by Sharmishta Majumdar, an expert seamstress and warden of the girls’ hostel at Sevagram. Illustration 83. A Bird in a House Watercolour on paper 15.5 x 10 cm Sevagram 1952 Illustration 84. Field with Flowers Watercolour on paper 25.5 x 18 cm Sevagram 1949 Illustration 85. facing page Landscape Tempera on paper 20 x 32 cm Dehra Dun 1944 82      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      83 84      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      85 86      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      87 88      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      89 POTTERY The village was never for Devi an isolated space arrested in some eternal Eastern utopia. The internationalism in his Sevagram works can be seen from the beginning of his time there. As early as 1949, Devi made his first paper cut-out of a boy [Ill. 94], less than a decade after Matisse had started exploring the form and only a couple of years after his cut-outs had first been published in Jazz. His expertise can be seen in the strong graphic of the brown boy with red lips which conveys volume, expressiveness and ornamental detail via a few pastings of black for the eyes and hair which contrast with the subtle tone-on-tone build up of pale yellow flowers on the white ground scattered behind him. The second surviving cut-out is of a dancer that was made at about the same time.53 But typically, apart from a few occasional examples, these remained just experimental expressions and cannot be considered as styles that Devi fully adopted. Sevagram attracted a continuous stream of international visitors, eager to learn from and contribute to Gandhi’s ashram. The Japanese Fua, of whom there are portrait crayon sketches by Devi [Ill. 37475], was one of them. But perhaps the one visitor that must be singled out for particular mention was the ceramic artist John ffrench. John ffrench came to live in Calcutta from 1957 to 1960, as a folk art collector for the Design Centre of West Bengal. He was profoundly moved by Sevagram and came to work closely with Devi during that period. By this stage Devi had already built a pottery studio in Sevagram, had been actively observing local potters and reading Bernard Leach’s A Potters Book. S.K. Mirmira, who graduated in ceramic technology from Bangalore Polytechnic and had also been active in the Quit India Movement (and imprisoned for eight months during that time), joined Sevagram in 1948. Devi and he started a small pottery section there, using local red clay, and carefully observed local potters. Mirmira settled with the Bhadravati potters near Wardha, and after the Khadi Commission was set up by the Government in 1953, became actively involved with training and organising several local craftsmen communities in India into-cooperatives that made new wares for the changing markets.54 Meanwhile Devi was focused more on activities at Sevagram, and was personally struggling with glazes, studying how to improve the local wheel besides learning how to throw clay pots from a local potter. It was in those days that Devi stumbled upon Leach’s book in Gandhi’s library at Sevagram. This was to be his most significant guide in aiding his transformation into a studio potter. Devi Prasad left a strong 53 Interestingly, the impact of the Matisse style was to have a more enduring and dramatic effect on Benodebehari Mukherjee who took to the style with the greatest felicity after 1957 when he lost his eyesight. 54 Kristine Michael, The History of the Studio-pottery Movement in India, unpublished paper, 2008–2010. Illustration 86. page 82-83 Tree and Fields Tempera on paper 36 x 21 cm Sevagram 1946 Illustration 87. page 85 Summer in Sevagram Tempera on paper 81 x 55.5 cm Sevagram 1954 Illustration 88. page 85 Fields Watercolour on paper 35 x 24.5 cm Sevagram Undated Illustration 89. page 84 Bhikshuni Tempera on paper 21 x 33 cm Sevagram 1950 Illustration 90. page 87 Untitled Tempera on paper 48.5 x 43.2 cm Sevagram signed and dated 26th February 1946 Illustration 91. page 86 A Girl Sitting in a Window Tempera on paper 29.5 x 20 cm Sevagram 1947 Illustration 92. page 86 Journey Back Home Tempera on paper 18 x 19 cm Sevagram 1950 Illustration 93. page 86 Moonstruck Tempera on paper 9 x 13 cm Sevagram 1953 Illustration 94. this page Portrait of a Boy Paper cut 17 x 22.5 cm Sevagram 1949 Illustration 95. facing page Vase Earthenware with painted pigment H 20 cm Sevagram 1950s 90      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      91 pottery legacy at Kalabhavan. The work had all been in red clay, fired and glazed to 960°C in a simple wood-fired kiln. He had also designed his own ball and pot mill to run on water power. Much of the technical knowledge for setting this up was adapted to his environment from Leach’s book. Bernard Leach was himself, as we have already noted, quite aware of Coomaraswamy, and had met both Gandhi and Tagore in England: Gandhi in London in 1930 during the Round Table Conference, and Tagore at Dartington with the Elmhirsts later in that decade. On his discovery of Bernard Leach, Devi writes: It was in Sevagram that I got introduced to the name and work of Bernard Leach, by a strange but pleasant accident. I had already come across his name in an art and craft book. One lucky day, when I was looking through the book shelves of the Institute’s library I came across a book entitled A Potter’s Book. The author was Bernard Leach. First I was intrigued thinking, how come this book is in Gandhi’s library! However, that thought did not occupy my mind for more than an hour or so because I straight away started reading it. Discovery of this book proved a great boon to me. Within a few days I made Bernard my ‘Guru’. Before I got the opportunity of learning from this book, I had already started toying with the idea of having a proper wheel, methods of preparing clay for throwing and a kiln. The traditional wheel was beyond my capacity to manage; so, with the help of the Institute’s carpenter I made a wooden frame with a kind of wheel-head, fixed a cycle chain on it, for the wheel to be turned by someone other than the one throwing pots. We also built a circular brick structure, which I thought would be good enough as a kiln. We mixed clay in large traditional earthenware pots made by a traditional potter, first by hand and then we discovered, rather concocted, mixing rods, which served our purpose. There were a few students who did pottery and learnt, along with me, the skills involved. One of us turned the wheel and the other made pots. We did manage to make some pots. The students and the teacher learnt the art of pottery together. We found that the way we were doing things was too tedious and not quite satisfactory. Thank goodness, I had found this book which came as a boon. Luckily, I also had a good friend, a graduate in ceramic technology from the Benaras Hindu University, at that time the only centre in India with ceramics as a degree course, but without pottery as a craft. He was working with the pottery department of the Khadi Commission. He helped us in transforming that ‘circular brick structure’ into Illustration 96. Vase Earthenware with painted pigment H 24 cm Sevagram 1950s Illustration 97. facing page Vase two views Earthenware with painted pigment H 20 cm Sevagram 1950s 92      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      93 a workable kiln, which, to my surprise reached the temperature of 960˚C without much problem. Later, when I understood the a, b, c of the technical side of the art I managed to make a fairly proper kiln and also acquired a small muffle kiln from Bombay Pottery. We were able to use these kilns for making pots for several years. I had two students who spent quite a bit of their time in pottery. One of them completed his course up to the Uttam Buniyadi (university) level.55 Children of all the classes came to do art work. Those who wanted to do pottery worked with clay. Others did drawing and painting. We made almost a routine of arranging exhibitions of children’s work on the Kala Bhawan walls. Even otherwise there were either prints of paintings and sculpture from all over the world or children’s paintings on display. It was a delight to see children arriving for their art class and going straight to see them. I was in Sevagram for eighteen years. Those were my most creative years of life. We arranged a couple of small all-India exhibitions. So much so that one year we were able to offer the Khadi Commission to hold their annual pottery conference in Sevagram. It was held on December 22nd to 24th, 1955 in Sevagram, with an exhibition of clay work – pottery, votive items etc. It is a surprise for me today to think of the brain wave I had at that time of inviting the two or three practicing potters in India, names of who I had only heard from different sources, to participate in the exhibition. Our dear Gurcharan Singh had also sent a few pieces and Haku Shah had brought with him the horses and elephants made by the Chowdhri community of Gujrat, both received awards. Apart from knowing something about the technical side of the art of pottery Bernard Leach’s book taught me how to look at a pot and to understand the elements that make a pot a living object. I say living, because Bernard Leach saw a pot as something that has its own personality. Realising fully well that my knowledge is very limited, I am taking the courage to say, even if it is only on the basis of my Santiniketan experience, that apart from Nandalal Bose no other artist would have drawn a parallel between the human body and a pot made with clay, as Bernard Leach did.... 55 Devi is referring here to S.K. Mirmira. Also helping was the famous ceramist Kalindi Jena. By 1956, when the eighteen year old Kalindi Jena joined Sevagram, Devi had created a Kala Bhavan there. Having worked alongside Devi for five- six years, Kalindi stayed on to become an art teacher assistant at Sevagram, (later taking over Devi’s position when he left to go to England as the secretary of the War Resisters’ International), spending a total of eleven years as student and teacher at Sevagram. Eventually he became disillusioned with the changes there and then left to join Prabhas Sen at the Design Centre in Calcutta. Illustration 98. A Face Brushwork on paper 9 x 14 cm Sevagram 1955 Illustration 99. Bowl Earthenware with painted pigment Diam 5.7 cm Sevagram 1950s Initialled ‘De’ in Hindi in the cavetto Illustration 100. facing page Bellied Bottle Earthenware with painted pigment H 20.8 cm Diam 15.4 cm Sevagram 1950s ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      95 ... I met Bernard Leach for the first time in 1972, when I was living in London. I went to his home in St. Ives. He was, as his secretary said, too busy and could give me only twenty minutes. I accepted the kind offer with gratitude. We found that there was a lot to talk about, pottery, Gandhi, Tagore and much more. Bernard did not look at his watch. Nor did I, naturally! We suddenly realised that we have been talking for more than two hours. But that he did not mind. He was very kind to me and like a good teacher he also taught me how to make Japanese green tea. I believe that Bernard’s entry in the world of pottery was one of those billions and billions of permutation combinations that go on happening in Nature, in fact the universe. I am sure he did not have any preconception of becoming a potter and that too, the father figure for most modern potters around the world. .... I was lucky as the day I met him the first time he was in a mood of chatting. He told me the wonderful story of his first experience in pottery. One day he was invited to a raku evening and was asked to try his hand on a pot. He took a bowl, naturally unglazed, and painted decorations on it very carefully. Then someone came and took it away. He then dipped it in a white liquid. Bernard was shocked to see this man do that. He thought that may be his decoration was not good enough therefore it was ‘removed’. When time came this bowl was put in the furnace. But, after a while when the bowl came out of the raku kiln he was amazed to see what had happened to it, which he had thought was rejected and destroyed. I am sure that experience made him fall in love with clay and fire. He must have seen the inherent magic of clay becoming a living thing when passed through fire. .... Bernard’s greatness was also in his way of looking at the art of pottery. Pottery for him was not just a craft. It was the art of living, just like any other art, painting, music or sculpture, which, if honestly practiced with dedication, takes the maker from the world of forms to a world of anandam – supreme joy. He was scientific in his understanding of the art and technology of ceramics, and the way in which he explained and practiced the scientific aspect of pot-making was unique. His language was of poetical nature and that which everybody could understand. It is also that aspect of A Potter’s Book that places it in the category of classics – something that remains always alive and in demand. There are thousands of books on the technique of pottery and there will be many more thousands in the coming decades, but A Potter’s Book will remain the bible for all potters. It surely is mine.56 56 Devi Prasad,‘Clay my Friend’, Exhibition catalogue, Art Heritage, Delhi, 1997. Illustration 101. Vase Earthenware with painted pigment H 24 cm Sevagram 1950s Illustration 102. facing page Vase Earthenware with painted pigment H 22.2 cm Sevagram 1950s 96      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM Illustration 103. ½VWXVS[ Bowl Earthenware with painted pigment H 5.2 cm Diam 11.5 cm Sevagram 1950s Illustration 104. Jug Earthenware with painted pigment H 13 cm Diam 21 cm Sevagram 1950s Illustration 105. second row Bowl two views Earthenware with painted pigment H 5.2 cm Diam 11.5 cm Sevagram 1950s Illustration 106. third row Pinched bowl with abstract geometric forms Earthenware H 5 cm Diam 17 cm Sevagram 1950s Illustration 107. Pinched bowl with faces painted in a clockwise direction Earthenware H 8.5 cm Diam 20 cm Sevagram 1950s Signed ‘De’ in Hindi Illustration 108. facing page Vase Earthenware with painted pigment H 21 cm Sevagram 1950s ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      97 98      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM In the field of his pottery during the Sevagram period, Devi really does come to define a modern Indian studio practice of an inspired quality, originality and excellence. The works are always utilitarian of course, their bare forms are classic, but at times consciously off-classic: for instance, the vases are a little too curvilinear, bulbous or wobbly to be related to classically oriental gourd-shaped ones [Ill.100]. Others are painted with a virile and passionate eye [Ills. 95-97, 112], something captured also by his photographs of the same period. Their decoration however draws on another host of memories: brushwork is held with the confidence of a Santiniketan trained painter but shorn of its sweetness to be able to communicate with the immediacy and confidence of a now mature artist. Its abstractionism is at times Fauvist, yet at no time does the work stop being rooted in his own reality. His deep friendship with John ffrench might also have aided in experimenting with the bold colours for which ffrench was so justly famous. Perhaps here we can associate Devi with the growing nature of abstractionism that was suffusing itself in Indian art. ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      99 Illustration 109. John ffrench at Sevagram circa 1957-60 Illustration 110. A potter at Sevagram 1950s Illustration 111. facing page Vase Earthenware with painted pigment H 21.5 cm Sevagram 1950s 100      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      101 Illustration 112. Vase two views Earthenware with painted pigment H 21.5 cm Sevagram 1950s Illustration 113. A pair of vases Earthenware with painted pigment Sevagram 1950s Left H 18.9 cm Right H 19.5 cm 102      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      103 PHOTOGRAPHY Devi brought his first five-Rupee Kodak box-camera at a discount for three Rupees and 50 paise as a teenager in Dehra Dun in the early 1930s. Although his photography ceased briefly when he joined Santiniketan, he picked it up again in the later part of his days there as a student when he bought himself a double-extension quarter size Maximar plate camera with which he began photography again. With this he took photographs of his student life, the teachers and visitors to Santiniketan in the early 1940s. The extensive documentation of the Jaipur Congress and the early years at Sevagram were also taken with that camera. Within a few years of joining Sevagram, Devi expanded his studio there to incorporate photography. Although his work on child education was primarily through painting, photography became his personal passion. It was then, in the early 1950s, that he began his own processing and printing and bought his own enlarger.57 He became an active member of many photography associations including a Life Member of the Federation of Indian Photography shortly after the society was launched in 1953 and a Life Member of the Royal Photographic Society (UK) in 1959. These amateur and professional clubs and associations held exhibitions across India and the rest of the world, some of which were part of the ‘postal portfolio’ scheme that had recently been launched. Devi’s works began to be increasingly selected from hundreds for display in photography clubs in several Indian cities and at large international venues. Just looking behind the prints in his archive one sees a series of stamps and stickers of every exhibition that the photographs travelled to, revealing a fascinating history of the forums available for the exhibition of amateur Indian photography in the 1950s and 60s. To mention only a few, Lonely Grazer [Ill. 138] went to ABAF at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and the Salao International de Arte Fotografica Sao Paolo; Morning Fog [Ill. 116] to Leicester in 1954 and then to Australia (1959) where it was shown at the International Exhibition of the Photographic Society of Queensland and the YMCA Camera Illustration 114. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan Frontier Gandhi Sevagram 1950s 57 He was not, however to start his own colour processing until he was in London in the 1970s.The early colour photography at Sevagram was all shot on transparencies. Circle at Sydney; Face and Folds [Ill. 120] to Japan; Mischief Ahead and Fog in the Forest [Ill. 387] were exhibited widely in India at regional Photographic Societies and Camera Clubs, the former in 1958-59 and the latter first in 1955 and then 1958-59 (Pondicherry, Kanpur, Burnpur, Rajasthan); Tree and Clouds at New Castle upon Tyne International; Elephant’s Bath [Ill. 148] was exhibited by the UP Photographic Association and the Photographic Association of Bengal in circa 1953; Lines of Age at the fifth Ljubljana International and the 41st Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Photography (1954) after which it travelled widely in India. The photographs appear to be very much part of the ethos of photography of the period. Amongst his portraits (more black and white than colour) are personalities that immediately betray Devi’s ambit: farmers and their children around Sevagram, people of distinct communities (as seen in the works of Sunil Janah and Madanjeet Singh), national leaders that he came in contact with (Tagore, Gandhi, Subhash Chandra Bose, Nehru, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Vinoba Bhave, Rajendra Prasad and Zakir Hussain), the Santiniketan community (classmates at picnics and school trips, Ramkinkar, Nandalal and Gurdial Mallik), etc. But his greatest attention in portraits is given to two themes: children and family. Although the Santiniketan portraits of friends and teachers were only ever meant to document his personal life and never intended to be art, they last today as important chronicles of an insider’s life there. Increasingly, his photography became more selfconsciously artistic, and thus there is a difference in the quality of his gaze by the time he photographs his own children and Janaki. Photographs of his children were now being sent to art photography exhibitions. Devi’s children and family and students have always been struck by his frequent recourse to childlike manners: expressions and gestures or play, often to bring home larger truths. These portraits thus encode a far bigger gesture for the artist. They express the joy and gravity of his work as a 104      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      105 child-educator. Thus we see children in Sevagram gardening, painting, eating, fighting, joyous children on a charpai in the evening light spitting out chewed sugarcane oblivious to any other world. His other photographs preserve histories of important moments in the history of Santiniketan, the Jaipur Session of the Congress and Sevagram. These can only be understood in the specific histories of these institutions. A third and extremely dominant motif is of unspoiled natural landscapes in places that are now completely unrecognisable urban jungles [Ills. 66, 117-18, 125-26]. These are, however more than just documentary photographs. Views of epic landscapes, the farmer tilling, women harvesting, groups threshing, fields fallow and abundant, people and their cattle... these constitute very much the Romantic Nationalist. Given that Ababindranath had decried the use of photography,58 Devi’s translation of a certain Santiniketan pictorialism in his landscape photography is an intervention that assumes significance. His studies on still-life were mostly in the form of recording flowers in his garden and documenting Indian statuary at Ellora, Konark, Mahabalipuram and other famous sites. His vision was strongly guided by what can be called a Santiniketan aesthetic: the picturesque and the epic proportions of man in nature, a rural idyll, personal portraits and the homestead. These are each marked by classically lyrical compositions. Studied together with his paintings, pots and prolific writings they reveal much about what captured his imagination and the common element of humanism that underlies all his work. In the photographs, perhaps even more than the deliberated paintings, lie a spontaneity of composition and line that explain the spirit of his philosophy of art and education. Equally, this large archive captures simple joys and an artistic spirit for which he is so well known. 58 In Sadanga, or, The Six Limbs of Painting by Abanindranath Tagore, Indian Society of Art, Calcutta, 1921, he condemned photography as Western and uncreative. Illustration 115. Evening Shadows 9RMHIRXM½IHPSGEXMSR Illustration 116. facing page Morning Fog Sevagram 1954 106      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM Illustration 117. Rajghat Delhi 1949–50 Illustration 118. facing page Landscape Sevagram 1952 ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      107 ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      109 Illustration 119. ½VWXVS[ Labourer / Builder (Retina II + 2 Xenon; Panatonic X. 1/250 78, 10.30 am) Sevagram circa 1950 Illustration 120. Lines of Age / Face and Folds Dehra Dun 1951 Illustration 121. The Actor Sevagram 1950 Illustration 122. second row Chacha Ji Sevagram 1950s Illustration 123. He sees him everywhere/Dadu 1 Sevagram 1953 Illustration 124. Dadu II Sevagram 1953 Illustration 125. facing page Landscape Sevagram 1950 110      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      111 112      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      113 EDUCATION In 1944 Devi Prasad was offered a position as art instructor for the first six-month teachers’ training camp wherein Sevagram could be looked upon as a model school for the country-wide Nayee Taleem work. His engagement with Sevagram, however, went on to last eighteen years. During this period, Devi was actively working with Vinoba Bhave on the ‘land-gift movement’ and with Jayprakash Narayan. A philosophical mandate was achieved by him by synthesising his art practice to the needs of empowering a society right down to its villages and children, through Nayee Taleem. Children and the village were seen as the agents of this change. Gandhi’s conviction in the value of creating a form of Basic Education for a free and peaceful society founded on Truth were to find expression through Nayee Taleem. And how Truth, satyagraha and svavalamban (selfsufficiency) were inextricably linked by him, has already been noted in the previous section. Gainful productivity through handicrafts was to be a cornerstone of this educational practice. Sevagram had become the main centre of Gandhi’s vision of Basic Education. Devi articulates his vision of this: Once it is realised that violent means cannot create the necessary climate for a change of attitude, education becomes the major instrument in the hands of the revolutionary. After he came out of prison in 1944, Gandhi declared that the most valuable contribution that he had made was his new system of education called Nai Talim, which he visualised as the true means of transforming society. In the context of BhoodanGraamdan, Nai Talim (New Education) develops into Gramswaraj-Nai Talim, which means that the function of Nai Talim becomes the creation of Gram-swaraj.59 In her history of the Nayee Taleem, Marjorie Sykes60 summarises that this idea really was first articulated in October 1937 when Gandhi called a conference which was attended by many eminent education experts of the country and the Education Ministers of several provinces. He presented his scheme to them that free and compulsory education should be provided to every child of seven to fourteen years of age; the medium of instruction should be the mother tongue; the process of education throughout this period should centre around some form of manual productive work, and all the other abilities to be developed should be integrally related to the 59 Devi Persad [sic] (ed), Gramdan – the Land Revolution of India, WRI Publication, London, 1969. 60 Marjorie Sykes was a great friend of the Prasad family. Close-knit ties were forged between the entire Sevagram community. The closest relationship was with Radhakrishna and the children of the two families were always in each other’s houses. Devi was also very close to Asha Devi and Mittu, her and Aryanayakam’s daughter, who features in a couple of his photographs. Sushila Nayyar (later Health Minister) was very close to Janaki. They met when Janaki arrived in Sevagram, where Sushila was already working as a doctor, having followed Gandhiji there. They formed a special bond. Banwarilal Choudhary, Kalindi Jena, Mukteshwar, Gajanan Ambulkar who is still at Sevagram and became an anatomical artist at the Kasturba Gandhi Hospital there – were all part of that community. Illustration 126. previous page Palm Forest Kerala late 1950s Illustration 127. Bapu Kutir Sevagram 1950s Illustration 128. facing page Day’s End Photographed during the bhoodan walks 1950s ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      115 central handicraft chosen, with due regard to the environment of the child. This system of education, he said, would gradually be able to cover the remuneration of the teachers. Gandhi’s Constructive Programme was built to provide the country with alternative techniques and institutions to replace the ones imposed by the colonial rulers, and with which the country did not wish to continue after attaining freedom. He had hoped that once India became free, it would have a fully tested pattern of political, economic and social structures to run the country on a sound non-violent basis. A little later the Hindustani Talimi Sangh, an all-India organisation, was formed to develop the Basic Education programme throughout the country and run experimental schools. The first such school was set up in Sevagram, which also became the central office of the Sangh with E.W. Aryanayakam as General Secretary. Gandhi chose Dr Zakir Hussain, then head of Jamia Millia Islamia, as Chairman of the Sangh. A Nayee Taleem conference was called in January 1945. In his inaugural speech Gandhi introduced an entirely revised and enlarged map of the system. Addressing the basic education workers (which by now included Devi) he said: ‘Although we have been working for Nayee Taleem all these years, we have so far been, as it were, sailing in an inland sea which is comparatively safe. We are now leaving the shoals and heading for the open sea. So far our course was mapped out. We have now before us uncharted waters with the Pole Star as our only guide and protection. That Pole Star is village handicrafts. Our sphere of work now is not confined to Nayee Taleem of children from seven and fourteen years; it is to cover the whole of life from the moment of conception to the moment of Illustration 129. Untitled Children spinning at a post-Partition refugee camp Photographed during the Bhoodan walks 1950s Illustration 130. facing page We are Gandhiji’s Disciples Tempera on paper 60.5 x 37.5 cm Sevagram 1953 116      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      117 death. This means that our work has increased tremendously. Yet workers remain the same. But that should not worry us. Our guide and companion is Truth which is God. He will never betray us. But Truth will be our help only if we stand by it regardless of everything. There can be in it no room for hypocrisy, camouflage, pride, attachment or anger. We have to become teachers of villagers; that is to say, we have to become their servants in the true sense. Our reward, if any, has to come from within and not from without. It should make no difference to us whether in our quest for Truth we have any human company or not. Nor does Nayee Taleem depend on outside financial help. It must proceed on its own way, whatever critics might say. I know that true education must be self-supporting. There is nothing to feel ashamed of in this. It may be a novel idea if we can make good our claim and demonstrate that ours is the only method for the true development of the mind. Those who scoff at Nayee Taleem today will become our ardent admirers in the end and Nayee Taleem will find universal acceptance. Whether this is a mere dream or a practical reality, this is the goal of Nayee Taleem and nothing short of it. May the God of Truth help us to realise it.’ 61 Devi says that Gandhi considered the Sevagram centre to be ideal for conducting the main experiment in Nayee Taleem, as it was there that the Charkha Sangh (All Indian Spinners’ Association) was carrying out its main activities. Wardha was the centre for the other village industries with nearly twenty villages surrounding it in close proximity. In defining the handicrafts and art philosophy of Sevagram, Devi drew on a synthesis of Gandhi and Tagore. He explains: according to Tagore’s scheme there are three centres of education: the mother tongue, not only as the medium of instruction but also as the major means of communication between people, creative activities, and Nature, of which we are an inseparable part. Gandhi’s scheme as presented to the nation in 1937 also had three similar elements. According to Tagore, Nature was the most important source of knowledge, human creativity and livelihood. The highest education is that which does not merely impart information but puts life in harmony with all existence. Illustration 131. facing page Zakir Hussain and Jawaharlal Nehru at Sevagram 1950s Illustration 132. Nehru at Sevagram 1950s Illustration 133. Vinoba Bhave addressing a gathering 1950s Illustration 134. Festival Sevagram 1950s Illustration 135. this page Vinoba Bhave addressing a gathering 1950s 61 Quoted in Devi Prasad, ‘Education for Life and Through Life’, accessed online at http://ignca.nic.in/cd_06018.htm on 15 March 2010. That Sevagram, the Hindustan Talimi Sangh and Nayee Taleem began to assume paramountcy in Gandhi’s vision toward the end of his life is borne out by the repeated references to them in his hand-written notes from December 1947, a matter inadequately reflected in his Collected Works. These papers, now in the archives of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, (courtesy the timely intervention of the Indian High Commission and President of India) originally came up for public auction in London in 1996.They were published at the time: The Last Papers of Mahatma Gandhi, Phillips Auction Catalogue, 14 November 1996, Lot 392 (5759), London, pp.50–51. 118      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      119 Illustration 136. Playing with Sea Waves Watercolour on paper 19 x 15.5 cm Andhra Pradesh 1950s 120      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM The second element was meaningful manual work according to Gandhi, and as Devi noted, creative activities according to Tagore. He saw little difference in the two approaches. Tagore did not talk of the economic side of creative activities. For him it was art, something that caters for all human needs, physical, emotional and spiritual. Gandhi, on the other hand, placed emphasis on it as a vocation for livelihood and a way of gaining knowledge. Devi explains: I do not think the difference between the two is crucial. While Gandhiji’s approach is obviously egalitarian, Tagore’s sounds elitist. Taking into account the time factor, Gandhiji had the advantage of drawing from Gurudev’s educational experience. He did not only learn something but he also improved on it.62 When I started working in Sevagram, I received a personal message from Gandhi, almost at the very beginning. It was a letter in reply to one from me about the spirit of freedom in an educational centre like Sevagram. By this letter he also taught me how to use the broom while cleaning a room or the outside courtyard and the road. In addition, he said: ‘you have learnt 62 Devi Prasad, ‘Education for Life and Through Life: Gandhi’s Nayee Talim’, in The Cultural Dimension of Education, accessed on-line: http://ignca.nic.in/cd_06018.htm on 3 April, 2010. Illustration 137. Horses Tempera on paper 76 x 46 cm Sevagram 1958 Illustration 138. facing page Lonely Grazer Dehra Dun 1950 ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      121 art from Nandalal, who, I regard to be an artist who comes very close to my ideal of a true artist. Apply what you have learnt from him in your work here as much as you can, but remember that art is not a commercial activity. It is sadhna. One must earn one’s bread by purposeful manual work.’ That guidance meant very much to me. It helped me in developing my personal philosophy, specially relating to education and creativity. During the early period in Sevagram while teaching children, it occurred to me that pottery is one art that has much educational potential. I felt that working on the potter’s wheel is a learning process in the art of concentration as well as creativity, which is the basis of real education. I put it at par with yoga. At the same time clay is a material which responds easily if handled gently and with the spirit of friendship. I planned to build an art department in the Institute, with a pottery section on the basis of whatever I had learnt by seeing and observing traditional potters at work. I started handling common clay.63 In 1959 Devi Prasad completed a book about his research on child art and education which was part treatise on the essentiality of art and part guide to children’s art education. This work represents the practical realisation of a philosophical basis that truly guided his own work. Even in the first ten 63 Devi Prasad,‘Clay My Friend’, Exhibition catalogue, Art Heritage, Delhi, 1997. years he devoted to the WRI, when the artist in him may have found hardly a chance to touch a brush or clay, he did go on taking pictures, designing and making. Yet as Sureshchandra Shukla historicises, the veracity of Gandhi’s educational philosophy began to lose governmental support towards the end of the 1950s when other contesting ‘national’ claims began to be favoured.64 Several divergent philosophies began gaining ground, and certainly the Gandhian was not Nehruvian India’s preferred educational ideology. With the failure of the suggested alternatives, and with the increasingly well-founded psychological bases to play, activity and nurture in the fields of early education, one can look back perhaps nostalgically to wonder if the then misunderstood Gandhian model lost governmental support too soon. At any rate, I shall not claim here to profess any expertise on Devi Prasad’s implementation of an educational philosophy and shall defer instead to Krishna Kumar’s assessment given below. But before moving on to that, I do think it worth noting the art historical importance of the Wardha Resolution of 1937 which provided the basis for the foundation of the Hindustani Talimi Sangh (and its Nayee Taleem). The Report of the Zakir Hussain 64 Sureshchandra Shukla, ‘Nationalist Educational Thought: Continuity and Change’, Economic and Political Weekly, July 19, 1997, pp. 1825–31; and again in Sureshchandra Shukla,‘Nationalist Educational Thought: Continuity and Change’ in S. Bhattacharya (ed.), The Contested Terrain: Perspectives on Education in India, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1998. Committee of 1938 stated that ‘The process of education should centre around some productive form of manual work, and that all other abilities to be developed or training to be given should as far as possible, be integrally related to the central handicraft chosen with due regard to the environment of the child.’ This was presented a few months later at the art historically famous Haripura Congress Session of 1938, (for which Nandalal Bose had made the posters and which had drawn Nandalal close to Gandhi). The whole purpose of Nayee Taleem was to equip people to raise their standard of living and be self-sufficient through their own efforts. Gandhi believed that such an education would stop the exodus from the village to the city and help people adapt to their real social environment; it would give the education itself a practical component; and equally significantly, it would endear an individual to labour, eventually breaking down caste and class hierarchies.65 Sevagram became the practical ground on which this was achieved. 65 Ambedkar famously critiqued the naïve outlook to caste in questioning of what use it was to teach labouring skills to children of labouring classes – pottery to children of potters, or teaching carpentry to weaver’s children – if it was only going to keep them arrested in parameters of the identity of the very caste group they hailed from. For Gandhi, the caste question was one (albeit significant) constituent in a wide network of other political, social and cultural variables (which saw the eventual emergence of a dignity for the work of the ‘harijan’ by involving all castes into manual work from the earliest stages of their lives), whereas for Ambedkar it assumed centrality. The difference in approach was thus expected. This is variously discussed in too large a bibliography to cite here, but for a brief study of its examination from the point of view of art history and craft, see Deeptha Achar, ‘Crafting Education: Caste, Work and the Wardha Resolution of 1937’ in Parul Dave Mukherj, Shivaji Panikkar & Deeptha Achar (eds.) Towards a New Art History, D K Printworld, Delhi, 2003, pp. 385–393. 122      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      123 A  THEORY  OF  EDUCATION  FOR  PEACE by  Krishna  Kumar To Devi Prasad’s life as an artist and as a philosopher-fighter for peace, his experience as a teacher of children lends a special dimension. He taught at Sevagram and the area of the curriculum he worked in was art. What link can we find between the man who led the War Resisters’ International and the one who worked with children as an art teacher? Were these merely two phases of his life? Considering how poor a status is accorded in our society to school teachers, and more especially to art or craft teachers, I can well imagine that many would regard Devi Prasad’s life in London as the Secretary General of WRI as the peak of his public career. Others might perceive him mainly as a great ceramic artist, painter and photographer. Both groups might find it difficult to believe that Devi Prasad developed his theory of peace while working as an art teacher of children. Yet, this is the truth. As an art teacher of children, Devi Prasad brought together two great approaches to human freedom that Tagore and Gandhi had developed in the context of India’s struggle against colonial rule. The two men and their minds were quite different, but they were driven by the same urge which inspired many others during the last two centuries – the urge to examine what meaning of ‘freedom’ might be applicable to India, given her nature and condition. Both believed that education was a major arena of India’s struggle for freedom. The pedagogic cultures they invented look rather different if we study them in terms of the ideas and priorities they were based on. In Devi Prasad’s work as a teacher, the two entered into a joint frame; not merely as two pictures fitted into a single frame, but rather as two designs woven into one. How do we know that this happened and what made it possible? The answer draws our attention to Devi Prasad’s rarity as a teacher who wrote about his work as a teacher and theorised about it. His book, Art, the Basis of Education, provides us with a dense and reflective account of what he did as a teacher and what it meant. Zakir Hussain says in his Foreword to this classic, ‘I have had the opportunity of seeing his work as well as seeing him work.’ Devi Prasad’s writing lets us do both these kinds of ‘seeing’ and, in addition, offers us a theory we sorely need to reconstruct education with the help of art. The theory helps us grasp the thread that ties together Devi Prasad’s life as a teacher of art, an artist, and as a pacifist. It also offers us a means to understand why education which allows us to stay indifferent to violence and war is no education at all. Illustration 139. facing page Vinoba Bhave’s entourage; Devi standing on left Late 1940s/early 1950s. Illustration 140. Devi at Kalabhavan Sevagram Early 1950s 124      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      125 QUEST  FOR  FREEDOM Its political significance for other parts of the colonised world apart, India’s struggle for freedom had a psychological dimension. The question why India came under British bondage fascinated several great minds during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. At least a part of the fascination had to do with the hope that that answer would show an appropriate and adequate meaning of ‘freedom’ for India. For Gandhi, India was not merely a nation in bondage; it was an idea which had somehow got distorted. India’s iconic value as a civilisation inspired Gandhi to differentiate rather sharply between the goal of political freedom and the goal of rule over the ‘self’ or self-rule. Gandhi perceived himself as an explorer of the inner self which he called ‘truth’. Gandhi denied with grace and finality the status of a superior or victorious model of life to Europe and made it look like an object of sympathy. That was good politics too, but it was primarily a quest for a world rather different from what Europe’s ascent had promised to create across the world. Gandhi rejected the European model of prosperity because it was based on war and aggression, both against human beings and against nature. Gandhi spent his life establishing a different model of life and culture based on non-violence. Education formed an important sphere of this attempt. The emphasis in Gandhi’s experiments in education was on self-reliance and ingenuity. Both children and teachers worked with their hands to make life possible, give it a purpose and grace, and to realise that people do not need a government to maintain peace. Gandhi developed a new political science which had the capacity to serve both as a historical force against colonialism and as a cultural force against India’s sharply stratified social order. Illustration 141. Labourers Sketch in a notepad Sevagram 1953 Illustration 142. Flute Player Sketch in a notepad Sevagram 1953 Illustration 143. facing page Hands Sevagram 1952 The period during which Gandhi’s experiment was unfolding was marked by several experiments. One with which he interacted closely was Tagore’s. The two men and their minds differed in many ways, but they maintained an intense dialogue on vital issues and principles. The dialogue between them and between the institutions they set up inspired many minds to invent new ways to look at the world and to find options for the future. Gandhi’s suspicion of the state as an instrument of power and Tagore’s critique of nationalism form a symmetry which found closely resembling expressions in their pedagogic preferences. Gandhi found in the lives of India’s artisans a means to challenge the epistemology of conventional education, both colonial and indigenously Indian. Tagore found in art and poetry an integrating principle capable of healing and regenerating. Historians are now beginning to discover the sources of pain and inspiration in Tagore’s life which shaped his particular model of child-centredness. The focus of his institutional endeavour has never been in doubt: 126      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM it was to use the arts as a means to establish a regime of freedom which might work in tune with nature. In his training at Santiniketan during the years leading to the second global war, Devi Prasad must have experienced a creative model of life which offered hope for a world preoccupied with plans and means of self-destruction. The model was based on art, in a wide and generous sense, as a means of fulfilling the self. THREE  PRINCIPLES The idea of self-discovery through creative endeavour develops into full-blown politics of peace in Devi Prasad’s account and analysis of his experience as an art teacher. We can identify three broad principles that underpin this remarkable ideational structure. The first is: the acceptance of the child’s innate urge for freedom to express; the second is the fundamental integrity of all art forms and crafts; and the third is: predisposition towards peace. Let us briefly examine these three principles one by one. Acceptance of the child’s freedom is not merely a recognition of the child’s right to freedom, as today’s political parlance would suggest, but rather a surrender to nature. Terms like the child’s ‘agency’ might help us to grasp what Devi Prasad wants us to do as teachers. However, the spirit of what we do is as important as what we do or avoid doing. Emphasis on activities is synonymous with progressive pedagogy, so the common tendency to keep children busy in multifarious activities seems justified, especially when the alternative is the conventional practice of making children sit in rows, listen to the teacher’s voice, focus on the blackboard, and prepare diligently for tests and examination. Devi Prasad belongs to the school of Maria Montessori, Herbert Read and Sylvia Ashton-Warner who argued that the child’s self has in it a potent expressive force; all we need to do as teachers is to let this force find creative opportunities and media to express itself in a benign and encouraging environment. Art can form a comprehensive basis for growth and education because it has the capacity to accommodate not just the intellect and the emotions, but the soul which forms the uniquely individualised ‘Secret of Childhood’ as Montessori called it in her famous title. What, then, is art? This question helps us reflect on the second principle of Devi Prasad’s educational theory, namely the fundamental integrity of all art forms and crafts. The division of art into forms and genres, according to status and application, tends to cloud our perception of art as a fundamental principle of life itself. When adults talk about art, their discourse is naturally shaped by the heritage of what has been regarded as art, incorporating views about works of art, especially the ones which have received acclaim. Such parlance takes us towards rationales for the inclusion of art in the school curriculum with Illustration 144. Devi’s photographs of Sunand and Udayan Prasad in their childhood Sevagram 1950s 128      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM the goal of identifying and nurturing children who might one day become reputed performers or practitioners. People who think this way apparently ignore the developmental value of art which would apply to all children, not a selected few. Then there are those who make a strong distinction between crafts like weaving, pottery, carpentry, and so on, on one hand, and ‘arts’ as they stand defined in the literate discourses of visual arts, music, dance and theatre, on the other. The division has its roots in the class division of society, between ‘folk’ and ‘bourgeois’. Be that as it may, all such divisions hinder us from noticing the meaning that art as creative expression might have in the child’s life. Devi Prasad draws upon Franz Cizek’s term ‘child art’ and his training under Nandalal Bose to help us ponder on his experience as an art teacher. The various narratives he gives us convey his holistic or inclusive vision of art which transcends social categories like ‘artist’ and ‘artisan’, genres and media. The vision persuades us to see aesthetics ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      129 as a pervasive regime of mental nourishment. It offers a sense of proportion and balance, the sensibility of rhythm and tone, and above all, a craving for symmetry. These are the elements of peace which the third principle of Devi Prasad’s educational theory encapsulates. Education is today so fundamentally linked to war—both its justification and preparation—that any principle which emphasises the relationship between education and peace is likely to be trivialised or perceived as a nice idea, not to be taken to heart. Universality of the human predicament in our times often gets forgotten when we choose to feel insecure within a nationalist framework. Both Gandhi and Tagore derided such a framework and underlined the civilisational crisis that the whole of humanity was facing. But then, the moment we refer to peace as a universal need, we invite the criticism that we are ignoring the risks our own country is facing and the urgency of socialising children into imagined frames in which they see themselves as being ready to sacrifice their lives for the nation in a violent conflict. The political appeal of such imagined frames cuts across national boundaries and unites the so-called developed countries like the US and Israel with the so-called developing nations like India and Pakistan. Concern for national security and the desire to attain it by stockpiling the latest weapons are but a symptom of the crisis which reproduces itself in the heart’s hollow and is fed into robust permanence by chronic inequality and injustice. This diagnosis must make it clear that there is no immediate or simple solution to the problem of war. In his position as the Secretary General of War Resisters’ International, Devi Prasad assiduously mobilized people in diverse national settings to pursue an anti-war agenda in the larger framework of a non-violent life-style. What we learn from Devi Prasad’s work as an art teacher and the theory derived from it is how a true beginning of a peaceful world order can be made. The experience of aesthetic discipline in childhood has the potential to create a predisposition towards peace or an aversion to war. It is easy to be cynical or critical towards such a view on the ground that its promised outcome is much too distant. That it undoubtedly is. In its true sense, education requires distant time horizons. Only instrumentalist goals can be realised quickly. Today we are encircled by precisely such goals and our preoccupation with them is deepening the crisis that endemic violence and war signify. It is just the right time to mindfully listen to Devi Prasad’s advice. Apart from fundamental sanity, it offers a sense of dignity and a historic role to the teacher of the young. Illustration 145. Young Girl West Bengal 1961 Illustration 146. Preparing for a Play Sevagram 1961 Illustration 147. facing page Fetching Water / Malati Uttar Pradesh 1954 130      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      131 ON  ART,  THE  BASIS  OF  EDUCATION Excerpts   from   Art:   The   Basis   of   Education   by   Devi   Prasad,  National  Book  Trust,  Delhi  1998 Gandhi and Tagore had a vision of a liberated human being, which could be realized only through an educational approach based on creativity in which the aim of every activity is the affirmation of the unity within the individual’s personality and the unity of all humanity. I found art education fulfilling three purposes simultaneously. The first and foremost is the aspect that is represented in the words of Tagore and Hebert Read, ‘We have to live art if we could be affected by art. We have to paint rather than look at paintings.’ Secondly, the practical aspect, which is related to the forces that direct the developments of skills, such as the skill to see, measure or plan. The third is its diagnostic potential. I was repeatedly fascinated by the way childrens drawings revealed the inside of their mind, its joys and its sorrows, its past experiences and its wishful thinking, and much more. Educational psychologists have now realised the potential of art as a tool for diagnostic purposes and also as a therapeutic activity. Art therapy is now becoming an important educational tool. In the hands of the schoolteacher, it can serve as an effective way to plan the child’s educational activities. I was also inspired by descriptions of the Indian educational traditions and philosophy given by scholars, as well as those found in our folklore. In India we did not compartmentalize art and life separately. The main objective of education was the pursuit of knowledge. Pursuit of knowledge did not imply only gathering of, or seeking information. It included wisdom, capacity of discretion, control of the ego, humanity, truthfulness, self-dignity, social service, and creative skills. The teacher did not impart only the education of classical subjects but also taught students the practical skills required for living a good life. The teacher and the students lived together and did everything required for survival from collecting firewood for cooking to receiving guests and looking after them in a most hospitable manner. The Sevagram School represented the real India to me. It was in a rural part of the country, which was poor and untouched by the elite culture created during the British Raj. All the children, expect very few, came from the nearby villages. Those very few were of urban or semi-urban families who were living in Sevagram and working in some of the departments there. Not a single child had any previous experience, neither of drawing pictures nor of making models with clay. I soon realized that none of the systems or schools operating in the Western world could serve as models for our work. The first thing to note was that ours was not an effort to build a unique educational institution. We were working on a scheme that would be suitable for every school in the 600,000 villages of India. According to Gandhiji’s educational scheme every child should have the best opportunity to blossom into a fulfilled individual and a creative member of the community. He knew that education, as it was being practiced, created a spirit of competition rather than cooperation, encouraged the attitude of separation instead of unity, and instead of teaching to give, it inculcated greed in the educated. In other words it nurtured violence in the minds of the pupils in place of non-violence. Education has to take a sophisticated view of the question of violence. It must define violence in all its manifestation. Physical violence is only a tiny part of violence committed within human societies. For instance, the inhuman treatment of the blacks in North America or the Harijans (untouchables) in India is equally, if not more damaging than any physical violence. The degree of violence children, or for those [sic] matter women, are subjected to is incalculable. Who could take the necessary steps to eliminate such violence from human behaviour? Surely not the politicians, who by and large, are the products of the so-called modern education. Hardly any among them have imagination and will-power to take necessary steps in their own lives or the lives of those they claim to lead. Many of them are responsible for sowing the seeds of violence in society. Therefore, the responsibility, I believe, is of those who want to be called teachers, and who are expected always to keep their minds on the future of the community they serve. There cannot be any doubt regarding the comprehensiveness of the Nayee Talim syllabus and the balanced stress it put on human values. Apart from the knowledge required to understand and live with one’s environs and the skills necessary for day-to-day life, the syllabus also put emphasis on cultural activities and social service. I was a novice in the field and had no previous experience of teaching, yet intuitively I was deeply impressed and amazed by the clarity and boldness of approach. In spite of a little intellectual loneliness that I sometimes felt, I had self-confidence, and was able to gradually demonstrate that art is the way to joy, freedom and fulfilment for children. Illustration 148. Elephant’s Bath Sevagram 1953 132      |      ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM ART,  DESIGN  &  PEDAGOGY  AT  SEVAGRAM      |      133 ON  GANDHI’S  SATYAGRAHA   from  “Satyagraha:  the  Art  of  Defying  Oppression  without   becoming  Oppressors”,  by  Devi  Prasad,  in  Gandhi  Marg,   Vol.  14,  No.  2,  July  –  Sept.  1992. Satyagraha is a way to live truthfully and constructively. It is also a war against everything and every force created by human beings, either deliberately or unknowingly, which causes divisions within the human family and by which individuals or groups harass, injure, exploit, or oppress other individuals or groups. At the same time it is a process of transformation of society – in other words, of reconstructing human relationships, to bring about an independent society made up of independent individuals living in cooperation among themselves as well as with their environment. Satyagraha by definition does not imply that the human community will or even should be free from conflict. In fact, it is also a method of conflict resolution. Satyagraha is often defined too loosely. For most people it is a method of confrontation or defiance. It is often conceived to be a weapon to fight against one’s opponent without honestly aiming at developing the kind of personal character which gives the necessary strength to endure suffering without becoming bitter or disillusioned. What goes on in the name of Satyagraha is far from Gandhi’s Satyagraha, which means literally – adhering firmly to the truth. A Satyagrahi is one who lives his or her life in truth, with truth and with firmness on truth. According to Gandhi, truth implies love, and firmness engenders force. Thus, Satyagraha is the foundation of life. A Satyagrahi is not a member of an army of ‘fighters’. Any person living a life which is guided by this truth force, or love force, is a Satyagrahi, who never seeks confrontation and all the time aims at fostering cooperation, but will not fight shy of confronting a situation with all the power of truth behind him or her. Satyagraha is a way of life, a process of conducting oneself, and if in this process a situation of conflict arises, the Satyagrahi does not sit quiet or inactive, but responds to the situation with courage, calm determination and humility. The time has come when our lifestyle has to be redesigned on the basis of Satyagraha. Gandhi’s vision of Satyagraha, with its constructive programme and its determination to resist evil, is a way to an oppression free world. It would be a world in which each and every person would feel that he or she is not afraid of anyone, nor would they do anything to make anyone else afraid of them. Illustration 149. A Sweeper Crayon brushwork and ink on paper 22.5 x 17.5 cm Sevagram 1947 Illustration 150. A Potter Watercolour and ink on postcard 13.75 x 8.75 cm Sevagram 134      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      135 CHAPTER  III A  PEACEFUL  WORLD  IS  A  CREATIVE  WORLD:  ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR   RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL 136      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      137 Pacifism was at the root of Gandhi’s philosophy and the Sevagram educational experiment aimed at instilling it right at the children’s (and hence a society’s) core. Several international supporters of Gandhi and their movements had been visitors to his ashrams in India and Devi Prasad was involved in their deliberations. As an active-pacifist Devi Prasad left Sevagram in 1962 and went to work as the Secretary General of the War Resisters’ International, the longest standing world pacifist organisation in London. He was responsible for broadening the WRI’s narrow Eurocentric focus in the decades after World War II by introducing the Gandhian concept of the Peace Army (Shanti Sena) with the founding of the World Peace Brigade. The WRI was at the forefront of non-violent protest during the Vietnam War, in Eastern Europe, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, the Nigerian Civil War and the Bangladesh-Pakistan confrontation in 1971. It was the time of the huge peace marches, of ‘flower-power’ and the height of the civil rights movement and non-violent revolution. In 1967, Devi presented ‘A Manifesto of Love on Behalf of the Human Race’ at the Peace Convention in Geneva along with fellow signatories Martin Niemoeller, Martin Luther King, Thich Nhat Hanh and Johann Galtung, among others. In their private lives, the Prasad family continued to live in London with the ideals of Sevagram. Devi’s meagre salary was certainly inadequate for five people. He says, “About the financial side of living in London, my wife Janaki wrote to me saying: ‘Our life-style in Sevagram was that of poverty and having practiced poverty for eighteen years it must give us the necessary courage and will-power to continue living in the same style.’”66 Frugality was a necessity and speaking to him about it years later I found Devi looked back on it without any ill feeling. Experiencing regular racist behaviour, the family found itself drawing on the courage, strength and principles of non-violence learnt at Sevagram. If Sevagram had tested the aesthetic Santiniketan artist, the early years in England certainly tested the Gandhian from Sevagram. In my interviews with Devi for the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library’s oral history documentation I tried to press Devi into a corner to elicit a strong reaction to the matter without success. He had removed it from his memory, perhaps holding on to it would have been an expression of hate, which the true Gandhian was certainly above. Illustration 151. previous page Trees YR½RMWLIHOil on paper 76 x 51 cm London 1974 Illustration 152. facing page Flower Power Protest March Trafalgar Square London 1960s Illustration 153. Protest March London 1960s Illustration 154. Protest March London 1960s From 1960 when he became fully immersed in the international pacifist movement to 1972 when he stepped down from the General Secretaryship of WRI, Devi infrequently practiced art as such. But he went on making – first ‘modernising’ 67 Sutherland Road, the house he bought in 1963 a year after moving to London – replacing, as was the fashion, the ogee mouldings and turned balusters with 66 Devi Prasad, War is a Crime against Humanity, London, 2005 p. 336. 138      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      139 plain, square section architraves, and hardboard panels. An interesting cultural warp for someone with such a deep respect for traditional art and craft. More interestingly, initially because of lack of money, he designed and constructed at weekends a number of pieces of furniture, inventive in their functionality as well as ease of making. The best example is probably an adjustable shelving system he created using oneinch diameter hardwood dowels with perforations at two-inch centres, threading through holes in eight and ten-inch wide parana pine shelves which rested on hardwood pins placed in the perforations. He had ‘knocked through’ the lounge and dining room, again as was the fashion. The first of these shelving units was very effective as a room divider within the large opening, cleverly using space while retaining a sense of openness. Sunand says that DIY became a dominant activity in their home and that he learnt a number of building trades in the course of helping his father. This was svavalamban thriving in a new context, one in which doing-it-yourself was a widely practiced male pursuit and tools and materials were readily available.67 Illustration 155. WRI Signa Work-study Camp Florence 1965 (Devi in vest) Illustration 156. facing page Devi with Danilo Dolci (‘The Gandhi of Italy’) 1973 Illustration 157. Devi with A.J. Muste USA Illustration 158. (IZM[MXL.SER&EI^¾EROMRK,EVSPH&MRK QMHHPI EXXLIXL8VMIRRMEP Conference of the War Resisters’ International Rome 1966 Illustration 159. ;MXL8SR]7Q]XLIERH2MIPW1EXLIWSR 2SV[E] London 1965 Illustration 160. With Members of the US War Resisters’ League 1967 His activities as a designer extended beyond making furniture. Already in Sevagram he had not only edited but also overseen the design of the journal Nayee Taleem. Publishing was a core activity of the WRI; not only War Resistance, the regular newsletter, but also a number of pamphlets and other publications. When he arrived in London to take over as General Secretary, the WRI was based in a suburban house eleven miles from central London. Against considerable opposition he moved the HQ to King’s Cross in the centre presenting huge advantages to an international organisation. This was the beginning of modernising the organisation. As regards its graphic image, rather than engaging a graphic artist Devi set about devising a distinctive and modern house-style for a WRI in tune with the radical new culture of the 1960s. He complained that people were always questioning his designs though he knew that if they had been produced by a so-called expert they would have lapped them up. He favoured sans serif typefaces like Univers and a bold asymmetric layout style with heavy bars rather than the dry, centred, serif style the WRI was used to. He also devised a lower-case logotype. Devi had also been a keen student of design patterns at Santiniketan and Sevagram where they had most often been expressed as alpana which could be used as printer’s ornaments. Most of these are floral, some geometric; the former betraying a design vocabulary established in alpana patterns at Santiniketan, but in the geometric ones one sees an engagement with contemporaneous design [see, for instance, the printer’s ornaments and doodles on pp. 1, 7, 265, 282, 286 in this book]. In 1969 Janaki died after a short illness and the family’s self67 Sunand Prasad, unpublished essay, 2010. 140      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      141 sufficiency had to move up yet another gear economically and emotionally. Sunayana (Ammani) was nine, Udayan sixteen and Sunand nineteen. Devi was 48. Each had to shoulder the loss with greater responsibility. Sunand says: ‘I think I was genuinely transformed by this experience and that the three of us (i.e. his siblings and him) came to hold a more civilised view of the roles of men and women, before the status of women in this society really did decisively change.’68 A little later in 1972 he resigned as General Secretary of WRI, and while keeping very much in touch with the movement, resumed his artistic career as a studio potter. The shed at the bottom of the garden now housed a wheel and a small electric kiln. Later a large gas kiln was erected at the back of the house under a steel frame lean-to he built with Sunand. Devi quickly regained his very considerable skill at the wheel and, while concentrating on utility ware, started to experiment with some new forms such as domed butter and cheese dishes and mobiles. Explaining his division of work as an activist and potter in England Devi writes: Illustration 161. Moonstruck Brushwork with pen and ink 32 x 42 cm London Undated Illustration 162. facing page Mother and Child under a Fruit Tree Pen and ink on paper 27 x 40 cm London 1971 After eighteen years of experimental and field work I had to give up my Sevagram work in 1962 to go to London to be the General Secretary, of War Resisters’ International, a worldwide pacifist organisation. This work did not allow me any time to do art work except for making a few drawings every now and then to sell at our occasional special days for raising money for the organisation. After completing ten years I suddenly realised that I have drifted away from the road to my real destination. I felt I should go back to my source. At the fourteenth triennial conference of the War Resisters’ International I announced my resignation. The parting was hard, not only for me but also for most of the three hundred members of the International who had come as delegates from all over the world and heard my resignation speech. I attended my last Executive Committee meeting in December 1972 and in January 1973 I went to Stoke-on-Trent and brought with me a wheel, an electric kiln, some tools and lots of raw material. I now had a tiny garden shed studio in London. It was a great feeling when I picked up some clay and started throwing. The response from the clay was terrific. Both of us – clay and me – felt as if we had been missing each other for over a decade. Our lost love was restored. At the first trial there emerged a pot, feeling shy but smiling! I was reborn and without losing much time I was there in the market in modest way. For a short time I also taught pottery at two evening institutes, which was fun. It re-established my self-confidence. My involvement with pacifism and Gandhian philosophy was so deep rooted that it was neither possible nor desirable 68 Sunand Prasad et al ‘What Devi Taught Us’ in K. Michael and B. Prasad (eds.) A Celebration of Creativity, Exhibition catalogue, Delhi, 2001. 142      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      143 for me to give up my moral responsibility towards the pacifist movement in general and the War Resisters’ International in particular. It was a two way relationship. The International kept live links with me, which I gladly and gratefully accepted. I was elected its Chairperson for three years, then Vice Chair, and then was elected as a member on the International Council of the organization every three years until 1992. So, I divided myself into two parts, one-third a peace activist and two-thirds a potter.69 One has already noted how Coomaraswamian ideas of education and craftsmanship (which were founded in art history) was of prime concern to Devi. He assiduously undertook studies of Indian statuary as a student. He began building a photographic archive of India’s monuments, then, and continued to do so right until the 1970s, a time by which he had started lecturing on the subject at various venues internationally. As Sunand notes, ‘For Devi Prasad if every man is a special kind of artist so is he also an art critic.’70 An immersion in art during education must take practical form but the point is to develop a true feeling for art and an appreciation of, if not aptitude for, creativity that is essential for forging a rounded personality. It was also, as we noted earlier, capable of causing social change if not a veritable revolution in human beings to lead a more peaceful, compassionate life. At the same time, his art practice, particularly when it came to painting, was always deeply personal: months may have passed when he did not sketch let alone paint, and yet the years of exposure, the effects of violence, depravity, personal loss and humanity made him communicate through his painting. These were almost never shown publicly. The sketch of A Woman Officer [Ill. 166] was made after a friend who was a survivor from a Nazi Concentration Camp narrated his description of her. The many erotic drawings [Ills. 168-74, 179, 202], mostly made after Janaki’s passing, are as personal as they are political. Indifference [Ill. 176, 180], Confrontation [Ill. 175] often refer to the strange condition where ‘comfort women’ sold into sexual slavery in times of war and conflict provide an intimacy that neither partner necessarily feels. While in London Devi maintained an active participation in the activities of the ‘Tagoreans’ a diasporic group set up by Tapan Gupta in London in 1965 that promoted the cultural philosophy of Tagore. Devi also maintained personal links with other friends and sympathisers of Gandhi in the UK, many of whom he had been introduced to at Santiniketan and Sevagram including John ffrench, Marjorie Sykes and Margot Tennyson. Margot Tennyson who served on the Executive of the World Congress of Faiths had continued her involvement 69 Devi Prasad,‘Clay my Friend’, Exhibition catalogue, Art Heritage, Delhi, 1997. 70 Sunand Prasad, Unpublished essay, Conversation 11.09.09. Illustration 163. Invitation for Performance Pen and ink on paper 21 x 29 cm London 1980 Illustration 164. A Cover for a Daily Newsletter Pen and ink on paper 21 x 29.5 cm London 1975 Illustration 165. facing page Who Am I? Feltpen on paper 16.5 x 22.5 cm London 1971 ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      145 with the Gandhian, Tagorean and Quaker spheres of activity.71 It is also worth noting that Devi had been an active collector of Indian folk art and textiles and when Margot helped organise the Tagore Festival in 1976 at Dartington Hall, she involved Prabhas Sen and Devi Prasad. Two years earlier, in 1974, Devi had lent his collection of Bengal textiles via Margot Tennyson for the Indian textile exhibition at Camden Arts Centre. Devi began travelling extensively during the 1960s to shape the wave of pacifism and non-violent protests across the world. Crisis of wars and conflicts, liberation movements and activist students invited him to hold workshops, give lectures and help them in protests in various corners of the world: in Europe, South-East Asia, Latin America and the United States (see bibliography of Devi Prasad’s writings in the Appendix). 71 Margot Tennyson’s extensive letters and papers between 1946–1948 (along with Hallam Tennyson’s) are at the Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge. They reveal her association with Gandhi, their acquaintance with Marjorie Sykes, the advances in Indian education and crafts (including using natural dyes on pots), etc. The World Congress of Faiths famously pioneered Inter-Faith worship and the Declaration Towards a Global Ethic; ideas which in their breadth and at least conceptual purport were akin to Devi’s. In 1975, invited to Boston by the Indian Students’ Association Indians for Democracy, he gave a lecture in Cambridge against the promulgation of Emergency in India. He talked of peace education arising from the core of primary education. During the lunch the Association hosted for him after his talk, he was introduced to one of its members: Bindu Parikh. She learnt that he had written Art: The Basis of Education, and was not just fond of music but had heard her Guru Ustad Sharafat Husain Khan in Faiyaz Khan Saheb’s house when Sharafat was only ten. All of this rang a chord with Bindu who had finished her PhD at Boston University on the effect of comparative strategies of child-rearing practices and moral education on the development of children and was by this stage working in a children’s hospital. She had also been a disciple of Sharafat Husain Khan of the Agra gharana, and their rapport grew from there. In 1977 they were married and decided shortly after to spend a year together in 1978 at Devi’s alma mater, Santiniketan. Illustration 166. %;SQER3J½GIVPen and ink on paper 41 x 29 cm London 1971 Illustration 167. facing page Scribbles and Sketches from various notebooks of WRI meetings Pen on paper London Mid 1960s 146      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      147 Six Drawings Crayon in various sketchbooks London all 1971-72 Illustration 168. Two Faces 29 x 41 cm Illustration 169. A Couple 29 x 41 cm Illustration 170. Lovemaking 21.5 x 26.5 cm Illustration 171. A Woman and Man 29 x 41 cm Illustration 172. Two Faces 21.5 x 26.5 cm Illustration 173. A Face 21.5 x 26.5 cm Illustration 174. facing page Couple Crayon on paper 58.4 x 41.9 cm London circa 1971 148      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 175. Confrontation Pen and ink on paper 13.5 x 18 cm London 1972 Illustration 176. facing page Indifference Watercolour and crayon on paper 55 x 40 cm Santiniketan 1979 Illustration 177. facing page, bottom right Romance Crayon and watercolour on paper 24 x 34.5 cm London 1975 later used for a series of lithographs made in Santiniketan 1978 Illustration 178. facing page, bottom left Romance Lithograph antiniketan 1978 ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      149 150      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      151 Illustration 179. Sketches Pen and ink on paper London 1968-70 Illustration 180. facing page Indifference Pen and ink on paper 29 x 40 cm London 1966 152      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      153 Illustration 181. Vase Stoneware H 26.2 cm London circa 1975 Stamped ‘dp’ above foot Illustration 182. Vase Stoneware H 22.8 cm London circa 1974 Stamped ‘dp’ above foot Illustration 183. facing page Bindu detail Epping Forest 1977 154      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 184. Bowl Stoneware H 7.8 cm Diam 14 cm London 1974 No signature Illustration 185. facing page Carafe Stonework with brushwork H 21.2 cm London 1981 Illustration 186. Lidded Jar Stoneware H 23 cm London 1979 No signature ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      155 156      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      157 Illustration 187. Globular Jar Stoneware H 14.5 cm Diam 19 cm approx. London circa 1980 Illustration 188. Globular Jar Porcelain with brushwork H 10.5 cm Diam 16.5 cm London circa 1981 Illustration 189. facing page Lamp Stand Stoneware H 33 cm Diam 9.8 cm London 1981 Stamped ‘dp’ above foot Illustration 190. Lidded Pot Stoneware H 9.5 cm Diam 12 cm London 1979 158      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      159 PAINTING  AND  POTTERY In a charming gesture, Devi’s colleagues at WRI collected the funds needed for him to buy a wheel as a parting gift in 1973. He supplemented these with some of his own and went to Stoke-on-Trent the next day to buy an electric wheel and kiln which he set up in the garden shed of his house. And this marked his return to being a full-time artist. This time it was stoneware clay that was formed into diverse shapes of ware drawing inspiration from Leach and classic Oriental, Indian, Cypriot and Middle Eastern shapes that were covered in felspathic glazes. A great deal of the decoration on his pots was done with slip-trailing, sgraffito (sometimes over an engobe to reveal the clay body beneath) and of course highly skilled brushwork, in underglaze pigments and slip. In 1976 he started working in porcelain in a more determined manner. His personal preference was for the Chinese oxblood red glaze, the pale celadon and the robust tenmoku with iron pigment brushwork. This necessitated a shift to reduction firing in a gas kiln. Illustration 191. Vase Stoneware approx H 23 cm London Mid 1970s Illustration 192. facing page Vase Stoneware approx H 26 cm London Mid 1970s The pots are remarkably well thrown, their proportions exact revealing a growing classicism. This is particularly evident in each of the bowls in this collection and in his teapots. Not that he hadn’t experimented with stylised forms, elongated Lucie Rie necks and high-footed bowls, metal-work inspired rigidly straight walls with smart banded rings decorating the cylinders... but these were like flights of whimsy, enjoyed for the moment. What came to endure as a result of all these experiments was a hybrid: as classic as it was contemporary. The most successful of these are meticulously recorded in notebooks with their proportions, volumetric capacity and weight noted beside their sketches. Alongside these are also charts of the quantity of what was made and how much was being spent for the studio’s supplies each week. Thus there exist notes which have information like: ‘18 teapots / 13 hours of throwing and turning + 8 hours of firing + materials £35 + overheads £10 + 10% wastage = wholesale @ £4.30 a teapot’ in 1974. And so it goes for coffee sets and breakfast cups and dinner sets and lidded jars, et al. These formed the bulk of his major sales and exhibitions. He had two major exhibitions, in Boston and Holland. Devi sold his pots mainly at arts/crafts fairs (e.g. Chelsea Crafts Fair), through a couple of shops in London and Cambridge and home sales. In the 1980s, he exhibited his paintings and ceramics at the Old Bull Gallery at Barnet and the Mandeer Gallery in London. But all was not always rosy in the hierarchy of the gallery circuit in the UK. He was not disheartened by two rejections to be accepted in the Craftsman Potter Association, some pottery shops met him with snooty reactions; paradoxically the criticism was that the work was very eclectic and derivative of the studio-pottery climate that had been current in the UK. The expectation was, 160      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL of course, that an Indian potter must be stereotypically Indian in style, not a global studio potter! He had come to stabilise his glaze called D-15, a versatile off-white with an egg-shell texture that can be coaxed toward grey or cream and which could on occasion delight with an odd spec of brown here or there. Similar are his variations in a standardised D-18: one recipe with rutile, another with a single percent more copper oxide, another with a percent more titanium.72 Ditto with D-1 (Tenmoku) (with a variant in D-11), D-3 (celadon); but the king of them all was the magical D-7 and its close cousin, D-14, both copper reds that could at times really reach a true state worthy of being called ‘peach bloom’.73 Entire notebooks, in fact, contain series of glaze recipes standardised for different clays from 1973 onward, through the 1980s, and include experiments carried out with students in the 90s. But returning to the forms and their surfaces. A number of celadon pots are faceted or fluted [Ills. 263-69, lidded jars of various sizes including many carefully executed small boxes and bottles [Ills. 244-45], each a little jewel. Charm and natural grace are ultimately what reign supreme in Devi’s pots. I shall single out a few pieces for particular mention: the deep porcelain bowl in celadon randomly scattered with abstract petals of blossom [Ill. 263]; the tenmoku bellied vase and large fruit bowl with a similar concept [Ills. 271-72]: tone on tone mud, sienna and black sprays of large flowers on a similarly varied ground; the tall white cylinder made at John ffrench’s studio in Ireland (also in the 1970s) with Indian women [Ill. 3], their baskets and pots balanced on their heads reminding one of the essential quality of the brushstrokes in some of the Sevagram works and platters; the perfectly satisfying globular teapots [Ills. 227-28, the sharper Cypriot-inspired compositions of demi-lunar outlines or hemispherical forms [Ills. 232, 381] with shallow cylindrical necks. An assortment which, when seen together, is satisfying for pure form, for skilful execution, for surface decoration and above all, for that mystical quality of graceful charm. ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      161 have started earlier, the opportunity to translate them into platters only came in the mid-1970s. Also, the paper-works are faithful to their mediums: charcoal, crayon or watercolour, and certainly the immediacy and deftness of the slip-trailing and brushstroke betray the man making the platters had had many years of practice painting those forms. He also made a series of musical mobiles [a preparatory drawing for one may be seen in Ill. 313]; complex forms of suspended arrangements using tension, balance and proportionate beauty of scale to create stunning combinations of wind chimes that created a different avenue of creative exploration for Devi. Devi’s practice as a potter, as he indicates himself, follows in the tradition of Leach. They had met and struck a rapport in 1972, and even if Devi never learnt directly from him, Leach had already been a guide to him for two decades. But in England in the 60s and 70s, he could not but be in awe also of Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. He writes : My understanding of the two artists is that they both were the pioneers in creating contemporary forms in pottery, shifting away from the Leachian Euro-oriental forms and giving pottery an entirely new orientation. Much of what is going on today is the result of the inspiration and encouragement derived from the daring, original and pioneering work Lucie Rie and Hans Coper did. The basic difference between the two, as I see it is, as follows: whereas Lucie Rie’s work is the product of her intuitive nature, Hans Coper’s is intellectual. Lucie could not drift away from the classical way of thinking and working, yet her pots in their The larger bulk of his cobalt blue underglaze painted and slip-trailed platters [Ills. 205-212] had a variety of faces, personalities rather, such that one wants to know who they are. Several are alone, but many confront each other and are akin to the compositions in his many paintings and sketches from the 60s and 70s. Yet while the paintings on paper may 72 Devi stopped making any quantity of this glaze when he came to India dissatisfied with the results there. 73 ‘Peach-bloom’ glaze (peau de pêche): one developed during the Ch’ing dynasty in the seventeenth century is a reduced copper glaze of pink mottled with a deeper red as well as with slight markings in green and brown. (The verdigris green being the natural reaction of copper to oxygen). The glaze can never be fully controlled by a potter, who can only aid in the creation of a kiln environment conducive to it. It often appears only as a blush on a pot.Traditionally, it was used generally for small vessels. Illustration 193. Lidded Box7KVEJ½XSIXGLMRKSRWXSRI[EVI(MEQGQ0SRHSRStamped ‘dp’ on base Illustration 194. facing page Vase Stoneware H 22.8 cm London 1979 Stamped ‘dp’ above foot Illustration 195. Vase Stoneware H 24.5 cm London 1979 162      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      163 shapes and treatment were totally original. It will be nearly impossible to show any work by an earlier potter which Lucie Rie might have imitated during her matured period. Hans Coper, on the other hand, did not care for classicism or any tradition already in vogue. He discovered his own expression. Looking at his forms as well as the surface treatment one can hardly think of any other potter who treated clay in the same manner. His shapes, it seems, dawned upon him from some other planet and that planet probably was his own intellect. In my opinion, both are highly sophisticated but completely different from each other in the looks of and in their approach to form. Although I consider myself a student of Bernard Leach I have the greatest respect for Lucie Rie. I put her on the highest pedestal in the world of pottery. Some of her pots, for me, are the most beautiful ones I can ever imagine. The greatest regret I have is that in spite of living in London and having passed through the area where she lived scores of time, I could never muster the courage to go and pay my respect to her; this is in spite of my planning to do that all the time. I always thought that I should not take up any of her time. I know it was my own hang up, which has nothing to do with her. After all I knew nothing about her as a person. I suppose it is easier and straight forward to approach a guru than to approach an angel! ...On account of the situation in Germany and Austria Bauhaus was closed down in 1933 by the German National Socialist government. In 1937 the New Bauhaus movement started in Chicago, USA. What was uniquely special about The Bauhaus was the influence it exercised in the art world. In the realm of pottery, as I have already mentioned, I consider Lucie Rie to be a product of that movement and Hans Coper her follower, with his own unique originality. Illustration 196. Platter Blue slip trailing and brushwork on iron speckled clay Diam 27 cm London mid 1970s Illustration 197. Platter Slip trailing on stoneware Diam 26.3 cm London 1974 No signature Illustration 198. Dancers Platter Slip trailing with brushwork on Stoneware Diam 29.2 cm London mid 70s Illustration 199. Platter Stoneware Diam 21.4 cm London 1975 Stamped on foot The difference I see between Bernard Leach on one side and Lucie Rie and Hans Coper on the other is neither of quality nor of creativity. I think they were two independent and yet mutually related historical landmarks in the development of the art of pottery. The Euro-oriental forms that Leach “invented” were as important and original as Lucie Rie’s and Hans Coper’s forms created nearly thirty years later. It will be erroneous to attach any hierarchic criteria to them on the basis of qualitative judgment. The foundation laid by Leach was in its historicity very important for the later growth such as that initiated by Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. Though hypothetical, it is worth stating that the foundation laid by Leach is at the very basis of the structure of studio pottery that we witness today in many forms. But let us not forget about the role of history in this wonderful drama. It was Japanese and Korean traditional pottery and not The Bauhaus that moulded Bernard, Lucie and Hans into what they ultimately became.74 74 Devi Prasad,‘Clay my Friend’, Exhibition catalogue, Art Heritage, Delhi, 1997 164      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      165 Even though he had no time for seriously pursuing art while he was working at WRI, his notebooks at conferences and scraps of to-do lists have revealing doodles: some full pages, others in the margins. He did however make time for some quick sketching privately. Many of these are with crayon and mostly either face studies, figures or erotic couples. Although he made his first landscape studies in England shortly after he arrived there in 1963 [Ills. 219 & 225], he really only reverted to the genre after his retirement from the WRI. A number of detailed pen and ink landscapes, many with dramatic trees, were patiently executed between 1973 and 1981 [Ills.220–224, 226]. A number of eclectic oil paintings also survive from the same period. In one landscape we see his execution of a postimpressionistic textural build up of thick paint. In another delightful unfinished work predominated by an autumnal pink [Ill. 151] we can see a similar use of the medium which Devi had intended originally to build up into a thick layer had the unfinished suggestiveness of the painting not satisfied him so. To note at what point he chooses to stop working on this painting is a definite marker of aesthetic choice. Its reserve, balance of colour, suggestion of form, movement and texture is something that is paralleled in his pottery decoration and in his preferred glazes. In his painting of a flower vase [Ill. 200] we see typically surreal imagining of a vase floating on an endless white space with carefully deliberated but immediately executed lines. The addition of squares of silver and gold leaf make it resemble a work by Kandinsky or Joan Miro (e.g. The Melancholic Singer ), while in his other two studies of birds done at the same time (also executed in 1974, Ills. 378-79) we may find shades of other influences: Santiniketan alpana in the two birds, 70s style textile design patterns and even Futurism. Clearly in the first year he returned to art-making he was enthusiastic to revisit all the styles he had been observing for so many decades. After Devi married Bindu in 1977, they decided to move to Santiniketan for a year where he took on a Visiting Professorship. During this period he tried to re-energise the pottery at Sriniketan, made a few lithographs [such as Ill. 178] and carefully dug out many broken and forgotten sculptures from the Kala Bhavana studios including preparatory maquettes which made for a comprehensive photographic study of Ramkinkar’s sculptural work before it was dispersed. The angle of each large black and white print with its sharp contrasts [Ills. 214, 216 - 18] reveals an acute sensitivity towards the spirit of the sculpture. The essence of monumentality is enhanced as one looks up at the woman in the migrating/ displaced Santhal family group, intimate as one looks straight at the Fruit Gatherers and many Mithunas, exaggerated as one looks sharply up at Subhash Chandra Bose and almost pitying as Devi makes us look down at the lamb being led to sacrifice (symbolic of the child being educated by the dogmatic), Illustration 200. Flower Vase Oil on board 54 x 76 cm London 1974 Illustration 201. Devi and Bindu ‘Ratanpalli’ Santiniketan 1978 Illustration 202. facing page Crayon Sketches in notebooks Early 1970s 166      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 203. Face Bowl Stoneware H 8 cm Diam 25.5 cm London 1976 ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      167 Illustration 204. Platter Stoneware Diam 33.5 cm London 1981 Signd ‘Devi’ on reverse 168      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 205. ½VWXVS[ Platter Stoneware with slip trailing Diam 27 cm London 1974 Stamped ‘dp’ on base Illustration 206. Platter Stoneware Diam 27 cm London 1974 Stamped ‘dp’ on base Illustration 207. second row Platter Stoneware Diam 28.5 cm London 1982 No signature Illustration 208. Platter Stoneware Diam 28.5 cm London 1982 No signature ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      169 Illustration 209. ½VWXVS[ Platter Toasted clay Diam 29 cm London 1979 Stamped ‘dp’ on back Illustration 210. Platter Stoneware Diam 29 cm London 1983 Signed by hand on reverse ‘Devi Prasad Jan 1983’ Illustration 211. second row Platter Stoneware Diam 28.5 cm London 1982 Illustration 212. Platter Iron speckled stoneware Diam 29.5 cm London 1982 Faint stamp ‘Devi’ on base Illustration 213. Sketches two from a series of preparatory drawings for platters, probably late 1970’s 170      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      171 or at the starving beggars made in response to the Bengal Famine. Devi is also acutely sensitive towards the medium of Ramkinkar’s work, and is careful about his choice of lighting for each sculpture in order to best bring out the softness and immediacy of clay, the coarse texture of Ramkinkar’s famous and preferred ‘cement fondue’ and the strength and smoothness of his work in bronze. The Ramkinkar photographs are controlled still-life studies, mostly taken by night. By removing each carefully floodlit gigantic outdoor sculpture from the noise of the buildings and trees that surround it, the photographs permit an incisive appreciation of the formal qualities of the sculptures. Only occasionally has Devi Prasad permitted a daylight view into the context in which the sculptures stand, thus fulfilling the other art historical need to view them in the landscape for which they were created. These photographs were taken in 1978, just two years before Ramkinkar died. They were processed in the lab in Santiniketan and Ramkinkar was delighted when he came for their first unveiling. Today, to protect the sculptures from the vagaries of the climate they been shielded under canopies, making the photographs an invaluable archive of their true place in the Santiniketan campus. By now Devi Prasad was completely reintegrated as a fulltime artist and began to show his works widely in India and Europe. Of all of them, the 1982 exhibition of his ceramic wares at Kunsrzall Lebra, in Oirschot, Netherlands, really marks the culmination and end of this period, for he was to relocate to India soon after. His one-man studio in London was by now prolific, producing large numbers of porcelain and stoneware pots, and several of the examples illustrated in this volume dated 1982–83 come from that phase. Illustration 214. Ramkinkar Baij Santiniketan 1978 Illustration 215. Crayon Sketch from Devi Prasads London notebooks Early 1970s Illustration 216. facing page Preparatory Maquettes for Yaksha and Yakshini Ramkinkar Baij Kala Bhavana Santiniketan 1978 Illustration 217. following page, at left Mill Call 6EQOMROEV&EMN4LSXSKVETLIHF]¾SSHPMKLX7ERXMRMOIXER Illustration 218. following page, at right Mother and Child Ramkinkar Baij right view Plaster of paris H 25 cm Late 1920s Collection of National Gallery of Modern Art Delhi Photograph © Devi Prasad 1978 172      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      173 174      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      175 176      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL A  PACIFIST  EXPERIMENT: DEVI  PRASAD’S  YEARS  WITH  WRI  IN  LONDON   by  Bob  Overy Fifty years ago, in 1960, representatives of pacifist groups from different parts of the world came to India for an international conference held in Tamil Nadu. It was the tenth time that this three-yearly gathering of war resisters had taken place, and the first time they had met outside Europe. Two world wars in the twentieth century had begun and ended in Europe. These devastating wars had run their course. Western pacifist groups, mobilised and deeply shaken by them, had proved powerless to affect them. War Resisters’ International, by deciding to hold its Triennial Conference at Gandhigram, was turning to India for inspiration. Perhaps European pacifists could learn from the legacy of work being taken forward by Gandhians after Gandhi? The great Indian leader’s method, which rejected violence – and which marshalled sufficient force to turn the tide of British imperial rule, not only in India but with repercussions across Africa too – was an example from which they could hope to draw renewed strength. Devi Prasad was an Indian representative at the conference. He attended as a worker in Gandhian education, whose long experience at Sevagram had led him to the editorship of the Gandhian education journal, Nai Talim. He had also worked with the constructive movement, Sarva Seva Sangh, and was in touch with the work of Shanti Sena, the Gandhian peace army. Devi heard Jay Prakash Narayan, the Indian socialist leader, give the inaugural address to the conference. Narayan, who was a strong admirer of Gandhi, was not a pacifist. Narayan noted that there was ‘at present no world organisation of nonviolence’. He told the audience that he had proposed to the United Nations that it should not command armed forces, but instead should rely on the unarmed force of peace-loving volunteers. At the same time, Narayan said that, in his view, India as a nation-state was not yet ready for nonviolent defence. He told the conference that pacifists would remain a small sect, cut off from the life of mainstream society, until they could discover and apply on a social scale the nonviolent methods of national defence and develop as well, nonviolent means of settling international disputes. Devi was already a pacifist and believed in the importance of opposing war, but he would have agreed with Narayan’s last point about the need for pacifists to develop nonviolent methods on a larger social scale. At Sevagram, he had noted Illustration 219. previous page Two Trees Watercolour on paper 34.5 x 24.5 cm London 1963 Illustration 220. facing page Forest Pen and ink on paper 29 x 41 cm London 1971 ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      177 178      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      179 the pacifist elements in Gandhi’s thinking and had read widely in pacifist literature. During the conference, he helped set up an all-India section of WRI. He was also involved with the World Peace Brigade (WPB) project, an initiative begun by J.P. Narayan, Danilo Dolci and various other prominent world peace leaders, with the support of WRI. The WPB aimed to replicate Shanti Sena on a world scale and intervene in international disputes. The following year, Devi spent seven months in Europe on a study tour of educational institutions. While away from India, he attended meetings with members of the WRI Council in Italy and Lebanon to help take forward the World Peace Brigade project. The WPB was already beginning to be active in Africa, in Northern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe). WRI had been formed in Western Europe, in Holland, but its headquarters moved to Britain in 1923 to link the separate anti-conscription and anti-war campaigns. Its declaration announced boldly: “War is a crime against Humanity. We are, therefore, determined not to support any kind of war, and strive for the removal of all causes of war.” The natural focus of WRI’s work was conscientious objection, the refusal of individuals to volunteer or be recruited to the military. Individuals whose personal, religious, or political beliefs told them they were not willing to kill on behalf of their governments were frequently prosecuted in military courts and subjected to cruel treatment. Often isolated and fearful of the consequences of their stand, they needed support from like-minded individuals. Pacifist groups provided that support and were linked across national boundaries by WRI. But it was a large step to move from a personal refusal to fight to an organised campaign, on a world-scale, to remove the causes of war. Supporters of WRI were bold enough to be committed to both aims. Devi said that what attracted him to WRI were the two aims, and particularly the determination to address the causes of war. Devi, like J.P. Narayan, shared the Gandhian view that the causes of war could best be addressed positively by developing nonviolent methods and principles on a much larger scale. He had had, of course, direct experience at the Sevagram ashram of an organised experiment, prompted by Gandhi, of living in a manner which strived to remove the causes of war and violence. WRI is a small organisation. In the early 1960s, after 40 years of war resistance, individuals from 30 countries had served on its International Council, mostly from Europe and the USA, but with occasional representation from all five continents. Ten or twelve key international sections were most involved, but the strength of sections varied. When Devi was invited in 1962 to Illustration 221. facing page and detail Trees in Autumn Pen and ink 57 x 40 cm London 1975 180      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      181 join WRI as its general secretary and he decided to bring his family with him to London to take up the post, he joined an office staff of two, with secretarial support. The WRI office itself suffered initially something of a culture shock with an Asian man as its manager. Devi saw his task as trying to bring the work of WRI to a wider range of countries, particularly those in Eastern Europe and in the developing world. His hope was always to move the WRI national sections beyond their courageous war resistance into an active movement which would confront war at its source. The ambition was immense. WRI had to use its limited resources to maximum effect. Over the next few years, while Devi was general secretary, it supported a peace boat, Everyman III, which the World Peace Brigade sailed boldly through the Baltic Sea to Leningrad to oppose Soviet nuclear weapons tests; it supported a Friendship March by Shanti Sena and the World Peace Brigade which attempted to take a message of goodwill and to defuse border tensions between India and China which could have lead to war; it supported a boat sailed by a Quaker Action Group, a group of US antiwar activists, to South Vietnam carrying medical supplies for political prisoners jailed by the US-supported South Vietnamese government; it distributed leaflets to American tourists in Europe in support of American deserters unwilling to fight in Vietnam; it distributed leaflets in four Eastern European capitals (Moscow, Budapest, Warsaw and Sofia), protesting against the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia; it supported Operation Omega which attempted to walk from India into East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) in protest against the invasion by West Pakistan; and it supported an international march from Geneva, in Switzerland, to Madrid, in Spain, in support of Spain’s first conscientious objector. Such propaganda by courageous nonviolent action captured the spirit of the times. A huge amount of political work was done too. One of Devi’s aims, which he thought was his ‘duty’, was to engage with people doing work for peace in Eastern Europe. Two seminars were held jointly with the World Council of Peace (WCP) in Eastern Europe, one in 1966 in Poland on ‘Education for a World Without War’ and the other, in commemoration of the Gandhi centenary, in 1968 in Hungary, on ‘Gandhi’s Relevance Today and Problems of Economic Development’. Devi sought, among other things, to interest the WCP in the problems of conscientious objection for war resisters in countries which were part of the communist bloc. However, the communist peace groups would only ever support the official state policies of their governments, and Devi admitted later that, despite his efforts, there was little evidence that the WCP was persuaded by WRI’s message. Illustration 222. facing page and detail Winter Pen and ink on paper 57 x 41 cm London 1974 182      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL During the ten years that Devi was General Secretary, WRI held four more Triennial Conferences in Norway, Italy, USA and UK. The themes of three of those triennials – ‘The Relevance of Individual Refusal in the Nuclear Age’, ‘Liberation and Revolution: Gandhi’s Challenge’ and ‘Revolution: Prospects and Strategies’ – expressed well the nature of the political debates at that time in pacifist circles. The changing nature of warfare posed a problem for pacifists. Armed forces and their weaponry, particularly in the West, had become more professionalised, more mechanised and automated, and more remote from society. In some countries, the military was less dependent on the individual actions of large numbers of soldiers. The opportunity to refuse military service was less in these countries, though it remained a powerful affront to the nation-state in others. Pacifism needed other or additional forms of refusal of war. Under Devi’s joint editorship, WRI published a world-wide survey of conscription to military service. It reviewed the nature of conscription laws in 101 countries and the conditions facing conscientious objectors. WRI took a world petition to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 1970 concerning the recognition of conscientious objection as a human right. Devi spoke and wrote regularly about the subject: ‘As the “right to life” is a basic right, so is the “right not to take life”,’ he argued. In 1967, at a convocation called in Switzerland to consider the ‘Pacem in Terris’ encyclical issued by Pope John on behalf of the Roman Catholic church, Devi represented WRI. He presented to the convocation ‘A Manifesto of Love’ signed by Rev. Martin Niemoller, Rev. Martin Luther King, Thich Nhat Hanh, Johann Galtung, Devi himself, and other peace leaders. It read in part: ‘Wars must cease.…We will no longer co-operate with any institutional demands or solicitations that we participate in mass violence.… Our loyalty must be given first of all to humanity.… We refuse all participation in acts of organised violence – direct or indirect.… We call upon everyone to do likewise.… We dedicate ourselves to the service of life and the living…’ European wars and fears of nuclear war in these years gave way to freedom struggles and wars of national liberation in other parts of the globe. One current WRI activist remembers the skill with which Devi encouraged Western pacifists to understand the frustrations and dilemmas which led liberation movements to abandon nonviolence and take up violence. Howard Clark (who more than 30 years later is now the chair of WRI) was impressed when Devi insisted on circulating to WRI members the full text of Nelson Mandela’s speech to the Rivonia Trial in South Africa. In that speech, Mandela justified his abandonment of nonviolence and the use of force against the apartheid system. WRI was deeply challenged by Illustration 223. facing page Winter Pen and ink on paper 25 x 39.5 cm London 1981 ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      183 184      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL these wars of national liberation. In Devi, they had a General Secretary who had taken part in the Quit India Movement and was well placed to respond firmly and sympathetically to the challenge they posed. In 1968, when the Vietnam War was at its height, the WRI Council issued a ‘working document’ for wide circulation, titled ‘Liberation Movements and War Resisters’ International’. The document began boldly: ‘The WRI is first of all a freedom movement.… From this belief in freedom stems our opposition to war and to systems which exploit and corrupt such as colonialism, capitalism and totalitarian forms of communism.’ Devi may not have written these words, but one can see him agreeing with them and recognise how his influence had helped WRI to reformulate its opposition to war in a positive way. The document goes on to criticise the brutalising effect of violent revolution and asks ‘our brothers and sisters in the movements of violent liberation’ whether they are certain that a just society can be created out of bloodshed. It adds: ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      185 ‘One of the basic reasons why we hold to nonviolence, even when it seems to have failed or when it cannot offer a ready answer, is because the nonviolent revolution does not seek the liberation simply of a class or race or nation. It seeks the liberation of mankind. It is our experience that violence shifts the burden of suffering and injustice from one group to another, that it liberates one group but imprisons another, that it destroys one authoritarian structure but creates another.’ At the Haverford West Triennial Conference in the USA in 1969, resistance to the American war in Vietnam was at its height. Young men subject to a selective draft (or conscription) to serve in Vietnam refused to attend the draft board to be served with their call-up papers and became ‘draft dodgers’. Others asked to be considered for CO status, and accepted or refused alternative service. Others found ingenious reasons why they should not be considered medically or psychologically fit to serve. Some simply refused to recognise the right of the court to draft them or explained frankly their reasons for refusing to serve, and were jailed. Gradually, men who had been called up and had served in Vietnam began to desert from the armed forces and went on the run. WRI through its sections in the US, in Europe and elsewhere supported them all. Outside the USA, in Canada and in Europe, it encouraged the creation of safe havens and provided a route and accommodation for those who wanted to escape capture and jail. At Haverford, alongside the triennial conference, the trials of some draft resisters were taking place. One, Randy Kehler, who was about to be jailed, made a speech to the conference expressing his thanks for the support of the conference and saying that he almost welcomed going to jail because it gave him the chance to share the fate of friends who were already there. Another, Bob Eaton, invited three peace leaders to speak at his trial in nearby Philadelphia, where he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. They were Rev. Martin Niemoller, a German who had resisted Nazi imprisonment in concentration camps, Vo Van Ai, a Vietnamese monk, and Devi. Eaton said that he was openly challenging the political order of his society in the tradition of those who had resisted slavery. Devi spoke of thousands of young men being thrown into jail ‘because they refuse to cooperate with the system which destroys life’. Many of those at the triennial spoke of the need for a nonviolent revolution. One of those attending the conference was a leading US military analyst at the Pentagon, Daniel Ellsberg. Inspired by what he had heard, Ellsberg later took the extraordinary step of publishing a large number of secret papers which showed that American decisions about the war in Vietnam and Cambodia had been taken illegally. At Haverford, the membership wanted the WRI to define positively what it meant by ‘nonviolent revolution’, and this became the next intellectual task. A resolution outlined what was needed: a justification for revolution; a revolutionary Illustration 224. Trees Pen and ink on paper 35 x 24.5 cm London 1973 Illustration 225. facing page Ageing Tree Crayon on paper 50 x 35 cm London 1963 186      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      187 vision; a justification for the revolution being nonviolent; and a strategy for achieving it. An American group, Movement for a New Society, had already given a great deal of thought to this topic and one of its members, George Lakey, had published a book on the subject. Lakey and others were charged with producing for WRI a ‘Manifesto for Nonviolent Revolution’. A first version was published in draft in 1972 under that title and then a second draft too, by Michael Randle, under the title ‘Towards Liberation’. But at the 1972 triennial in Sheffield, UK, one of the German sections (a Marxist group, in sympathy with the policies of communist parties in Eastern Europe) insisted that the argument was naïve. The only revolution worth supporting, they said, was the socialist revolution which required the acquisition of state power to resist counter-revolution. More traditional pacifist groups also remained unhappy with a proposal which would identify war resistance so fully with nonviolent revolution. The large step from a refusal of war to a commitment to build a nonviolent society by Gandhian means had nearly been taken, but it was too big at that time for parts of WRI. At Sheffield, Devi announced his retirement as General Secretary. He had served for ten years and thought it was time to move on. His decision was already made before the conference and the discussion there on the nonviolent revolution manifesto. But it would have been a remarkable achievement to persuade all the world’s pacifist groups to adopt a Gandhian strategy for how to pursue their task. Devi had achieved a great deal in taking the Gandhian approach to conflict to the European pacifists – and in delivering the pacifist message in numerous forums across the world. The continuing adoption of CO laws in many countries is a testimony to his work and that of others, as is the widespread acceptance that alternatives to violence must be found and the nonviolent way is one which is relevant in many situations. His work in Eastern Europe did not bear fruit, but the situation there completely changed with the destruction of the communist system and the end of the Cold War, which WRI welcomed. In the developing countries, as Devi himself noted and J.P. Narayan predicted, WRI has continued to offer its message but has not yet made a breakthrough. Devi’s own sense of his achievements typically combines idealism with realism. ‘It takes time’, he says. ‘We don’t know what the influence of our contribution will be in the long run.’ Illustration 226. Forest Pen and ink on paper 35 x 25 cm London 1981 188      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 227. Teapot two views Stoneware H 15.5 cm Diam 18.5 cm London 1982 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi below handle ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      189 190      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      191 ON  A  NEW  SOCIETY   from   the   Introduction   of   ‘Fifty   Years   of   War   Resistance:   What   Now?’,   by   Devi   Prasad,   in   Journal   of   the  War   Resisters’   International,   vol.   2,   Golden   Jubilee   issue,   1st   and   2nd   quarters   –   Nos.  40  .  41:  pp.  3–6 I am often asked the question: “What keeps you going? There are two things which might provide the answer. First, I realize the magnitude of the problem of bringing about revolutionary social change; the problem of creating a new society, a new human being. At the same time I am aware of the tininess of my own being and the little I can do. I am just a drop in the ocean – an ocean which has been there all along, while I am only momentary. I am aware that a force like me has hardly any significance, when it is judged in proportion to the totality of the situation. But there is another truth which is as deeply engraved in my mind as the one I have just described. It is that I am the world, and without me there would be nothing whatsoever. I am the centre of what there is. This fact moves me to action. If I do not act, everything else will be inactive. So I act. This ‘dynamics of contradiction’ applies to the time factor of what I am saying. You go on trying to change the situation. Nothing seems to happen. The structures of society, with its inbuilt injustice and oppression appears to be as strong as ever, despite the enormous dedication and sincerity of the countless people who have struggled throughout the years to bring about some kind of change. So should I then stop functioning? Many have stopped taking part in this kind of action because they have felt nothing was happening, that none of their actions were making any impact. This is only partly true because when you look at a comparatively longer span of time, you see the actions of individuals and groups changing society. This gives me some kind of patience. It gives me hope that if I go on, believing that some day something will happen, and the world will change, then this will certainly make an impact. It may not be visible in my lifetime but it will be there. We want to build an alternative society. We feel that the present society is not the kind we want to live in and that we must create our own society. The concept of building alternative societies is not a new one. My theory is that conventional power structures and movements for building alternative societies have gone on parallel to each other for thousands of years. If you let the power structure go on as it does, then even if you have hundreds of cells trying to create an alternative style, nothing will happen, because the power structure has its own dynamics, and it will go on. If we are to have any hope of a change in the power structure itself, then we must tackle it directly – challenge it – and to challenge it successfully, we must find new and imaginative techniques. The roots of injustices and oppression lie in the way we live our day-to-day lives. In order to be able to challenge society effectively, our own lifestyle will have to be changed. Without direct confrontation, an alternative society will have no impact on the existing one. Confrontation not based on the firm ground of a genuinely creative lifestyle will be equally ineffective. Therefore, a movement for a new society should have these two components totally integrated with each other. The primary concern is resistance to injustice in the most relevant way, in a manner which is effective, and which is politically, socially and morally sound. It is from this basis that my belief in nonviolent action arises. No action which harms human life can eventually create those values which we wish to inculcate in society. It is also important that even if our actions are local from the tactical point of view, from the political and philosophical point of view, they ought to be global. The strength of the movement for a new society does not lie in organisational unification, but in the unity of objectives, in the spread of the idea and in the different ways in which different groups work. The beauty of such a movement is that whereas in a political party, there is always the need for a party whip to ensure that all the members toe the line and create a unified front, we reject this whole concept and hold that individuals and small groups must be completely independent to think, plan and to act upon their plans as they wish. The suggestion that all movements should join together and create a world-wide movement has no meaning, because it would hinder the spontaneity of small groups and individuals. It would also harm the whole idea of personal responsibility and initiative. What is needed is not a unified organizational structure, but unity in concerns, and the preparedness to help each other and to come together in particular issues and programs: the preparedness to act on our own behalf and on behalf of people whom we may not ever meet, and whom we may not know personally – to act because we are concerned about the whole of humanity. If we really cherish the vision of a new society, it is essential that we liberate ourselves from the small cages that we have built round us – from the narrow loyalties and dogmas we have cherished up to now. Illustration 228. Teapot two views Serves 12 cups Stoneware H 14 cm London Late 1970s Collection of Drs. Asha and Raj Kubba 192      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 229. ½VWXVS[Teapot Stoneware H 8 cm London 1974 Stamped ‘dp’ above foot Illustration 230. Fluted teapot Stoneware H 7.5 cm London 1974 Stamped ‘dp’ on base Illustration 231. second row Teapot Stoneware H 14 cm London Early 1970s No signature Illustration 232. Teapot Stoneware H 8.5 cm Diam 10.7 cm London 1974 Stamped ‘dp’ above foot ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      193 Illustration 233. Teapot Porcelain with painted brushwork H 12 cm London 1981 Signed ‘Devi’ in English 194      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 234. Teapot Porcelain with painted brushwork H 12 cm London 1981 Signed ‘Devi’ in English ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      195 Illustration 235. ½VWXVS[Teapot Porcelain H 12 cm London 1979 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi above foot Illustration 236. Teapot Porcelain H 14.8 cm London 1980 Illustration 237. second row Teapot Porcelain H 13.2 cm London 1989 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi above foot Illustration 238. Teapot Porcelain H 12.3 cm London 1981 Stamped ‘dp’ 196      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      197 ON  PEACE,  EDUCATION  AND  CREATIVITY From   Education   for   Living   Creatively   and   Peacefully,   by   Devi   Prasad,  Hyderabad,  2005,  pp.  144–147,  152–154.   The crucial point is that unless we as individuals consider ourselves part of the whole, we cannot experience the whole, which is the ultimate aim of the human mind. And without that experience we cannot be happy and feel fulfilled. Art actually assists in creating the desired unity with the Universe. According to Indian and Chinese aesthetics, it is of supreme importance that the maker should completely identify with the object that he or she makes. Writing on Chinese painting, Coomaraswamy states, ‘The Chinese artist does not merely observe but identifies with the landscape or whatever it may be that he will represent. The story is told of a famous painter of horses who was found one day in his studio rolling on his back like a horse, reminded that he might really become a horse, he ever afterwards painted only (the) Buddha. An icon is to be imitated not admired. In just the same way in India the imager is required to identify himself in detail with the form to be represented. Such identification, indeed, is the final goal of any contemplation, reached only when the original distinction of subject breaks down and there remains only the knowing, in which the knower and the known are merged.’ 75 If what Coomaraswamy wrote seems at all strange to us... let us at least remember that ‘identification’ was also presupposed in medieval Europe; in Dante’s words, ‘He who would not paint a figure, if he cannot be it, cannot draw it.’ What I am trying to convey here is that to be able to experience and act, and act creatively and constructively, one has to be predisposed to taking certain steps in one’s life. These steps are not occasional acts in one’s life; one’s whole life is a series of these steps. I am asking no more than what Maria Montessori had suggested in her message to the International Congress against War and Militarism held in Paris in the month of August 1937: ‘If at some time the Child were to receive proper consideration and his immense possibilities were to be developed, then a Man may arise for whom there would be no need for encouragement to Disarmament and Resistance to War because his nature would be such that he could not endure the state of degradation and of extreme moral corruption which makes possible any participation in war.’ It is exactly what Nandalal Bose says, ‘Music, literature and art provide those possibilities which build healthy human attitudes. Rhythm and harmony between the specific and the whole – one and many – is their gift to humankind.’ One may call it a Utopia. Every time in history a revolutionary idea is born, it is first termed Utopia. But, haven’t we seen that only Utopias have succeeded? The Sevagram experience convinced me that children in whom creative activities become spontaneous and joyful grow into mature individuals at peace with themselves. In education where spontaneous creative activities are the basis of learning, the relationship between teacher and pupil must be different from that of the current systems. It will be a relationship between creator and creator and not teacher and taught. Let nobody jump to the conclusion that I expect that once creative activities become the centre of education, a world without war will come into being and a new lifestyle will emerge. I am suggesting no such thing. What I wish to convey is this: to abolish war it is essential that men and women must be predisposed to peace, i.e. free and courageous enough to choose the path of love and unity with all human beings, instead of the path of hatred and fragmentation of human society.... The path to that kind of development is of aesthetic discipline – the path of creativity. 75 A.K. Coomaraswamy, quoted in Roger Lipsey (ed.), Coomaraswamy: Vol 1, selected Papers, Princeton University press, 1977, p. 309. Illustration 239. Teapot Stoneware H 15.5 cm London 1979 Stamped in Hindi ‘Devi’ above foot Illustration 240. facing page Teapot with Milk-Jug and Sugar-Bowl Stoneware 1974 Teapot H 7.4 cm Diam 11.8 cm Stamped ‘dp’ above foot Milk jug Diam 8.4 cm Sugar bowl H 3.6 cm Diam 8.8 cm 198      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      199 ON  WAR  RESISTANCE from  ‘Creative,   hence   a   Peaceful   Society’,   by   Devi   Prasad,   in   Culture   of   Peace:   Experience   and   Experiment,   UNESCO   and   IGNCA,  1999 While travelling in Sweden in 1966, I met in a training camp for conscientious objectors, nearly a hundred draft-age men who had declared themselves against military service on grounds of conscience and opted for alternative civilian work. That year, nearly six hundred draftees had declared themselves as conscientious objectors. Towards the end of the meeting, I asked the group if they knew the total number of conscripts that year. ‘Over twenty-five thousand’, one of them answered. Then I asked if they could explain why on earth only six hundred out of twenty-five thousand had opted for CO status, specially as life for a CO in Sweden was easier than that of a conscripted soldier: they could go home every week and their girl-friends and relatives could visit them every now and then. The answer to my question came after the meeting, when ten or twelve of them suggested that we continue the discussion in the bar. What came out of this discussion was, as one of them said,” The fact is that they are afraid of making their own decisions”. Another said, “ Most young men dislike military service, yet to write ‘no’ on the form is difficult. After a period of dilemma they just sign ‘yes’ on the form, designed precisely in a manner that will put the draftee in that particular dilemma”. In most countries with military conscription, draft-age men receive orders to personally report for registration, a constitutional requirement. A man who would like to be a CO has to submit a special application for obtaining that status. The mechanism for obtaining CO status is such a deterrent that most young men decide to go in for military service. It is the easiest way to escape the unpleasant experience of going through the exercise – filling up forms, producing proof of their pacifist convictions and facing tribunals, etc. They console themselves by thinking that, after all, life in the military, specially in peacetime, is not too bad, and it is four months shorter than alternative service. The essence of all this is, that in one case the decision is made for you and in the other, you have to make it yourself. In nearly all the countries of the world, there are traditions, laws and practices which train and condition the individual not to be able to make his or her own decision on many issues that he or she face in everyday life. The crux of the matter is that in spite of the claims of modern upbringing and education, that they prepare the individual for facing life sensibly and courageously, men and women are the least prepared to confront the challenges and dilemmas of life intelligently and with courage. Similar to the young men who put yes on their draft forms, most people do not know what actually they want and must do. Illustration 241. Vase Porcelain with brushwork H 19.2 cm Diam 9.5 cm London circa 1981 Illustration 242. Vase Porcelain H 22 cm London 1980 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi above foot Illustration 243. facing page Teapot Porcelain approx H 15 cm London 1981 No signature 200      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      201 A B C D G H E Q I F J K R S L N P M O Illustration 244. facing page Various Miniature Lidded Jars Made between 1976-81 of porcelain and stoneware London Miniature Lidded Pots A. approx H 7.6 cm B. H 8.5 cm C. H 5 cm D. H 7.5 cm No signature E. H 8.5 cm Scratched ‘Devi’ in Hindi on the underside F. H 5.75 cm G. H 11.4 cm Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi on the side H. H 9.5 cm Stamped ‘dp’ on the underside I. H 9.5 cm Stamped ‘dp’ on the underside J. H 8.5 cm No signature K. H 7.4 cm No signature L. Miniature Vase Porcelain H 11.5 cm London 1977 M. Miniature Jar Porcelain H 7.4 cm London 1975 N. Miniature Lidded Pot Porcelain H 8.5 cm London 1975 O. Miniature Bud Vase Porcelain H 8.5 cm London 1979 P. Miniature Vase Porcelain H 9.4 cm London 1977 Illustration 245. this page Three Miniature Lidded Jars Porcelain 1981 Q. H 10.5 cm Scratched ‘Devi’ R. H 9.75 cm No signature S. H 9.75 cm No signature 202      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      203 Illustration 246. ½VWXVS[ Bowl Stoneware H 21.3 cm Diam 20 cm London 1981 7XEQTIH³HT´SR¾SSV Illustration 247. Bowl Stoneware H 8.4 cm Diam 12 cm London 1981 No signature Illustration 248. second row Bowl Stoneware H 10.5 cm Diam 15 cm London 1981 Stamped ‘dp’ above foot Illustration 249. Bowl Stoneware H 9 cm Diam 2.5 cm London 1982 Stamped ‘Devi Prasad’ above foot Illustration 250. third row Bowl Porcelain H 6.6 cm Diam 12 cm London 1981 Stamped ‘Devi Prasad’ above foot Illustration 251. Bowl Stoneware H 4.8 cm Diam 10 cm London 1975 Stamped ‘Devi Prasad’ above foot (detail on following page, at right) Illustration 252. facing page Vase Stoneware H 21 cm London Mid 1970s Stamped ‘dp’ 204      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 253. Bowl Stoneware H 78 cm Diam 15 cm London 1979 Stamped ‘dp’ on base ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      205 detail of 250. Bowl Stoneware H 48 cm Diam 10 cm London 1975 Stamped ‘Devi Prasad’ above foot 206      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 254. Bowl Porcelain H 5.5 cm Diam 11.5 cm London 1983 Signed ‘Devi Prasad May 83’ in English on foot ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      207 Illustration 255. Bowl Porcelain H 4.8 cm Diam 11 cm London 1983 Signed ‘Devi Prasad 83’ in English 208      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      209 Illustration 256. ½VWXVS[ Bowl Porcelain H 5.5 cm Diam 11 cm London 1982 Signed ‘Devi’ in English Illustration 257. Bowl Porcelain H 8.5 cm Diam 12.5 cm London 1983 Signed and dated ‘Devi 83’ in English Illustration 258. second row Bowl Porcelain H 5.5 cm Diam 10 cm London 1983 Signed and dated ‘Devi 83’ in English Illustration 259. Bowl Porcelain H 7.2 cm Diam 12.4 cm London 1983 Illustration 260. third row Bowl Porcelain H 7.5 cm Diam 13.5 cm London 1982 Faint trace of stamp ‘Devi’ in Hindi under base Illustration 261. Bowl Porcelain H 10.8 cm Diam 13.8 cm London 1983 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi above foot Illustration 262. facing page Bowl Porcelain H 12 cm Diam 26 cm London 1983 Signed and dated ‘Devi May 83’ in English 210      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      211 Illustration 263. Bowl Porcelain H 8 cm Diam 13 cm London 1983 Signed and dated ‘Devi 83’ Illustration 264. JEGMRKTEKI½VWXVS[ Vase Porcelain H 12.5 cm Diam 11.4 cm London 1983 Signed ‘Devi Prasad’ in Hindi Illustration 265. Fluted Teapot Celadon Porcelain H 12.2 cm London 1980 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi Illustration 266. second row Facetted Lidded Pot Porcelain H 10 cm London 1980 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi on foot Illustration 267. Celadon Teapot Porcelain H 12 cm London circa 1981 No signature Illustration 268. third row Fluted Bowl Celadon porcelain H 9 cm London circa 1981 Stamped ‘Devi’ on side Illustration 269. Fluted Bowl Celadon porcelain H 9.75 cm Diam 16 cm Scratched ‘Devi’ on the underside 212      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      213 Illustration 270. A Dinner Service for Ten Stoneware with slip trailing London 1980 Bowls H 6 cm Diam 14 cm Stamped ‘dp’ on foot Casserole H 18 cm Diam 27 cm Stamped ‘dp’ near foot Gravy boat H 9 cm Stamped ‘dp’ near handle facing page Dinner Plate Diam 26 cm Stamped ‘dp’ on the underside Quarter Plate Diam 17 cm Stamped ‘dp’ on the underside 214      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 271. Vase Tenmoku glazed stoneware with brushwork H 17 cm London 1980 Stamped ‘Devi’ on side Illustration 272. facing page Bowl Tenmoku glazed stoneware with brushwork H 10 cm Diam 37 cm London 1980 No signature ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      215 216      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 273. Teapot Tenmoku glazed stoneware with brushwork H 18.5 cm London 1980 Illustration 274. facing page A Set of Three Vases Tenmoku glazed stoneware with brushwork 1980-1 Left to right H 18 cm Stamped ‘dp’ on the underside H 21 cm Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi on the side H 20.5 cm Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi on the side ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      217 218      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 275. ½VWXVS[ Lidded Pot Porcelain H 9 cm London 1979 Signed ‘Devi’ in Hindi Illustration 276. Lidded Pot Porcelain H 9.5 cm London 1979 Signed ‘Devi’ in Hindi on base Illustration 277. second row Lidded Pot Porcelain H 9.5 cm Diam 12 cm London 1981 Signed ‘Devi’ in Hindi on base Illustration 278. Lidded Pot Stoneware H 10 cm London 1980 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi above foot Illustration 279. third row Lidded Pot Porcelain H 7.5 cm Diam 11.8 cm London 1980 Signed ‘Devi’ in English Illustration 280. Lidded Pot Porcelain H 9.5 cm London 1981 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi on base Illustration 281. facing page Container Stoneware with iron oxide slip trailing H 9.8 cm Diam 12 cm London 1979 No signature Illustration 282. Container Porcelain H 5.5 cm Diam 9 cm London 1979 Stamped ‘dp’ at base ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      219 220      |      ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL Illustration 283. ½VWXVS[ Milk Jug Stoneware H 8 cm London Mid 1970s Stamped ‘dp’ Illustration 284. Sugar Pot Stoneware H 9.2 cm London Mid 1970s Stamped ‘dp’ Illustration 285. Coffee Pot Stoneware H 17 cm Lodon Mid 1970s Stamped ‘dp’ under handle Illustration 286. second row Jug Stoneware H 11 cm London 1975 Stamped ‘dp’ below handle Illustration 287. Oil Bottle Stoneware H 12.3 cm London 1975 Stamped ‘dp’ Illustration 288. Jug Stoneware H 13.5 cm London 1982 Stamped ‘dp’ under handle ENGLAND  &  THE  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL      |      221 Illustration 289. Jug Stoneware H 18.4 cm Diam 18 cm London 1979 222      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      223 CHAPTER  IV A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT   by  Kristine  Michael 224      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      225 Devi Prasad’s quiet contribution to the nascent Modernist discourse of ceramics in the craft movement in India is known to few. ‘Modernism’ is a term that is problematic enough in the Western context and yet is a term that has universality in nineteenth and twentieth century Western art history, but in the Indian context has multiple meanings as it links to Nationalism, changing traditional craft practice under colonial rule, the academic art establishment of nineteenth century Indian art schools, post-colonialism and globalisation. The question of whether early modernism – rebellious and progressive – affected craft and in this case ceramics has to be understood in the light of the combination of features of the artistic development of its early protagonists or pioneers, most of whom were trained as painters at Tagore’s Santiniketan, and were introduced to the complexities of making and firing ceramics at Sriniketan. Devi Prasad’s early pottery at Sevagram was in terracotta – a choice governed by the ethos of Gandhi’s education philosophy and the use of local materials, resources, and market within the village structure. An ethos that was later institutionalised under the Khadi and Village Industries. Nationalist art, for example, promoted the use of traditional or indigenous motifs much as the Indian art school craft revival for the early Great Exhibitions where ornamentation and form of extant styles was revived to be marketed as a separate category for urban consumers as against a living craft form for a people who used it every day of their lives. Modernist discourses in Indian art have constructed a paradoxical view of such objects – a ‘double’ discourse, sometimes seeing them as progressive signs, at other times condemning them as conservative, traditional and not sufficiently progressive to shift the craft into the realms of ‘high’ art. This paradoxical position is a beacon of India’s particular form of modernism and cultural development. As we reach toward the conclusion of this book, in understanding the synthesis of Devi Prasad’s relationship with both ‘high’ and ‘low’ art as well as ‘design’, this essay retreads and supplements some of the history outlined in the previous chapters to attempt to follow the story of the Indian ceramic object into 21st century India and weave a rich tapestry of all the varied threads and lives that contributed to its development. This leads us to Devi Prasad’s work after he moved back to India in 1983. Here he became increasingly involved with writing about issues concerning the Indian potter, about training and shaping the environment for studio pottery. I will examine these in the context of the form his own pottery took in this phase: where it drew on the experience of decades of previous work. Illustration 290. previous page Devi Prasad at his Studio in Delhi circa 2000 © Kristine Michael Illustration 291. Bowl Stoneware H 7.5 cm Delhi 1992 ‘Devi’ stampd on side Illustration 292. facing page Face Study Plate Stoneware Diam 18 cm Delhi 1994 Scratched ‘Devi’ on the underside Collection of Madhukar Khera 226      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      227 STUDIO  POTTERY  FINDS  ITS  FEET  IN  INDIA: The traditional potters in India have always had a distinct position in society, straddling both private and public domains: the world of the private household space where their terracotta vessels for cooking, storing, carrying food and water as well as pots for agricultural purposes, were dominant over any other material, and the public, ritual and votive space which gave them a direct connection to a spiritual activity and role. There are still more working potters in India than any other culture in the world and they cater to an extraordinary diversity of communities, environments and customs. Both the forms of vessels and the types of content connected with clay objects historically, has intensified in the contemporary ceramic art movement where the vessel form was equated with the human form, and a container for abstract ideas. In India, as in nineteenth century Japan, it is regional characteristics of shape, clay quality, decorative markings and indefinable subtle insinuations of form and embellishment that specify the origin of the object as it was, in the words of Soetsu Yanagi, made by the hand of the ‘unknown maker’. The shift from the unknown maker to the signature at the base of the pot (as the sign of the burgeoning artist) was one that must be laid at the door of the five Art Schools of Madras, Bombay, Jaipur, Lahore and Calcutta in the nineteenth century. The intervention that the Schools had incorporated into their curriculum began as copies of the syllabus from the South Kensington Museum and Design School and later used suggestions from cultural theorists such as E.B. Havell, George Birdwood, Lockwood Kipling, Cecil Burns, John Griffiths among others, to ‘develop’ the Indian artisan as well as the object. By the time Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1859, the Schools of Art which originally had been intended to preserve and protect the arts of India had had almost the opposite effect. The decline in royal patronage within India, as more princely states were taken over by the British, affected the upper levels of artistic production in craft as well as painting. The Schools were run mainly on Western theoretical lines with the students being taught life drawing from plaster casts of Western figurative sculpture. This was countered in some ways by John Griffiths’ attempt at the Bombay School of Art to study the cave paintings of the Ajanta frescoes, which became a major design source for the School’s pottery – known as Wonderland Pottery – and run by George Terry. All the Art Schools had different clay and firing temperatures, and the ware looked distinctively different. The ceramics made at the Madras School of Art was a glazed semi-stoneware clay body with carved, incised and applied colour clay decoration; while the Jaipur School of Art used the low temperature quartz-based body with white slip and bright pigment painting in cobalt Illustration 293. facing page Teapot Celadon glazed stoneware with underglaze brushwork H 13 cm Delhi 2001 Collection of Jeet Seth 228      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT Illustration 294. Platter with Three Faces Painted with oxides under matt white glaze on stoneware Diam 24 cm Delhi Thrown in 2004; Painted and glazed in 2009/10 No Signature A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      229 Illustration 295. Platter with a Painted Face Stoneware Diam 25.2 cm Delhi Thrown in 2004; Glazed in 2009/10 No signature 230      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT and copper blues under a transparent glaze. The Bombay and Calcutta Schools both used glazed and slipware terracotta, mainly in the Sindh and Gaur technique of architectural tiles. In 1872, Caspar Purdon Clarke of South Kensington visited India to collect artefacts for the Museum. In his Report titled ‘Modern Indian Art’,76 among the causes he lists as responsible for the cause of the decline of the decorative Indian handicrafts is the influence of the Schools of Art. He found that even though the Superintendants were enthusiastic supporters of Indian art they were unfortunately made to follow the European style of art education which, he felt, turned out more painters than designers and which also was a radically different one to the traditional Indian system of teaching followed by master craftsmen. ‘If Indian craftsmanship was dead’, said Havell, ‘it is strange that during the last twenty or thirty years European manufacturers have devoted a great deal of attention to investigating their methods for the improvement of European industry. The best European manufacturers have worked on this principle in their exploitation of the Indian craftsmen’s technique. It is a thoroughly unsound principle which is being adopted in India to reverse this and tell the Indian craftsman to adopt the inferior European processes only for the purpose of competing with the lower class of European manufactures.’ 77 Havell, a contemporary of Tagore and the Principal of the Calcutta School of Art, stated that India had been ransacked for all its portable art treasures to fill European Art Museums and private collections so that except in ancient monuments and in a very few Museums there is very little which is representative of the highest standards of Indian domestic art. Havell describes the term ‘art ware’ as that class of objects known to Europeans which fill the shops of Indian curiosity dealers and represent Indian Art at Exhibitions in Europe as being freaks of art; ‘curiosities’ which are produced for the amusement of those who stand entirely aloof from true Indian culture. ‘What India wants is less literacy of the European kind, and more Art. Heaven preserve Indian artists and craftsmen from the literacy of our Anglo Indian schools and colleges. Once Indian craftsmen are taught to look at nature through European spectacles and not in the light of Indian tradition, they cease to be Indian artists and craftsmen.’ Havell could see the signs of the times and felt that the growth of the Indian national consciousness would surely make itself manifest in an artistic revival which was a reaction and a protest against the continued denationalisation of Indian Art. ‘Ignoring the protests was political folly,’ Havell prophesied, ‘the coming artistic A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      231 Renaissance would grow to be an anti-British movement.’ Devi Prasad strongly empathised with the Indian traditional potter while understanding the cause of social and political events that lead to the threatened condition of the living craft. Ceramics, and in the early years it was only terracotta, became a continuous part of Devi Prasad’s life at Sevagram from 1944. His decision to contextually place himself alongside traditional potters and describe himself as a kumbhar, rather than a painter, was a defiance against conservative thought of the day as he was from an educated upper class background and in the heirachy of caste in Hinduism, potters are socially very low in status. Devi Prasad is a notable example of those of his generation who took up the Gandhian social message and applied it to their own lives. He was regarded as being nonconformist, in particular for his refusal to join in with much of the religious observance at Sevagram. Studio pottery, defined as the balance between the unselfconscious functional vessel making tradition of pottery and the ‘higher art’ mediums of painting and sculpture, began in India when Sardar Gurcharan Singh returned from his studies in Japan inspired with the ideals of Mingei, the Japanese art and craft folk movement that he was introduced to by Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada and Soetsu Yanagi in Japan in 1919. Twenty-two-year-old Gurcharan Singh, a student from India who was on a two-year diploma course at the Higher Technical Institute in Tokyo to learn the industrial and commercial side of pottery and tile making was invited to Abiko by Yanagi to see their group’s pottery for nearly six months before Leach returned to England to live at Dartington and St Ives. Those visits to Abiko are what drew Gurcharan into the aesthetics of studio pottery. On the advice of Yanagi, he travelled to Korea and Japan to study pottery for several months before his return to India in 1922. The next sixteen years after his return from Japan, Gurcharan was determined to establish studio pottery in India. In 1926, he established the New Delhi Blue Pottery on Ring Road in New Delhi and kept up a lively correspondence with Bernard Leach for the rest of their lives and visited him in England in 1958 and 1977. His son, Mansimran Singh, apprenticed briefly with Bernard Leach at St Ives in the 1960s before returning to India to join his father at the Delhi Blue Pottery. While Leach’s lasting contribution was philosophical, he was also an early source of practical advice. Much of the experiential knowledge of working clay had been lost during the rise of factory ceramics and there were few contemporary sources of information. In 1940, Leach published A Potter’s Book with a rousing treatise on the importance of ‘honest’ 76 C. Purdon Clarke, ‘Modern Indian Art’, Journal of the Society of Arts XXXVIII, 1890, pp. 511–27. 77 E.B. Havell, ‘The Basis for Artistic and Industrial Revival in India” in Theosophist Office, Adyar, Madras 1912, pp. 94 and 163. Illustration 296. Vase Stoneware H 19 cm Delhi circa 1995 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi on the side 232      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT pot-making and practical advice on clay bodies and glazes from local soil and rocks. He also had instructions of how to build and fire a wood kiln. This represented a breakthrough, because since the beginning of the industrial period, kilns had been economically feasible only in factory settings. Leach made it possible for the potter, anywhere in the world, to become self-sustaining, designing, producing and marketing handmade pots from an individual studio. The nationalist Swaraj/Swadeshi movement had by the turn of the twentieth century become concerned with the decline of the traditional skills of Indian craftsmen and the need for craft preservation. For Tagore, the pedagogic, agricultural, cultural and rural were vitally linked. What he tried to work out, at Santiniketan and Surul, which later came to be known as Sriniketan, was an integrated programme where ‘culture of the mind and culture of the soil went hand in hand.’ Rabindranath’s contribution to cultural nationalism were considered so important that he was described by Coomaraswamy as the finest example of Swadeshi. Tagore was joined by Leonard Elmhirst in 1921, an Englishman who had studied agriculture and history, who spent two years getting Sriniketan onto its feet. They both shared a passionate concern with the imperative need of resuscitating A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      233 the dying agricultural and village economy. This, though, never received appreciation for its value as an experiment to the rest of India, and many feel this was because it was overshadowed by Gandhi’s political agenda of Swadeshi. With Nandalal Bose, they realised that an art that responded to the everyday realities of contemporary life and environment could be a more authentic form of national art, than a revivalist art dealing with mythological or historical themes. Nandalal Bose believed that the design of everyday objects could mould the tastes of a community. He wanted to reach out to a wider social class and change the taste of a larger segment of society. This meant the study of crafts along with fine arts, and the learning of different skills. Pottery was started at Sriniketan as a part of the Cottage Industry section, along with agriculture and animal husbandry, health and adult literacy. There were also facilities for weaving, carpet making, woodwork, leather craft, lacquer-work and book binding. By the mid-1920s, Kala Bhavana began to resemble an Asian Bauhaus. Elmhirst returned to England and married Dorothy Straight, who had financially supported the early experiments at Sriniketan. They bought Dartington Hall in Devon where they built up a remarkable centre for experiments of farming, rural industry, education and the arts, all following Tagore’s integrated ‘living harmoniously with nature’ ideals of Santi/ Sriniketan. It was a part of the Tagorean vision of integrating educational idealism and a progressive school in a rural economy. Within this was a place for crafts – especially pottery – but Leonard Elmhirst’s ideas were clear on the running of the pottery as a serious economic activity that would bring employment and educational activities to the locality. It was not to be just a whimsical exploration of ideas but would be expected to contribute to the larger social and economic planning around Dartington. As Leonard Elmhirst wrote to Leach in 1931, ‘We would love it (pottery) to find its natural place as an art, a science and a utility as well as in the educational scheme as an introduction to a sense of form and design.’78 The Elmhirsts frequently had Tagore as their guest, until his death in 1941. They invited Bernard Leach to start a studio pottery at Dartington and Shinners Bridge which he did around 1936 after first visiting them in 1927. He was impressed by the ‘quiet enthusiasm of their ideals’ and was known to be very interested in the writings and philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore. In Tagore’s collection of gifts from around the world, Devi recalls seeing several pots from Bernard Leach and his student, Michael Cardew. And, as we read in the previous chapter, Devi grew to become increasingly involved in activities at Dartington Hall in the late 1960s and 70s. Illustration 297. Preparatory Sketches for Teapots 1970s Illustration 298. facing page Teapot Copper green and red glazed stoneware H 13.8 cm Diam 14.5 cm Delhi 2001 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi below handle 78 Quoted by Edmund de Waal from the Bernard Leach Archive 5832, MS4 December 1931; see Edmund de Waal, Bernard Leach, Tate Gallery Publishing, London 1998, p. 44. 234      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      235 Illustration 299. Teapot two views Stoneware H 17.9 cm Delhi circa 1998 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi at the end of handle 236      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      237 Illustration 300. ½VWXVS[Teapot Nickel pink glaze on stoneware H 12 cm approx. Delhi circa 1998-2000 Illustration 301. Teapot Nickel pink glaze on stoneware H 12 cm approx. Delhi circa 1998-2000 Illustration 302. second row Teapot Serves 6 cups Copper, Green and red with brushwork on stoneware H 12.5 cm approx. Delhi 2001 Illustration 303. A Bird in Blue Serves 5 cups Off white with brushwork on stoneware H 12.5 cm approx. Delhi 2000 Illustration 304. third row Teapot Celadon with slip trailing on stoneware H 11 cm Delhi 2001 Illustration 305. Teapot Serves 4 cups White with Albany and cobalt brushwork H 13 cm approx. Delhi 2000 Illustration 306. facing page Teapot Semi porcelain with peachbloom glaze H 13 cm Delhi 1997 Scratched ‘Devi’ under base 238      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      239 Illustration 307. Bowl Copper green and red glaze on stoneware H 13 cm Diam 19 cm Delhi 1997 Stamped on the underside Collection of Madhukar Khera Illustration 308. facing page Tall Vase two views Copper green and red glaze on stoneware H 30 cm Delhi 1997 No signature Collection of Madhukar Khera 240      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      241 THE  POTTERY  OF  AND  AROUND  DEVI The idea that Santiniketan and Sriniketan could become the experimental basic ground for the social and economic rejuvenation of the country after years of colonial rule was part of Tagore’s holistic approach to the question of the allround development of the country. The area near Bolpur had a hard clayey soil. As Devi describes. ‘Tagore asked his son to find out if the people of a village could turn out pottery by investing in a small furnace. He had been thinking, “which of the cottage industries could be taught to the peasants?” Thus the seeds of a new pottery movement were sown by Tagore for its growth in India.’ Tagore found, in the early twenties, two German refugees, both pottery experts, whom he asked to set up a workshop in Sriniketan and train some village potters. They accepted the offer and built a full-fledged workshop to produce low temperature glazed earthenware. The workshop was fully and efficiently equipped with all kinds of tools and accessories. It was run as partly educational and partly commercial, inasmuch as there were sales of the pottery made there. The terracotta was largely glazed with a transparent glaze over oxide slip painting. Pinch pots were worked on with John ffrench, an Irish potter at Sriniketan. The slip painting was free and asymmetrical, with a folk influence from the rural village traditions of wall and floor painting that he saw around him. These folk patterns, the study of which was encouraged by Nandalal Bose and Benodebehari Mukherjee, reoccur in his sketchbooks throughout the years as subconscious doodles that manifested themselves on his later stoneware and porcelain pots. In 1944, Devi left Santiniketan and wanted to join Gandhi in his Sevagram educational experiment. Gandhi’s plan was to build a national system of education, parallel in idea to Tagore’s, of three centres of education: Meaningful Manual Work, Nature and Society and Communication. It was to train teachers for this cause that Gandhi started Sevagram’s Uttam Buniyadi. Devi was recruited as art teacher at the end of 1944. He worked on creating a teachers’ and children’s art training centre. Devi learnt throwing from watching traditional potters and had developed an admiration and a fascination for wheel-thrown pottery. According to Haku Shah, ‘During his Sevagram days, Devi Prasad chose pottery as his main medium of expression as an artist and craftsman. The artist in him creates the beautiful forms and the delicate variety of surface treatment, while the craftsman in him, uses his superb skill on the wheel, deep knowledge of materials and the grip over technologies for making all the tools he needs, including kilns!’ Illustration 309. Three Preparatory Designs for the Kala Bhavan in Sevagram Late 1940s Illustration 310. facing page Lidded Jar Stoneware H 27 cm Delhi 1994 No signature 242      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      243 When Devi Prasad started pottery work in Sevagram, he had to start from scratch, but he has always considered this as his most creative years of life. From the time of his joining in 1944, his art classes for the school children were held in the verandah of his cottage which was situated at one end of the community campus, in the midst of the farm. Practical work classes for the trainees were held in the common hall which included more of theory about the issues and practice involved in children’s creativity. Once the new Kala Bhavan was built by the community to his design in 1954, there was a special room for pottery and a photographic dark room, in which he built two kick wheels fixed with the wall behind the seat. There were small tanks for mixing clay and all the other gadgets needed for kneading and storing the clay. Before he was influenced by reading A Potter’s Book, he had already started toying with the idea of having a proper wheel, methods of preparing clay for throwing and a kiln. He felt that the traditional wheel was beyond his capacity to manage so, with the help of the Institute’s carpenter, he made a wooden frame with a kind of wheel-head and fixed a cycle chain on it for the wheel to be turned by someone other than the person throwing. He also built a circular brick structure for a kiln. Clay was mixed in large traditional earthenware pots made by a traditional potter, first by hand and then mixing rods, which he concocted and which served his purpose. There were a few students who did pottery and learnt along with him the skills involved. One turned the wheel and the other made pots. The students and the teacher learnt the art of pottery together. Devi had always been passionate about the idea of having a proper potter’s wheel and a kiln and was able to re-build a low temperature wood-fired kiln and some kick wheels, again improving on his earlier designs with the assistance of S.K. Mirmira, his student Kalindi Jena and Leach’s A Potter’s Book that he found in Gandhi’s personal library collection. Mirmira helped Devi when he wanted to start pottery as an activity at Sevagram and to build a kiln for terracotta firings.79 By 1946, 79 S.K. Mirmira, his colleague at Sevagram, was working at Wardha, where the sister project to Sevagram was located, when he met Devi Prasad. Mirmira had already been trained as a ceramic technologist in the Bangalore Polytechnic. He had also been a part of the Quit India Movement and was imprisoned in 1942 for eight months. Half the day was spent as an apprentice at the German-run Bangalore Porcelain Factory for insulators, half at the Polytechnic, and the nights, printing and distributing political papers. He joined Wardha in 1948, when Gandhi died. There was a small pottery section and they started with red clay. The first year was spent with the potter community in Wardha, living and working with them, understanding their needs and establishing processes. Vinoba Bhave’s bhoodan movement was a strong pull for Mirmira as well and he too joined him for three years, 1952–54, walking throughout the country. Vinoba took charge of Sarva Seva Sangh and exhorted his followers to ‘go and settle in a village’. Mirmira chose Bhadrawati for many reasons – it was close to Wardha, there was a huge potter community and there was plenty of clay available. He stayed with the potters, taught adult classes at night and started a small brick kiln to raise funds for his pottery institution. The Khadi Commission came into existence in 1953, and financially supported Mirmira in starting a training institution for pottery products and craftsman training. The Mangalore tile unit was started in 1969, the martban or pickle jar unit in glazed white earthenware fired to 1200˚C, and the glazed whiteware unit – all of which employed traditional potters. The effort was to train them so that they had the know-how to start their own cooperative production units as an alternative to their shrinking market of traditional products. Alongside continued the community work of education and civic hygiene. Later, Mirmira visited Japan, England and Tanzania to study the pottery and glaze techniques and started developing a filter candle and terracotta water pot unit, and a glazed red clay unit. Illustration 311. Two photographs of the First All-India Khadi and Village Industries Pottery Conference Sevagram 1955 Illustration 312. facing page Vase Oxblood glaze on stoneware H 21 cm Diam 16 cm Delhi 1993 Signed and dated ‘Devi 93’ 244      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      245 when Kalindi Jena joined Sevagram, Devi had created a little Kala Bhavan at Sevagram. Kalindi was an eighteen-yearold from Indupur, Orissa, where he had studied in one of Gandhi’s Basic Education schools, Uttam Buniyadi, started by Gopabandhu Choudhary. From a young age, he had been interested in learning painting. The activities with Devi Prasad included sketching, landscape and human figures, woodcut, alpana, murals, sculpture, etc. They filled the walls of Sevagram with paintings. Devi also used to take both World and Indian art history classes. Kalindi stayed on to become an art teacher assistant at Sevagram, later taking over Devi’s position when he left to go to England as the General Secretary of the War Resisters’ International. He spent eleven years as student and teacher at Sevagram and later left to join Prabhas Sen at the Design Centre in Calcutta. After eighteen years at Sevagram, Devi Prasad had left a strong pottery legacy at his Kala Bhavan. The work had all been in red clay, fired and glazed to 960°C in a simple woodfired kiln. He had also designed his own ball and pot mill to run on water power. Often small shows of prints of paintings and sculpture and the work of students and teachers were exhibited on the walls of Kala Bhavan. Otherwise there were either prints of paintings and sculpture from all over the world or children’s paintings on display. He says it was a delight for him to see children arriving for their art class and going straight to see them. Three hours work every day was compulsory, whether it be in hand spinning khadi or weaving. Carpentry and agriculture were the main subjects taken by the primary and secondary school students and the theory, or anubandh, had to evolve out of it. Craft was given respect in this manner. Any handwork was considered as important as any other subject. Gandhi said ‘I see God in my spinning wheel’ and for Devi Prasad it was also the potter’s wheel. Apart from his personal collection, Devi Prasad tried to build a collection of toys and other artefacts and a small art library for the Institute. The Institute published a monthly journal in Hindi, in which he used to contribute articles on his own experiences in the field of art education and the role of art in the building of a child’s personality to its maximum potential. Based on his fifteen years of experience, a book in Hindi entitled Bacchon Ki Kala Aur Shiksha or ‘Child Art and Education’ was published by the Sarva Seva Sangh in 1959, later to be republished, in English, by the National Book Trust India, with the title Art: The Basis Of Education. He continued writing throughout this period and was the editor of Nai Talim, the official journal of the Hindustani Talimi Sangh. Illustration 313. Preparatory Sketch for Musical Mobiles London mid 1970s Illustration 314. facing page Suspended Planter Tenmoku glaze on stoneware H 12 cm New Delhi 1994 No signature 246      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      247 Illustration 315. &PYITVMRXWJSV7EL]SK/MPR;LIIPERH7QSOIPIWW'LSSPLE RSXMPPYWXVEXIH developed by Devi Prasad for IIT (Indian Institute for Technolgy) New Delhi mid 1980s According to Sunand Prasad, ‘One of the most vivid memories that we have is of the activities round the Kala Bhavan – painting, ceramics, sculpture, the mysteries of the dark room, making your own paints from coloured earths and glue, the older students making great murals, bas relief and sculpting replicas of statues from Konark in sand and cement over a wire armature. There was a total belief in svavalamban – self-sufficiency. There was nothing we could not make ourselves. Accha was the messenger for world art and with it came standards of judgement and skill which others simply had no idea about.’ In 1955, after gaining some experience and self-confidence, Devi Prasad offered the All-India Khadi and Village Industries Board an opportunity to hold their first pottery conference in Sevagram with an exhibition of pottery [Ill. 311]. Among the experts invited were Gurcharan Singh from Delhi who sent a couple of bowls and Haku Shah from Ahmedabad who brought some traditional votive horses made by the Chowdhari community of Gujarat. Most of the participants were potters, and others were scholars, artists, economists, sociologists and well-wishers. Haku Shah remembers that he was happy to see mainly traditional potters at the Conference because he felt that if something was to be done for the potters, and if they were not represented at the meeting, then what would the point have been? They had the best knowledge about themselves. At the Conference, there was a fine exhibition of the pottery from different parts of India, all the food was served at every meal in clay vessels, and there were demonstrations of skill and creativity with prizes. Haku Shah won a prize for the best traditional terracotta horse. In April 1957, Khadi and Village Industries Commission became a statutory body. It took over the work of former All-India Khadi and Village Industries Board and created an active section to help the traditional pottery industry in the country. Devi had to stop making pottery from 1962 to 1973 when he was working for the WRI in a full-time capacity. In January 1973 however, he went to Stoke-on-Trent with his gift of 150 pounds from the WRI, and bought a wheel, an electric kiln, some tools and lots of raw material. He had a tiny garden shed studio at 67 Sutherland Road in Lower Edmonton, London. He describes his exhilaration when he picked up some clay and started throwing again. ‘The response from the clay was terrific. Both of us – clay and me – felt as if we had been missing each other for over a decade. Our lost love was restored. At the first trial there emerged a pot, feeling shy but smiling! I was reborn and without losing much time I was there in the market in modest way.’ For a short time he also taught pottery at two evening institutes in London, which he enjoyed, and which helped re-establish his self-confidence and would pave the way for his role as teacher on his return to India many years later. In 1979 he lectured on Tagore at the Whitechapel Gallery and exhibited his ceramics. In the same year he also exhibited at the Hutheesingh Visual Art Gallery in Ahmedabad after the exhibition in Calcutta at the British Paints and Décor gallery showing his London pots, following a one-year residency at Santiniketan. In the early 1980s, he exhibited his paintings and ceramics at the Old Bull Gallery at Barnet and the Mandeer Gallery in London, lectured at the Serpentine Art Gallery on Traditional Indian Handicrafts in 1982 during the Festival of India, and perhaps most significantly, held a major exhibition at the Kunstzalle, Oirschot, Holland. As a young art graduate, I was privileged to first meet him and Bindu at his stunning, memorable exhibition at the Lalit Kala Gallery in 1985. Indian studio pottery had not seen the likes of the delicacy of his porcelains which glimmered like pale jewels in the gallery. Very few people at the time worked in porcelain successfully in India as there were no excellent deposits of China clay in the country.80 80 Nirmala Patwardhan was the exception. She was working in the Lalit Kala Artists Studios at Garhi at the time and was experimenting and researching for her Handbook for Potters, published the same year, with English recipes from her apprenticeship with Bernard Leach at St Ives and Ray Finch at Winchcombe Pottery, converted into Indian materials – a hugely difficult task given the nature of the Indian mining industry with substandard clays and oxides. See Nirmala Patwardhan, A Handbook for Potters, Allied Publishers, Delhi, 1984, (Revised and enlarged in 2005). 248      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT Illustration 316. Bowl Oxblood glaze stoneware H 10 cm Diam 29.5 cm Delhi 1997 No signature Collection of Mamta and Harshpati Singhania A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      249 250      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      251 Illustration 317. ½VWXVS[Bowl Tenmoku glaze on stoneware H 5.2 cm Diam 12.5 cm Delhi Mid 1990s No signature Illustration 318. Vase Tenmoku glaze on stoneware H 19 cm Delhi Mid 1990s Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi on side Illustration 319. second row Bowl Peachbloom glaze on semi porcelain H 5.6 cm Delhi 1994 Scratched ‘Devi’ on the underside Illustration 320. Miniature Globular Vase Oxblood glaze on semi porcelain H 5.8 cm Delhi 1994 No signature Illustration 321. Vase Peachbloom glaze on stoneware H 15 cm Delhi 1992 Scratched ‘Devi’ on the underside facing page 6IZIVWIZMI[ERHHIXEMPSJ 252      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      253 THE  RETURN  TO  INDIA On his return to India in 1983, Devi Prasad and Bindu settled in Zakir Bagh in Delhi and he became the Editor of Gandhi Marg, the official journal of the Gandhi Peace Foundation. He was a senior consultant at the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) in the ceramic section and was an articulate voice regarding development policy towards the traditional Indian potter and other craftsmen. At the IIT he developed a Sahyog kiln, a model for a wheel and smokeless choolha that could be used and locally made in the Indian rural environment. He assisted the UGC (University Grants Commission) and Jamia Mass-communication Centre to make two films about Indian pottery. Shameem Hanfi of the Jamia University was a close friend who shared his ideals. He set up his first pottery studio in Delhi in 1985 and by the time he moved to 52 Godavari Apartments, Alaknanda, in 1987, he enlarged his studio in the small garage adjoining the house to accommodate two kilns and four wheels. Here he began teaching pottery along with building gas kilns and designing tools to suit Indian conditions. A close student cum companion of these days was Dalip Daswani, a ceramic graduate of the National Institute of Design, who later relocated to Pune. The first wheels were designed with steel frames, which then, after testing, were exchanged with wooden frames. Some later wheels were dual purpose – powered as well as kick wheels. Soon he also became a most influential teacher of ceramics. His was a unique method of ‘instruction’ honed from years of conviction in developing his pedagogical methods. His first principle of teaching was that nothing can be taught and learning should be undertaken in the spirit of exchange. Devi Prasad quotes Martin Buber from Between Man and Man where he elaborates his perspective on the relationship between a teacher and a student as one which should be of pure dialogue. As a teacher of ceramics Devi Prasad’s importance lies in his weaving his personal approach to pottery into social and aesthetic issues along with the practicalities and techniques of making meaningful pottery. Devi’s style of teaching had evolved from his contact with Gandhi and his educational experiments at Sevagram as well as his art education at Santiniketan. The belief that Devi Prasad shares with Sri Aurobindo is in the concept of a teacher who is not an instructor or task-master but a helper and a guide who suggests and does not impose. His first principle of teaching is encapsulated in the quotation, ‘Teaching is a joy, but only if you do not “teach”,’ means that nothing can be taught and it should be in the spirit of exchange. As a teacher of ceramics in New Delhi from the mid-1980s, Devi’s importance lay in his weaving his personal approach to pottery – his sadhana or meditative work – into social and aesthetic issues along with the practicalities and techniques of making meaningful pottery.81 Devi’s role as teacher sought to inculcate self-sufficiency and independence in the students, in art of course but also in life. The studio’s management and collaborative air became avenues for learning: the simple task of cleaning the studio became a sort of ritual to conserve every bit of clay, recycling all waste several times over, such that his studio produced virtually no waste at all. It became exemplary to his students, lifting heavy objects, using tools like saws, drill machines or hammers, making one’s own tools or any other such work related to the craft of pottery. Many of his students, especially those from privileged backgrounds, had never done this before. The effort was to get their critical perceptions attuned and heightened through experience that was gathered alongside the confidence in being able to make whatever crossed their imaginations for themselves, without any help. Several of them have independent studios today and exhibit as professional ceramic artists in galleries. The culmination of all his teaching and design experience in the pottery workshop was the publication of the book, Potters! Make Your Own Tools and Equipment, in 2004 which distils this information as a practical manual for how to set up a studio in India. He had also wanted to build a community of studio potters in India and to this end compiled the first comprehensive directory of India’s studio potters and ceramic artists. And certainly, the environment in his studio was of an extended family, with a score or more students coming and going over an active period of about twenty years.82 As for the form and decoration of the pots he has made, they have always been made to suit the environment and the needs of the people amongst whom they were created. Tempting as it is to eke out an Indian sensibility within the work of an Indian modern artist, in the previous chapters we looked at influences Japanese and English, forms that were Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean, and the carefully limited glazes that Devi selected for his work. At the same time, much of his work has been based on an acute observation of Indian forms. I shall highlight a few of these here. Taken together, they may form some understanding of how Devi’s works show an aesthetic that is globally informed and the forms of his pots reveal as much classicism as they do a contemporary aesthetic. 81 There are few pottery teachers in contemporary ceramics today – Gurcharan Singh and his son Mansimran Singh of the Delhi Blue Pottery were one of the early centres in Delhi. Ray Meeker and Deborah Smith of the Golden Bridge Pottery, Pondicherry, began in the 1980s and has become a Mecca for the wood-fired reduction glaze potter. Their students have also spread throughout the country and started studios in Bangalore, Mumbai, Baroda, Bhopal, Hyderabad and Kolkata. 82 Amongst the many students who passed through his studio one can mention Aakash Dharmaraj, Usha Chadda, Mamta Singhania, Naman Ahuja, Anju Kalsi, Rajneesh Dutta, Inca Roy, Juthika Bose, Shehla Hashmi Grewal, Ranjana Deb, Soni Dave, Radhika Bharatram, Shweta Mansinghka, Indu Rao, Sarita Agarwal, Sandhya Agarwal, amongst several others. Illustration 322. In love Stoneware platter with underglaze painted brushwork Diam 31.5 cm Delhi 1993 Signed and dated ‘Devi 93’ in Hindi 254      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      255 The lota has epitomised the refinement and minimal design qualities inherent in Indian aesthetic sensibilities over generations. The clay form was the originator of the metal one – and a source of inspiration in the forms that Devi Prasad made over the years on the wheel [Ills. 321, 363]. The form is very different to the Chinese, Korean and Japanese vase form. The lota is a functional object, whatever material it was made of, to carry water in small quantities for personal or ritual purposes. The form has been essentially unchanging although it has many regional variations – in the relationships of its parts such as the vessel’s neck, the spherical body, the articulation of the belly to the foot and the upward rising neck. One of the most distinctive qualities of Devi Prasad’s pottery has been his controlled brushwork. This goes back of course to his Santiniketan training, but equally and perhaps more specifically to his Sevagram days where his painting became more confident and its content became more fixed. The terracotta gourd-shaped pots from the Sevagram period are more sophisticated in both form and treatment of wash and line. The forms are gourd-shaped with a double swelling profile and a small raised rounded lip without a discernible neck and a turned foot rim at the base [Ills. 97, 112-13]. The division of the pictorial space is very interesting in both vase and platter and is directly linked to his love of nature, trees and the Indian countryside. The fluency of painted line speaks of his expert handling of the brush and slip trailer, but the themes were always in a modern vein and no conscious attempt was made to transpose the thematic content of Indian miniatures onto the pots.83 Devi’s love for the countryside was expressed through the medium of watercolour and pen and ink drawings over the years and in various countries. The plants that he focused on were, besides the bamboo – so beloved of the Far East pottery decoration – other Indian everyday plants such as jowar (sorghum) stalks, sugarcane, mustard shoots, and trees like the Palash, Banyan and Peepal. Over the years these became minimalised to a single sheaf, a single shoot, or a single Palash flower in heady bloom, all painted on vertically or singly, rarely a controlled border, on a range of single gourd-shaped vases or pots. Devi Prasad was surrounded by strong women – his mother Ramkali Bajaj whom he remembers making cotton thread Illustration 323. Children’s Faces Stoneware platter Matt-white with underglaze and slip Diam 33.5 cm Delhi 1997 Signed ‘Devi’ on reverse Illustration 324. Bowl Matt-white glaze with brushwork on stoneware H 12.2 cm Diam 19cm Delhi 1997 No signature Illustration 325. facing page Platter Matt-white with underglaze and slip on stoneware Diam 30.5 cm Delhi circa 1997 Signed ‘Devi’ in Hindi on reverse 83 Another Santiniketan student of the same time as Devi Prasad, who used the pottery surface as a painter, was Kripal Singh Shekhawat in Jaipur, who revived the famous quartz-type blue and white pottery on the request of Kamladevi Chattopadhyaya of the Handicrafts Board and the Maharani of Jaipur, Gayatri Devi. Kripal remained devoted solely to the painting treatment of the pot surface and his concerns were always to promote the young painters of the Rajasthan School of Art to use the miniature and fresco style of painting with traditional themes on Jaipur blue pots and platters. He used, unlike Devi Prasad, a workshop of pottery artisans who made the shapes in moulds for him, applied the white slip or asthar onto the finely sanded surface, and then after the pot was painted, fired the ware with a transparent glaze under his supervision. 256      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      257 Illustration 326. Dancers Stoneware platter with slip and underglaze brushwork Diam 32 cm Delhi circa 1992 Stamped ‘Devi’ on reverse Illustration 327. Moonstruck Stoneware platter with underglazed brushwork Diam 33 cm Delhi 1997 Signed and dated ‘Devi April 97’ in Hindi 258      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      259 at home for her weaving of khadi, according to Gandhi’s Satyagraha call, his first wife, Janaki, who was renowned for her scholarship and could recite the Gita from memory; Bindu, his second wife and beloved companion; Ashadevi Aryanayakam, one of the directors of the Nayee Taleem Insitute and others, especially from the local villages, who were incredible role models for the independent Indian woman. He sketched them endlessly toiling in the fields, carrying water, with their families, dreaming of lovers, dreaming of nature, and this passion was translated into fluid vivid lines on platters and cylindrical vases and bottles. Devi Prasad acknowledges Leach’s ideas and influence when he says, Apart from knowing something about the technical side of the art of pottery Bernard Leach’s book taught me how to look at a pot and to understand the elements that make a pot a living object. I say living, because Bernard Leach saw a pot as something that has its own personality. No other artist would have drawn a parallel between the human body and a pot made with clay, as Bernard Leach did. Leach did not only say: “As cloths are to the human body so are glazes to pots” but also.... The essential element in a glaze is the fluxing agent.... It might be considered... as the life blood of the glaze,... heat resisting silica,... may be called the bone of the glaze. ... a third element, clay, analogous to the flesh of the glaze...84 One would not be able to live in England at the time, be interested in ceramics and not be influenced by the Leachian style of Oriental glazes and traditional English forms. He was also deeply impressed by the iconoclastic aesthetics of Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. At the same time Devi Prasad often weaves an Indian sensibility to form, content and the context of his pots which is second nature to the traditional Indian potter. He was happy to deviate from such a tradition, and that could be liberating and creative. It is clear that he had no difficulty in reconciling imitation and discovery. He says, ‘Maybe both!’ Illustration 328. A Dinner Service for Ten Stoneware Delhi 1994 Scratched ‘Devi’ in Hindi on the underside of most pieces Collection of Mamta and Harshpati Singhania Dinner plates Diam 26.5 cm Quarter plates Diam 17.75 cm Dessert bowls H 6.5 cm Diam 13.2 cm and Lidded serving dishes not illustrated In the 1970s, Devi Prasad travelled widely and he lectured on Pacifism as well as Indian art and architecture in Latin America and the USA. His first ceramic exhibition was held in 1975 at MIT, Boston. The period from 1973-75 saw Devi Prasad exploring and experimenting with a wide variety of shapes and forms. The works were made in stoneware, glazed mainly in oxidation firings in an electric kiln. A great deal of decoration was done with slip trailing and sgraffito in slip and brushwork. As an Indian artist in the UK, he participated in exhibitions showing both paintings and pottery. One of these was at the North Finchley Library sponsored by the London 84 Bernard Leach, A Potter’s Book, Faber & Faber, London, 1971 edition, pp.133–34. 260      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      261 Borough of Barnet. Devi exhibited his drawings and ceramics along with other Indian artists like Dhiraj Choudhary, Jatin Das, Shanti Panchal and Moni Jana. In 1976-78 he started working in porcelain and felspathic glazes in a more determined manner. The Chinese oxblood red glaze, the pale celadon and the robust tenmoku with iron pigment brushwork were possible once shifted to reduction firing in a gas kiln. Other ceramics were wine carafes, large works like bread bins and breakfast cups and saucers [Ill. 185], as well as complex musical mobiles in the form of suspended wind chimes that created a remarkable new avenue for creativity. As he says, I am neither a classicist nor an ultra modern artist. In my own work, I derive a tremendous amount of inspiration from the classical art of most regions. But I do not try to imitate it. Nor do I want to be a classicist in my approach. I find much in it that is solid, substantial and enduring. Also, it helps me understand Nature, which is my source of strength. The series of heads painted over the years on platters, plates and sometimes bowls, hark to the times of endless confrontation between people – as lovers, as comrades, as friends, as partners or as seekers. They stare at each other in a direct confrontational bold manner or gaze out of the plate trying to connect with the viewer’s eyes in a direct gaze [Ills. 198, 203, 205-13, 322, 326-27]. They communicate in an intimate manner – rarely are they in a “pretty pottery” decorative pattern. The techniques used such as slip trailing, etching or painting in pigments remained a perfect vehicle for Devi to practice his skills at drawing and painting. Most of these plates remained individual but the making of sets of dinnerware was a challenge for a self-taught potter. Devi refined his methods of making dinnerware and tea and coffee sets over the years by sheer trial and practice and a huge continuous self-critical exercise. Many of the early dinner sets were made on the occasion of his three children’s marriages as wedding gifts. The thali type plates sometimes had a perfectly flat base with a narrow edge and double turned foot rim, especially designed for eating Indian food; it needs a flat surface otherwise the runny food collects at the centre of the dish and gets mixed togather – anathema for Indian cuisine! This may not have been appreciated in England as the Western dinnerware is designed with a flaring curved profile which aids in collection after every course. The Indian style of ergonomics prevailed in most of Devi Prasad’s tableware. The plate rim was designed for eating with one’s fingers where the Illustration 329. Teapot two views 1EXX[LMXI[MXLMRGMWIHQERKERIWI½PPIHPMRIWSRWXSRI[EVI H 14.5 cm Delhi 2001 No signature Illustration 330. facing page Platter Stoneware with underglaze painted brushwork Diam 32.5 cm Delhi 1982 Stamped ‘dp’ on reverse 262      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      263 food needs to be picked up against a subtle vertical edge of a rim, as opposed to the Western style of eating with cutlery where the food is picked up vertically from the plate with implements. The common understanding of the placement of the spout for coffee, from the top of the vessel as the grounds sink to the base and only the liquid needs to be poured, versus the teapot spout, where the flow needs to be from the base of the vessel for the full infusion to be served, was inherent in all his tea and coffee sets. The functionality of the pots was paramount: how carefully and exactly their lids would fit, how to make teapots and milk jugs such that they would pour perfectly and not leave a drip, how comfortably would the cup sit on the lip or be gripped in the hand, how easy was it to keep the pots clean? These questions were fundamental to his practice and teaching. Devi Prasad’s teapots are well known for their delicacy of turned lid and flange – for their exactness and precision of spout and strong handle. The influence of the English style of attachment of spout and lugs for an overhead bamboo handle is very evident. He was making for an English audience and market and the challenge of being self-taught and retaining a sense of quality was apparent. He made all the glazes himself with painstaking testing of raw materials and compositions. This was to stand him in good stead when he returned to India and began experimenting with Indian raw materials to achieve the same effects of glaze and clay body. Once the studio was fully functioning he had many exhibitions in Delhi at the Art Heritage gallery in 1994, 1997, 2000 and 2001, in Mumbai at the Jehangir Art Gallery in 1992 and Cymroza Art Gallery in 2003. The dinner sets dominated at this time – several large peach-bloom sets with various bowls and platters in stoneware and porcelain. The bowls were like the Indian katora, with delicately furling rims and flat bases. Some were more kulhar shaped with exaggerated and sinuous profiles. The delicacy of the brush gave way to self colours in celadon over carefully fluted and faceted surfaces. He restricts himself to a limited palette of glazes. His approach to teaching pottery is more than technique, and includes an understanding of a traditional aesthetic towards form and function. Devi describes his pots as ‘simple and unpretentious’. Illustration 331. Bowl Peachbloom on semi-porcelain H 6 cm Diam 6.8 cm Delhi 1994 Signed ‘Devi’ in Hindi under base Illustration 332. Bowl Peachbloom on semi-porcelain H 6 cm Diam 8.4 cm Delhi 1994 Signed ‘Devi’ in Hindi on base Illustration 333. Lidded Pot Celadon glazed stoneware with brushwork H 11 cm Delhi 2001 No signature Collection of Jeet Seth Illustration 334. facing page Fishpond Stoneware platter with matt white glaze and underglaze brushwork Diam 36.5 cm Delhi 1996 Collection of Naman P. Ahuja 264      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      265 CONCLUSION Illustration 335. Apsara Stoneware platter with Albany slip painting and tenmoku rim Diam 34.7 cm New Dehi 1997 From his involvement with rural NGOs for the development of improved clays and kilns for village potters, Devi Prasad tries to show the formal art school trained ceramist, the hobby potter and the development field worker, the wisdom and aesthetic vigour of our rich cultural heritage. He brings these challenges into the field of contemporary ceramic art, which is in a state of flux, defining itself and searching for a relationship to its dual heritage of living traditions and modern influences. Devi Prasad understood the paradox of the urban art school trained Indian artists who, by social status and economic privilege, had positioned themselves separate from the traditional rural potter. Much of the relevance of the issues that he had raised in child art education, Pacifism and Satyagraha in the 1950s and 60s, retain their poignancy and resonance with concerns today, because in retrospect, the direction that Indian society has taken over the years has neglected these areas rather than strengthening them, and has deepened conflicts rather than moving towards resolving them. post-modern divide of conceptual artist and technician. For him, the artist has to understand the material and this gives an ethical value of honesty to craftsmanship and material. Devi constantly pressed the need through his writings and teachings for a thorough understanding of the history, culture, tradition, aesthetics and the lifestyle that modern India had inherited, and of a vision of what the responsibilities for the future were. His understanding of the paradoxical cultural situation facing the traditional potter and the studio potter who occupy different spectrums of the ceramic world in India is, sadly, that ‘there was hardly any dialogue between the two. The only interest they had in each other’s work was: how to make use of the other.’ ‘What he needs is not to get unduly mesmerized by studio pottery, but share the dignity with the studio potter which he or she commands from the society. Give him a chance to innovate forms and items that will make the life of the people enriched with beautiful objects.’ The crucial question he asks now is: ‘Which way do we want to go?’ He argues that though each side found a fascination in each other – the traditional potter for the high fired glaze and kiln technology and the studio potter in a more self-centred manner, with their skill and techniques – he realised that ‘the traditional potter could not afford the kind of kiln and other equipment the studio potter used, hence he could not enter into the field of “high class glazed pottery”. He had neither the college education which could give him the opportunity to read books and learn the art independently, nor did he have the social status to be able to go to the studio potters and ask them if they would be interested in mutual cooperation on equal footing.’ Devi Prasad presses the point convincingly that the interest shown by many studio potters is more self-centred. They want the traditional potter, who is a master in the art of throwing, assisting with the production of ware in a workshop or small-scale production centre, either on contract or as an employee. In other words, he states, ‘they want to pass on the drudgery work to him and produce as “their own work” in larger quantities for the market.’ Devi Prasad has never been convinced of the art versus craft schools of thought and of the It is a dilemma many have faced. Devi Prasad’s argument is that even though it is validated that by this process the craftsman earns more money than he can otherwise, he questions the fact that while the poor potter may get a few more rupees, does he get a share in the status and the earnings of the studio potter? There is a more important point here to be considered. It is about the character and demand for the two very different types of pottery. How can they co-exist, enjoying equal degree of importance and dignity, and why? One is far away from the concept of glazed pots and the other is oriented to a functionally different type of local production for local resources, market and requirements of custom and ritual. Devi Prasad critiques the basic issue of improving the work of the traditional potter. He answers it himself in a rousing article in 1987 called ‘The Indian Potter and His Future’, an extensive extract from which is reproduced elsewhere in this volume. His concern is to bring dignity and creativity back to the traditional potter by reducing the laborious drudgery of his work through a qualitative shift in production methods without being dependent for this on external agencies, much less so Government. This will allow an environment where the traditional potter and the urban studio potter can live harmoniously. The dream lives on in the lives of many potters in India today and we hope more in the future; the dream to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity as Devi Prasad and Kalindi Jena did, as Mumbai’s B.R. Pandit and his two sons who have studied at the JJ School of Art and then Golden Bridge Pottery, or Delhi’s Harkrishan and his daughter who has studied sculpture at the Delhi College of Art. Devi Prasad’s dream may not manifest itself for many years to come but the changes are there and we are the chroniclers. 266      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      267 Illustration 336. ½VWXVS[Facetted Teapot Stoneware with tenmoku and brushwork H 14.5 cm Delhi 2000 No signature Illustration 337. Faceted Teapot Stoneware with copper, green and red glaze H 11 cm Delhi 1997 Collection of Anusha Lal Illustration 338. second row Teapot Semi porcelain with peachbloom glaze H 12.5 cm Delhi 1991 Collection of Kamalesh Lathey Illustration 339. Faceted Teapot Stoneware with celadon glaze and brushwork H 9.5 cm Delhi 2001 Signed ‘Devi’ in Hindi Devi on base Illustration 340. third row Teapot Celadon with slip and brushwork on stoneware approx H 12 cm Delhi 2001 Illustration 341. Fluted Cypriot Shaped Teapot White stoneware platter with Albany slip H 8.5 cm New Delhi 2000 Collection of Shruti Jain Illustration 342. facing page Teapot Semi porcelain with peachbloom glaze H 13 cm Delhi 1997 Scratched ‘Devi’ on the underside 268      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT Illustration 343. ½VWXVS[ Plate for a Dinner Service White stoneware with spiralling tenmoku Diam 17.2 cm Delhi 1994 No signature Illustration 344. Plate for a Dinner Service Celadon with tenmoku brushwork on stoneware Diam 25.8 cm Delhi 1994 Scratched ‘Devi’ on the underside Illustration 345. second row Whirlpool of Colours Stoneware platter with multiple glazes Diam 40 cm Delhi 1997 Scratched ‘Devi’ in Hindi on the underside Collection of Reena and Ravi Nath Illustration 346. Plate for a Dinner Service Tenmoku glaze with iron oxide brushwork on stoneware Diam 24.5 cm Delhi 1994 No signature A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      269 Illustration 347. ½VWXVS[ Platter Stoneware Mattwhite with tenmoku rim Diam 36 cm Delhi 1992 Illustration 348. Platter Stoneware Matt white glaze on stoneware with a faint wax-resist painted face the rim covered with Albany slip Diam. 27.5 cm Delhi 1997 Scratched ‘Devi’ on the underside Illustration 349. second row Platter Stoneware Mattwhite with Tenmoku on rim Diam 32 cm Delhi 1994 Illustration 350. Starry Sky White glazed stoneware platter with underglazed brushwork and Albany slip Diam 35 cm Delhi 1998 270      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      271 ON  THE  INDIAN  POTTER   from   ‘The   Indian   Potter   and   His   Future’   by   Devi   Prasad,   in   Moving  Technology,  vol  2,  no.  5,  October  1987.   The Indian potter today faces serious problems, which though they seem to be of a technological nature, are in actuality political and social and are partly the results of the pauperization of the Indian industries during the colonial rule, which has continued owing to the policies followed by the country even after Independence. The approach that our development and political leadership has shown towards the traditional potter shows a lack of historical and sociological understanding of our society. It indicates the kind of inferiority complex we have developed towards our own past and of aesthetical illiteracy, and also reflects the attraction we have developed for Western and Japanese machine-made things. To consider the creations of the traditional potter as unattractive and crude, is the real tragedy and a denial of our inheritance. The institutions, which have developed as mini pottery factories, produce some good stuff but mostly for the urban middle class consumer. These projects are financed with funds meant for the aid of traditional pottery industry, but have hardly touched the life and craft of the potters who may be living within a stone’s throw distance and who may not even have a shed over their open hearth kilns. Although the primary commitment was to help the village potters, development agencies like the Khadi and Village Commission and others, saw much potential in the glazed pottery centres of Jaipur, Khurja and Chunar for producing artefacts for the middle class urban home and for export. We need to revolutionise the development philosophy by marrying technology with socio-political change. Understand the importance of the Indian potter’s creativity. Help him win back his raw material, his market, his dignity. Help him with the technological knowhow which will minimize the drudgery involved in his profession and that will improve the quality of life for his family. Give him ideas and strength to produce new things without becoming dependant on centralized agencies and which will not require fundamental alterations in his way of operations. I do not see much sense in introducing glazes as such within the framework of traditional pottery, except in very special and limited circumstances, as there is tremendous scope for growth within itself. As far as the low temperature glazed pottery is concerned, the basic characteristics of traditions such as Khurja and Chunar should be retained, encouraged and assisted to develop in their own way, remembering that the imposition of an alien technology can destroy the uniqueness and character of an industry. We cannot leave the matter entirely to fate and knowingly let it go in an undesirable direction. Hence the need for a thorough understanding of the history, culture, tradition, aesthetics and the lifestyle we have inherited, and of a vision of what we want to make of it. Substantial sums were given to develop these traditions despite which these centres have not been able to retain the original traditions nor are they producing articles which are functionally sound. Do we want to transform Khurja and Chunar into mini factories, whose objectives are to imitate the production of large and highly mechanized factories? The development policies need to be radically changed. Industrial pottery in India has advanced a lot due to the financial and moral support it has received from the State. Their product is steadily improving because it has a model and a readymade technology to copy. Its clientele, aspiring to own the best tea sets and dinner sets are also increasing in number and buying capacity. The cheap and ugly cup-and-saucer which many of the factories produce and sell to the wayside tea stall and the lower middle class home is a curse on the traditional potter and the death knell for the art of making the lovely and ecologically sound kulhad and shokora. Illustration 351. Platter Stoneware with matt white glaze slip trailing and underglaze brushwork Diam 32 cm Delhi 1994 Illustration 352. facing page Plate for a Dinner Service Stoneware with matt white glaze slip trailing and underglaze brushwork Diam 18.7 cm Delhi 1994 Stamped ‘dp’ 272      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT Illustration 353. Coffee Pot Tenmoku glaze with incised and iron oxide painted cranes on stoneware H 16.5 cm Diam 12 cm Delhi 2000 Stamped ‘Devi’ in Hindi below handle A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      273 Illustration 354. Plate for a Dinner Service Tenmoku glazed stoneware with iron oxide brushwork Diam 29 cm Delhi 1998 Signed and dated ‘Devi 98’ 274      |      A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT A  UNIVERSAL  SPIRIT      |      275 Illustration 355. Vase Stoneware H 19 cm Delhi circa 1993 Illustration 356. What a Chin White stoneware platter with Albany slip brushwork Diam 31 cm Delhi 1997 Scratched ‘Devi’ on the underside Collection of Ein and Ashok Lall Illustration 357. following page Computer Drawings Delhi 1992 278      |      COMING  FULL  CIRCLE COMING  FULL  CIRCLE      |      279 CHAPTER  V COMING  FULL  CIRCLE 280      |      COMING  FULL  CIRCLE COMING  FULL  CIRCLE      |      281 This book began with a discussion on the importance of the legacy of the Arts and Crafts Movement on India. Ananda Coomaraswamy was not only a pioneer historian of Indian art, but one of the first Indians to believe in the regeneration of India through its art, and not by politics and economics alone. In 1910, he was concerned for the loss of an Indian understanding and sensibility in industry, and said ‘Swadeshi must be something more than a political weapon. It must be a religious-artistic ideal.’ He took on the nationalist leaders of his time about their lack of any opinion on Indian craft and art. He urged them to include the restoring of the status and patronage of artisans in their Swadeshi agenda of national education. Through the course of this book we have seen how these ideas were variously interpreted by several critical players via Tagore, Gandhi and Bernard Leach to inform Devi Prasad’s implementation of it in his own life. Although Devi almost always signs his work, that does not imply all the baggage that has come to be associated with the presence of the artist’s signature in the modern milieu need be associated with his work. In fact, if anything, the impact of the writings of Morris, Lethaby, Ruskin, Bernard Leach and Yanagi on labour, social relations, economy and modes of production, and the ideals of the Unknown Craftsman made a most persuasive theoretical model for a branch of art historians and art practitioners. One group amongst them espoused the Perennial Philosophy or called themselves part of the Traditionalist School. They too drew on some of the ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement and included William Morris, René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, Ananda Coomaraswamy, amongst others. Although the Perennialists subscribed to several traditional types of religious philosophy, Devi cannot be found to follow them in this regard. Instead, one sees in Devi an alliance with them in spirit, at least in the respect for their traditionalist beliefs and critique of the effects of soul-killing mechanisation, the recreation of the individual feeling derived from using a hand-made pot. The Traditionalists/Perennialists and the Arts and Crafts subscribers confronted a similar crisis between traditional art, typecasting, religiously motivated art and, in their times, emergent modernisms. They have found themselves sidelined in scholarly circles for the past few decades for promoting some stereotypical notion of woolly transcendalism linked with outdated modes of art production. And yet, curiously, we are back seeking ‘The Reenchantment of Art’,85 a magical, 85 The book The Reenchantment of Art is also the title of Suzi Gablik’s concluding chapter, invoking Arthur Danto’s, The End of Art History, and seeks to find a new paradigm in a compassionate, non-patriarchal, non-Eurocentric art history. The call of the reenchantment of art by Gablik does have a frame of reference in the West but it seems to capture the return of the ‘romantic traditional’ in contemporary Asian art; some of the modes of this reclamation are naturally thus going to be different depending on where they are located. For instance, in China, where there was a sharp break with religion, this is taking a wholly new form while in Iran the forced extremism of the religious ideals leads to more humanistic expressions. Even in India, there is no going back to the Illustration 358. previous page Plate Slip trailing on stoneware Diam. 26 cm London 1974 Stamped ‘dp’ at the back Illustration 359. facing page and above Some of Devi Prasad’s Signatures, Stamps and Seals from 1944 onward 282      |      COMING  FULL  CIRCLE COMING  FULL  CIRCLE      |      283 visionary experience through art; to re-capture art from journalism, to give its place its due, rich with the complexity of the times it comes from. We have already noted that Devi was quite aware of Coomaraswamy’s writings that ‘...in India the imager is required to identify himself in detail with the form to be represented. Such identification, indeed, is the final goal of any contemplation, reached only when the original distinction of subject breaks down and there remains only the knowing, in which the knower and the known are merged.’ 86 Perhaps this is one way for us to be able to see the extent of the embodiment of the ideals of the Unknown Craftsman. The adoption or play with multiple styles and the absence of a desire to develop a signature style may be read as a sublimation of the self, or self-noughting (a favourite term of Coomaraswamy), as we discussed earlier in the volume. It can also be seen as an attempt to negate a growth of individual ego, which could only breed competition, desire, fame or a type of acknowledgement which would not find a place in his Gandhi-inspired writings on peaceful society and education. As has been noted elsewhere in this book, he says that, Style is an increasingly personal matter specially today, when the strict application of traditions of schools is becoming less and less important for self expression. Even within the musical gharanas in India following the set traditions is becoming increasingly lenient. A creative musician deviates from the set traditional style, adds something of his or her own, which enriches the style of the gharana. Whatever a musical genius produces becomes an integral part of that gharana itself. Same is true to a great extent about visual arts such as painting, pottery, sculpture, architecture or blacksmithy etc. I think the pre-set traditional forms of gharanas and their styles will become less and less rigid making the path of the genuine artist wider and wider all the time. I am too orthodox to believe that the individual’s personality will no longer have anything to do with his or her creativity. I hope that the creativity in the art world will always enhance all the beautiful aspects of the traditional forms of art. Nonetheless, I know that the most important criteria of good art is the sensibility of the individual artist, his or her creativity and the way of looking and feeling about the vast world we live in and our behaviour with it. Devi Prasad humbly concedes in his interviews that he has not developed his own style ‘I am not an artist of that greatness’, he says, ‘I have absorbed many styles, or..., you can say, I have not taken any style, I have just made what came transcendentalism of Coomarawamy without its reinvention via simultaneous claims of cosmopolitanism and local rootedness: Where even a religiously motivated society finds that in its art, religion re-enters in an ironic mode as a critique of secularism and religious fundamentalism. Some of these ideas are taken from Naman Ahuja,‘Tropes and Places’, in Parul D. Mukherji, K. Singh and N.P. Ahuja (eds.), InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia, Sage Publications, Delhi, forthcoming 2011. 86 See the extract on Peace, Education and Creativity, p. 196, in this volume Illustration 360. Doodle from Devi’s WRI notebooks London late 1960’s Illustration 361. facing page Vase)EVXLIR[EVI½VWX½VMRKMR0SRHSR,GQ Illustration 362. Vase)EVXLIR[EVI½VWX½VMRKMR0SRHSR,GQ 284      |      COMING  FULL  CIRCLE COMING  FULL  CIRCLE      |      285 to me in the long life I have led.’ 87 He is not alone in this sort of an approach to art: shorn of the heroism of modernism’s greats, the conscious absence of a signature style, to derive satisfaction from the act of making, and to make in any medium and language of art that may adequately allow the artist to communicate what he feels. Through the course of this book one has explored what prompts this kind of art practice: Devi’s family, including his rapport with his brother and mother; the influence of Devi’s inspirations: Nandalal and the other forces of Santiniketan; the impact of ideas Gandhian and Tagorean, and moving further back to the historical milieu of the early decades of the twentieth century when Indian nationalism, the call for Swadeshi and the right to education, all came from a particular integrated philosophical outlook that can be seen very much within the history of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Yet, perhaps one can see this kind of art practice today from a different lens: when it is no longer unusual to encounter contemporary gallerists’ patronage of artists who adopt postmodern strategies of quoting from the history of art and their reduction in the need for individual expression (for the sake of an individual expression). This is seen as a trend alongside another where celebrity artists are themselves working in a pre-modern (traditional?) style as heads of ateliers of junior artists/craftsmen. These are phenomena which pose challenges to the definitions of art as it stands today. We also stand today at another threshold where skills are being valorised again: almost a déjà vu revisiting of the polemics of the Arts and Crafts Movement as the world faces further loss of craftsmanship. Having been through the wringer of conceptual and ideationally stimulated art for decades now, only to come full circle to see that there isn’t any new idea in sight, but rather, to nostalgically quote previous generations while the disenfranchised contemporary delves deeper into the cynicism of acidic hopelessness, perhaps the other trope of traditional Asiatic skills/craftsmanship may hold a panacea. The phenomenon of everyday, mass and folk art being the source of inspiration for a lot of today’s art is also one of the characteristics of contemporary art, at least for the so-called trans-avant garde of the 1980s and 90s. Besides, there is little point in being a theoretical ostrich, refusing to acknowledge that the reality on the ground is that there are more craftsmenartists steeped in traditions in India than in middle-class studio practice. Further, with the new directions that collaborative art production and curatorial endeavours are taking, narrowly local community needs and expressions are being showcased globally, and art and utilitarianism are once again finding an interface. Illustration 363. Vase Oxblood glaze on stoneware H 18.5 cm New Delhi 1994 Collection of Anuradha Ravindranath Illustration 364. facing page Platter with a Lotus Whorl Stoneware with copper red glaze and wax-resist pattern Diam 31 cm New Delhi 1994 Collection of Radhika Bharatram In a technocratic society ridden with caste politics where traditionally several art forms are associated with particular 87 Oral history documentation interviews with Naman Ahuja, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, Sept. 26–28, 2009. 286      |      COMING  FULL  CIRCLE COMING  FULL  CIRCLE      |      287 castes and their habitus, perhaps the time has come to revisit the idealism of Nayee Taleem. Certainly the rootedness of village craft in an age of globalisation has turned out to be a chimera – where ‘Kutch’ embroidery is done in China, where several international exhibitions have showcased the changing face of Indian ‘folk’ art being driven by a global middleclass market. On the other hand, ‘high art’, like high-minded intellectualism, is thus no longer segregated from the world of handicrafts, popular and traditional art; domains where an engagement with the spirit of continuity in tradition, guildbased communitarian work and its social place and even the sacred in art have remained pervasive. Whereas modernism feared the stereotyping of ‘traditional’ in many Asiatic cultures, the Arts and Crafts Movement recognised the rich civilisational histories of Asiatic countries and how, within that superstructure, exist their means and modes of production. Devi Prasad’s works are founded in a profound humanism and sublimation of a personal ego to the voice of tradition and utilitarianism; a slightly different Indian modernist milieu. With the recent changes in contemporary art then, where a celebration of craft is making a return, the significance of Devi’s stylistic eclecticism, his ‘self-noughting’ and his validation of pottery as contemporary art form can be grasped. Gandhianism, the socio-ethical, community art and collectives are all back in art parlance. Devi’s style and ethic are thus not of the large one-offs, his works are shorn of the heroism of contemporary artists and shows instead a simplicity, a modernisation of tradition, an acceptance of influences from all over the world. All the works are characterised by a gracefulness of line, and humility before the great traditions of the world. Although he is best known as a ceramicist, Devi Prasad’s practice has encompassed an unusually wide range of art and design media. In each art form he has produced compelling work; but his unique contribution lies in the breadth and character of his explorations, and their framing within a consistent ideology. Individual pieces where distinguished may be fine examples of synthesis rather than originality. Perhaps one can stretch the argument to state that the absence of a signature style is the very mark of his work. At any rate, taken as a whole this is a truly original oeuvre that ranges across media and bridges art and politics, and finds an interstitial personal space between local traditionalism and globally informed influences via a vision of a Gandhian utopia. If the mark of real art is that it makes you see the world holistically and aesthetically – then Devi Prasad’s art does it. Devi Prasad was born in Dehra Dun, 8 October 1921, died on 1 June 2011 in Delhi while this book was in press. Illustration 365. Lidded jar Oxblood glaze on stoneware H 10.5 cm New Delhi circa 1993 Illustration 366. facing page Untitled Photographed during the Bhoodan walks early 1950s 288      |      APPENDICES SELECT  WRITINGS  OF  DEVI  PRASAD    |      289 APPENDICES FURTHER  EXTRACTS  OF  SELECT  WRITINGS  OF  DEVI  PRASAD:   On  Tagore’s  Philosophy  of  Education On  Tagore  and  Education On  Child  Education   On  Child  Art   On  Peace  Education   A  BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF  DEVI  PRASAD’S  WRITINGS ON  THE  EXHIBITION’S  DESIGN SELECT  BIBLIOGRAPHY   ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS   A  NOTE  ON  THE  AUTHORS INDEX 290      |      APPENDICES SELECT  WRITINGS  OF  DEVI  PRASAD    |      291 ON  TAGORE’S  PHILOSOPHY  OF  EDUCATION   from  Rabindranath  Tagore:  Philosophy  of  Education  and   Painting,  National  Book  Trust,  2000 Rabindranath’s educational philosophy and its application shows that human beings have three homes, or say life centres. The first is the individual himself or herself, different from everyone else. The second centre is the community, which is for the individual to live in cooperation with others. The third is nature – the whole universe – in which the individual lives, sometimes completely within himself, sometimes with others, elements and forces of nature, creatures and objects, small or large, living or otherwise, by establishing mutual relationships with them physically and/or spiritually, but as integrated part of the whole. The relationship between the three centres is being created every moment anew and yet it is permanent in form and rhythm, by the interaction of the self and the other-thanself elements. If, at any time, the tie between one of them and the other two is broken, the individual, as well as the society, develops distortions. The life style of the individual and the society today is a clear example of this fact. Social relations are gradually being distorted and the relationship between humankind and nature has changed from cooperation to exploitation. As a result, the human being does not feel the sense of fulfilment and joy within himself. The more he gets, the more greedy he becomes. colour, sound and rhythm, etc. Developing dexterity in these activities also enhances clarity in most other things we do. Not only that; with that kind of experience, one also understands the efforts made in discovering the self by having a dialogue with the sub-conscious and unconscious self. The main purpose of education is not only to gather loads of information, but to know humankind and to learn to express the self within. For the sake of achieving fullness in the life of the individual with the whole creation, Rabindranath put the major emphasis on creative activities in his school, Santiniketan. In addition to the objective of unity between the individual and nature, art, music and literature also provide the individual with possible outlets for getting rid of his destructive and antisocial tendencies. More than for the intellectual faculties, these activities have greater importance for emotional and intuitive aspects, through which the individual gives expression to his personality. Art is considered influential for the growth of the inner self of the individual, thus giving a feeling of fulfilment. Rabindranath has often said that the responsibility of education is to see that the growth of the body, mind and heart takes place in a balanced manner. He argues that even if a person has developed his book-oriented intellect to the extent of becoming capable of certain activities but has not learnt to use his hands in a constructive manner, his education will be incomplete. If the education of the body does not go parallel to the education of the mind, the mind too does not get the strength and inspiration necessary for its full growth. Self-expression, too does not get its full quota of expression and communication with only the language of words. Hence, human beings have to discover other languages, e.g., the language of lines and Illustration 367. previous page A Young Face Tempera on paper 10 x 15 cm Sevagram Undated Illustration 368. A Young Woman Watercolour on postcard, 9 14 cm Sevagram Undated Illustration 369. facing page A Young Girl Pen and ink on transparent/tracing paper 14 x 21 cm London 1972 292      |      APPENDICES SELECT  WRITINGS  OF  DEVI  PRASAD    |      293 ON  TAGORE  AND  EDUCATION from  “Tagore’s  Warning:  Rescue  the  Human  Soul  from  the  Chains   of  Greed  and  the  Path  of  Destruction”,  Gandhi  Vigyan,  Journal   of  the  Academy  of  Gandhian  Studies,  vol.  1,  no.  1,  1983. Education ought to provide opportunity and guidance in the spirit of fellowship with the whole of humanity and nature, of which human society is only a part. The process is not merely intellectual; it is one in which both, the mind as well as the body grow in full harmony with each other. We are born on this earth as our home, to be fully accepted by us, and not merely to know it. Knowing, not meaning knowledge in the Vedic sense, but as a process of accumulating information, is a means of power. We can become powerful by the injections of information given to us from our childhood but we cannot attain fullness without sympathy. Tagore said that the highest education is that which does not merely give us information but which brings our lives in harmony with all existence. And it is this education which is being systematically neglected in the school system. From the very beginning, information is forced into the minds of children so that they are alienated from nature. Instead of accepting the earth as its home, humankind sets itself in competition with it and makes schemes to exploit it as if it were its servant. Related to it is the question of simplicity of living. When Tagore started his school, he introduced simple living essentially as an educational principle. Many critics acclaimed that he was glorifying poverty and taking back the inmates of his ashram to the medieval ages. Tagore, however, was certain that luxuries are burdens for children. They are actually the burden of other people’s habits, the burdens of the vicarious pride and pleasure which parents enjoy through their children. He argued that poverty was the school in which humankind had its first lessons and its best training. We need this kind of understanding more urgently now than in the days when Tagore founded Santiniketan at the beginning of the century. In this age of affluence, schools go on accumulating junk in the name of educational equipment. We judge schools by their buildings, the size of their libraries, the number of textbooks they use and the educational material they possess and their capacity to go on adding more and more to it. Tagore, on the other hand, lays maximum emphasis on the elements which help the seed to sprout and the bud to blossom – sunlight and spring, for instance. He gave least importance to acquiring gadgets for his school, because he believed that although they help in gaining materialistic knowledge, in fact they nurture greed and selfishness and dwarf the spiritual and social side of human relationships. Illustration 370. Lidded Jar Tenmoku glazed stoneware H 15.8 cm London 1975 No signature Illustration 371. facing page A Woman with a Plant Pen and ink on paper 27.5 x 40 cm London 1972 294      |      APPENDICES SELECT  WRITINGS  OF  DEVI  PRASAD    |      295 ON  CHILD  EDUCATION from   “Seeds   of   Growth:   Is   the   Child’s  World   the   Same   as   that   of   the   Adult?”   Psychological   Foundations   Journal,   vol.   1(2),   December  1999.   I want to make a plea to all teachers and educational planners: please do not treat the child as a miniature adult. Children have a simple and straightforward way of relating to their environment. It is governed by the pure search to discover and know. They live for and seek achievement. Instincts and senses govern their interaction with the world around them. And that world is almost completely different from that of the adult. Each child’s world is different from another’s, though in spirit they are nearly the same. Few adults are able to know what a child’s world is like. Sensitive educators can see that world through the windows provided by children themselves. Their self-expression through creative activities is the most effective of these windows. Meaningful education is achieved only through providing opportunities to children to engage themselves in creative activities. For the fullest possible growth of the child we need the following: Create new opportunities for sensorial fulfilling experiences and interactions with the environment. Guard the child so that potentially dangerous or lifethreatening stimuli are removed from the child’s environment. Experiencing the spirit of cooperation and togetherness is equally important. No preaching can ever help in inculcating this spirit in children. Modern education has done just the opposite. It is divisive instead of being a uniting force. Illustration 372. Platter Underglaze painted on stoneware circa Delhi 1992 Illustration 373. facing page Ammani Devi with the camera and Janaki in the background London 1967 Lastly, intellectual growth helps only one-tenth of the total personality of the individual. The rest of it – nine-tenths – remains unlived. If the full personality of the individual has to blossom, avenues of growth for the remaining nine-tenths must be found. Seeds for that growth must be sown during the period of childhood. 296      |      APPENDICES SELECT  WRITINGS  OF  DEVI  PRASAD    |      297 ON  CHILD  ART from  “Experiences  From  Child  Art”  in  Seminar,  no.  462,  February   1998 Creative activities provide the discipline in which the senses intuitively seek unity, harmony, proportion and wholeness of experience. The use of mediums and tools – clay, cotton, wool, leather, wood, stone, brushes, potter’s wheel, saw – impose on this discipline by their very physical nature. They draw the creator closer to nature, which alone is the supreme example of harmony, sympathy and union. These are the same laws on which the human community depends for its own unity and integrity. Art activities create a deep sense of freedom in the child, which leads to full fruition of all his gifts and talents, to his true and stable happiness in adult life. Art actually leads the child out of himself. Children engaged in spontaneous creative activities are happier than those who may do well in their academic work but do not take part in art activities. Children’s spontaneous paintings are direct evidence of their psychological and physiological disposition. Child art has more clinical value than any other form of evidence. Creative activities also help develop self-confidence in the child. It can liberate individuals from their aggression and other repressed instincts accumulated during early childhood. In many homes, I have observed that children who are engaged in art activities are happy and more alert. They have a close relationship with their families and become a source of joy for the parents. Even at a very early age if the child is given an opportunity to handle simple art material, he starts scribbling in order to experiment with the material. He uses it to convey the urges of his inner world to a sympathetic spectator, to the parent from whom he expects an encouraging response. It provides an opportunity for dialogue between the child and the parent. Until the age of three and four, the average child has not developed a spoken language to the extent of being able to communicate with someone who is prepared to listen. Artistic activities provide to the child a language he needs to give expression to his inner self. If the child is unable to express freely, his feelings get distorted and often become destructive. Illustration 374. Portrait of Fua Crayon on paper 18.5 x 27 cm Sevagram 1946 Illustration 375. Portrait of Fua Pencil on paper 18.5 x 27 cm Sevagram 1946 Illustration 376. facing page Four Wise Men Pen and ink on paper 41.5 x 29 cm London 1980 Illustration 377. Eight Young Stars Crayon on paper 55 x 41 cm London 1980 It is not sufficient for the child to be able to express himself through art. He needs an audience that will give him recognition and appreciate his work, for building a healthy self-image. The role of the family is even more important in this regard. The child needs messages from his parents, which will assure him that they trust him and respect his personality. The health of the family depends upon the degree on intimacy in relationships and recognition of and respect for each other’s personality. A family is happy where the children are happy and active. Can human society be considered healthy if its units – individual families – are not happy? 298      |      APPENDICES SELECT  WRITINGS  OF  DEVI  PRASAD    |      299 ON  PEACE  EDUCATION from   Peace   Education   or   Education   for   Peace,   Gandhi   Peace   Foundation,  1984 The educational philosophy of Gandhi (Nai Talim) lays the individual, social and moral foundations of life. By education, Gandhi meant an all-round drawing out of the best in child and man – body, mind and spirit. He would begin the child’s education by teaching a useful handicraft and enabling him to produce from the moment he begins his training. He held that the highest development of the mind and soul was possible under such a scheme of education. Every handicraft had to be taught scientifically, not merely mechanically. Illustration 378. Peacock with a Baby Pen and ink on paper 57 x 41 cm London 1974 Illustration 379. facing page A Bird from some other World Oil on board 76 x 51 cm London 1974 In his system, there were three centres of education, the art of creating things using manual labour, the art of living cooperatively in a school community and the art of being one with nature. The actual education plan had to be prepared by the community as a whole, not imposed from above. The relationship between the individual and the community on the one hand and nature on the other, should have the perspective of the whole universe as a family. The task of building a peaceful and a warless world is a twin programme. The first task is to redefine our educational needs, work out a practical programme, inject this perspective into all our activities and aspects of life, and the second is to go on non-violently resisting the evil that war is and its preparation – direct or indirect. It is a programme for learning the art of Satyagraha, with its two essential aspects – constructive work and resistance to evil. It is a plan to build a new civilization of non-violence. 300      |      APPENDICES BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF  DEVI  PRASAD      |      301 BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF  DEVI  PRASAD BOOKS 1959. Bacchon ki kala aur shiksha (Hindi), All India Sarva Seva Sangh Publications, Varanasi. 1961. Pagdandi (Hindi translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s prose poetry Lipika), Rajpal and Sons, Delhi; republished as Lipika, Rajkamal Prakashan, Delhi, 2011 1963. Peace Making and Peace Education - A Bibliography, first published in Hindi in Nayee Talim; later as a mimeographed pamphlet by War Resisters’ International (WRI). 1968. with Smythe, T. (eds.) Conscription: A World Survey, WRI Publication, London. 1968 (ed.). Handbook of Human Rights, WRI Publication, London. 1969 (ed.). Gramdan: The Land Revolution of India, WRI Publication, London. 1970 (ed.). Problems of Economic Development, WRI Publication, London. 1971. They Love it but Leave it: American Deserters, WRI Publication, London. 1972 (ed.). Fifty Years of War Resistance: What Now? WRI Publication, London. 1984. Peace Education or Education for Peace, Gandhi Peace Foundation Publication, New Delhi. 1986 & 2000. Rabindranath ki shiksha aur chitrakala (Hindi), National Book Trust, New Delhi, 1986, also translated in English by the Author, Rabindranath Tagore, Educational Philosophy and Painting, National Book Trust, 2000 (Bengali edition by National Book Trust, 2002). 1988 (ed.). Nayee Talim, special issue of Gandhi Marg, Gandhi Shanti Pratishthan: Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi, February – March. 1996. Contemporary Indian Potters/Ceramic Artists – A Directory, 1996–97. Aaditya Chandra Prakashan, New Delhi. 1998 & 1999. Art: The Basis of Education, National Book Trust, New Delhi. 1998. Hindi edition published by NBT, Shiksha ka vahan: Kala, 1999. The book is being published in Thai in Bangkok. 2005. War is a Crime against Humanity: The Story of War Resisters International, WRI, London. 2005. Potters! Make Your Own Tools and Equipment, Mosaic Books, New Delhi. 2005. Education For Living Creatively and Peacefully, SparkIndia, Hyderabad. 2007. Nanha Rajkumar, Hindi translation of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, NCERT, Delhi. 2007. Ramkinkar Vaij: Sculptures, Tulika Books & Kotak Mahindra, New Delhi. Illustration 380. facing page A Musician Playing a Harp Pen and ink on paper 32 x 42 cm London circa Mid 1960s 2009. Srujanatmak aur shantimay jivan ke liye shiksha (in Hindi), Rajkamal Praksashan, New Delhi. 302      |      APPENDICES BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF  DEVI  PRASAD      |      303 ARTICLES The majority of Devi Prasad’s early articles are published in Hindi in the Journal Nai Talim, which he edited. The earliest ones are published under the name Deviprasad Gupt/Gupta. Being the Journal’s editor, the list is too extensive to include here, but some of the articles include: Utsav shastra, kala shiksha, nayi talim mein kala, bacche bhi kalakaar hote hain, grameen jivan mein saundarya bodh, shala ka pustakaalaya, etc. ON  GANDHI 1 ‘Shanti Sena: The Need of the Day (Gandhi’s ‘Peace Army’)’. Paper presented at a seminar at the Centre Studi a Iniziative, the Danilo Dolci Centre, Partnico, Sicily, Italy, July 1961. 2 ‘Nonviolence and Satyagraha’, written as a talk while Devi Prasad was travelling in Europe before joining War Resisters’ International, August 1961. 3 ‘Lenin & Gandhi: Contemporary Revolutionaries’, in Review of International Affairs, vol. XXI, no. 484, pp. 32–36, Belgrade, June 1970. 15 ‘Gandhiji kal, aaj aur kal’ Jansatta Newspaper (n.d.). 16 ‘Ekta: sadbhav shanti suraksha aavashyak ya ghrina, hinsa aur vighatan’, in Asli Bharat, August, 1992, pp. 22–27. 17 ‘Pashchim ke yuddh virodhi aandolan’, in Anuvrat, August, 1985. 18 ‘Ekta ke naam par kya chahte ho? Banduk, ghrina aur phut ya suraksha, sahyog aur shanti’ (place of publication not traceable). 19 ‘Aazadi ke liye svashastra sangharsh aur Gandhi drishti’, in Asli Bharat, October 1988, pp. 99–124 20 ‘Pahle mahayuddh ke samay yuddh virodh’ in Gandhi Marg, March 1987, pp.43–48. ON  NONVIOLENCE 1 ‘War and Religion’. 1961 (unpublished for WRI or other pacifist groups’ conference circulation). 1970 2 ‘Pacifism in India’. 11th Triennial Conference of WRI, Published in War Resistance no. 7, 4th quarter, Stavanger, Norway, July 1963. 5 ‘An effort to put different aspects of Gandhi’s ideas in a coherent form’. (unpublished paper) 1977. 3 ‘The Sarvodaya Movement in India’. 1964 (unpublished for WRI or other pacifist groups’ conference circulation). 6 ‘Gandhi’s Emphasis on Self-suffering and Service for Satyagraha to be Effective’. A talk given at Golders Green Unitarian Church, London, Easter Sunday, 1980. 5 ‘The Pacifist Perspective on Social Change’. 1970 (unpublished for WRI or other pacifist groups’ conference circulation). 4 ‘Satyagraha: According to Gandhi (Publication details unavailable). and Vinoba’. 7 ‘Gandhi’s Attitude Towards Violent Struggles for Freedom’. IFOR report, pp. 4–9, 1980. 8 ‘Gandhi and the Minority Struggle’. Published as a booklet by Non-violence Alternatives (NVA) information series. Supplement to PAN no. 9, Belgium, 1981 and in Gandhi Marg, July 1981. 9 ‘Gandhi and the Indian Renaissance’. Resource reading materials for study seminars, Antwerp, July 1980 and Brescia, Italy, 1981. 10 ‘Satyagraha: The Art of Defying Oppression Without Becoming Oppressors’. A paper presented at the seminar, ‘Gandhi and the Twenty-first Century’, 5–7 January 1987, New Delhi. Later published in Gandhi Marg, volume 14, no. 2, pp. 362–78, 1992. Illustration 381. Teapot Stoneware H 7.5 cm London 1980 Stamped ‘Devi’ on side Collection of Soni and Adit Dave Illustration 382. Lidded Jar Stoneware H 21.2 cm London 1981 Stamped ‘dp’ on wall 14 ‘Shanti sena aur hinsa ka pratikar’ (for private circulation). 6 ‘Witch Hunting in Eastern Europe and How to Face it’. 1970 (unpublished for WRI or other pacifist groups’ conference circulation). 7 ‘Nonviolent Peace Building’. 1970 (unpublished for WRI or other pacifist groups’ conference circulation). 8 ‘Report from Devi Prasad on Conference on Nonviolent Strategies for the Liberation of Latin America’. Columbia, 1974. 9 ‘How much Violence? Can Power be Used with Justice?’ A non-violent Revolutionary view (University talk, UK or for WRI or other pacifist groups’ conference circulation) 1976. 10 Preface for Liberation Without Violence: A Third Party Approach, (eds.) Paul Hare and Herbert Bloomburg. Rex Collins, London, 1977. 11 ‘Gandhi’s Concept of Freedom’. Paper based on an introductory speech given at a conference organized by War Resisters’ International in cooperation with World Peace Council, Budapest, 1964. 11 ‘Nonviolent Revolutionary Movements and State Aid’. Background paper WRI 16th Triennial Conference, 1979. 12 ‘Gandhi’s Nonviolence’. Fr Michael Rodrigo Memorial Lecture, 26 October 1991. 13 ‘Nuclear Power, Security and Development in India’, (Research Project at the Institute of Strategic Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, 1979, later submitted as a project proposal, Ford Foundation, Delhi, 1980). 13 ‘Do we have the Will and Courage to Knock at Gandhi’s Door?’ 1995. Later published as: ‘Can We Accept The Challenge of Gandhi?’, Journal of Peace and Gandhian Studies, vol. 2, pp. 116–132, April–Sept 1997. New Delhi; also published in Hindi as: ‘Gandhiji ko “out of it” kaha ja raha hai.’ 12 ‘Why Non-Violence?’ Talk given at SPAAS Gandhi Seminar, Sweden, 20–21 February 1982. 14 ‘Jai Jagat – Hurdles, Rising Tensions and Nonviolent Solutions. The present, future and our responsibility’, (unpublished conference paper for private circulation) 1997. Illustration 383. A Small Lidded Container Stoneware with brushwork H 8 cm London mid 1970s Illustration 384. A Vinegar Bottle Stoneware H 17.2 cm London mid 1970s 304      |      APPENDICES ON  GANDHI  AND  EDUCATION 1 ‘Gandhi’s Educational Revolution’, in Christian Action, Gandhi Centenary Issue, 1969, pp. 10–14. 2 ‘Education for Nonviolent Social Order’, in K. Arunachalan & Chris Selter (eds.), On the Frontiers’ Strategy for Nonviolent Social Order, Kodal Publishers, Madurai, 1977. 3 ‘True Education is Education for Satyagraha’, unpublished conference paper, Gandhi Bhavan, Chandigarh University, 1986. 4 ‘Education for a Peaceful World – A World Without War’, originally a conference paper, London, 1981 later published as a chapter in Devi Prasad, Education for Living Creatively and Peacefully, Hyderabad, 2005. 5 ‘Peace Education or Education for Peace’. London, August 1981 Keynote address, published in Fellowship of Friends of Truth, Part I, Summer 1982, and another portion in the same journal, Part II, March, 1983, UK. Republished in Peace News, London, December 11 & 25, 1981. 6 ‘Education for Human Rights and Social Responsibility’, in Indian Journal of Adult Education, Vol. 48, No. 4, OctoberDecember 1987, pp. 43–52. 7 ‘Education for Life and Through Life’, Gandhi’s Nayee Talim. 1995. Later published in Kapila Vatsayan (ed.), The Cultural Dimension of Education, Indira Gandhi National Centre of Arts, 1998, pp. 171–90. 8 ‘M. K. Gandhi: 1869–1948’, in Joy A. Palmer (ed.), Fifty Major Thinkers on Education, from Confucius to Dewey, Routledge, London, pp 219–234, 2001. ON  CHILDHOOD,  ART  AND  EDUCATION 1 ‘Art & Social Change’, in Peace News, December 1981, pp. 21–24. 2 ‘A Basis For Education’, in MANAS, January 1982. 3 ‘Tagore’s Warning.’ A talk given at the Hampstead Garden Institute, London, March 1980; also published in Gandhi Vigyan, No. 1, New Delhi, Oct. 1983, pp. 30–38. 4 ‘Life as Seen by the Child. Experience from Child Art.’ Paper presented at a conference titled: ‘Eller Familiearet Kaos Eller Struktur’, Molde, Norway, March, 1995. 5 ‘How Does Art Influence the Family and Human Society?’ Paper presented at a conference titled ‘Eller Familiearet Kaos Eller Struktur’, Molde, Norway, March, 1995. 6 ‘Experience from Child Art, a Symposium’, in Seminar, No. 462, February 1998, New Delhi. 7 ‘Creative, Hence Peaceful Society’, in Kapila Vatsyayan (ed.), Culture and Peace, Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, New Delhi, 1999, pp. 57–68. 8 ‘Seeds of Growth’, in Journal of Psychological Foundation, Vol. 1(2), New Delhi, December 1999, pp. 1–3. 9 ‘Window to the World of the Child’, Based on a paper titled ‘Child and Adult – Two Entirely Different Worlds’, presented at the workshop, – Design in Child Development, at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, December 1999. BIBLIOGRAPHY  OF  DEVI  PRASAD      |      305 10 ‘What is Education?’ Key note address at the seminar ‘Elementary Education – Shaping a Vision’, at Lady Sri Ram College, New Delhi, 2001. ON  POTTERY,  HANDICRAFTS  &  ART 1 ‘Problems of Pottery and Potters in India.’ A report of the work as a visiting fellow at Visva-Bharati during 1978–1979, Santiniketan. 2 ‘Tagore’s Paintings.’ A talk at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, 12 December 1979 (sections incorporated in Rabindranath Tagore, Philosophy of Education and Painting, NBT, Delhi, 2000). 3 ‘Towards a Renaissance of Traditional Handicrafts in India’. A talk given at The Serpentine Art Gallery, London, March 1982 (unpublished). 4 ‘Production of low cost ceramic products for rural sanitation, drinking water supply with emphasis on utilisation of locally available materials.’ Project by Central Glass and Ceramic Research Institute, Khurja, funded by Council for Advancement of Peoples’ Action and Rural Technology (CAPART), New Delhi, 1989 Illustration 385. Bathing Buffaloes in Kopai River Watercolour on postcard 9 x 5.5 cm Santiniketan 1943 5 ‘The Indian Potter and His Future’ in Moving Technology, Vol. 2, no. 5, Oct. 1987. 5 ‘The Question of Nazarene Conscientious Objectors in Yugoslavia’. June 1965. 6 ‘Rabindranath & Lok Shilpa’. A talk at a seminar for the Handicraft Development Corporation, Calcutta, 1995. 6 ‘Pacifism in India’, Document 9 circulated at 11th Triennial Conference, Stavanger, Norway, 26–31 July, 1963. 7 ‘Clay My Friend’, November 1997, Edited version published as ‘My Kinsman, Common Clay’, in Art Heritage, exhibition catalogue, Delhi, Nov. 2007. 7 ‘Some Thoughts on the World Peace Brigade’. WRI, July 1964. 4 ‘It Is The Direction That Matters’ (The work of the WRI). For Norwegian WRI July 1964. 8 ‘Emergency Meeting on Cyprus’. WRI 1964. 9 WRI Study Conference 1967 on Folkehogskole, 19th – 22nd July 1967. NATO, 18th August 1979. 21 ‘Who Are War Resisters?’ Souvenir for the 18th Triennial Conference held in Vedchhi, India, 1985. 22 ‘An Open Letter to Pacifists’. Written for 19th Triennial Conference, Aland, Finland, 6th July 1988. 23 ‘From Bilthovan to Vedchhi and After’. 1990 24 ‘ The Real Challenge Yet to be Faced’ WRI 25th Anniversary Address. Romerike 8 ‘The State of Indian Pottery Today’, Science, Craft and Knowledge – Understanding of Science among Artisans in India and South Africa – a Cross-cultural Endeavour, Gauher Raza and Hester du Plessis, (eds.), Protea Book House, Pretoria, 2002, pp. 43–49. 10 ‘Peace In Europe’. 17th July 1967. 9 ‘Half a Century of Studio Pottery Movement in India’, Peace & Harmony Exhibition Catalogue, Blue Pottery Trust, pp. 6–13, 2004. 12 ‘Aid and Development’. A paper presented at a seminar: ‘Aid and Development on the Occasion of Gandhi Centenary’ organized by WRI, London, 1972. 10 ‘Kala aur sanskriti’, in Srdtasvini, Centre for Cultural Resources and Training, April – June, New Delhi, 1999, pp. 4–11. 13 ‘Training for Non-Military Resistance’. Paper presented to a conference: ‘Non-Military Forms of Struggle’, Upsala, 25th–30th August 1972. 3 ‘Massacre at Amritsar’. 1963 14 ‘Report on Latin America’ 15th September – 4th November 1973. 5 ‘Emergency Meeting in Cyprus’. 1964 15 ‘Bringing About Alternatives’ Sheffield, July 1972. (Being Devi’s resignation address as WRI Chairperson) 6 ‘Notes on a conversation with Michael Scott, Naga Problem’. Feb 1964 16 ‘Report on USA’ 1973. 7 ‘Witch Hunting in Eastern Europe and How to Face It’. 1970. 17 ‘South Vietnam. Report on South & South East Asia’ 5th August – 28th September 1974. 8 ‘Resettlement of Displaced People and Prospects of Normalisation of Life in Cyprus’. Cyprus Resettlement Project, July 1973 11 The Studio Potter, Exhibition Catalogue, Eicher Gallery, New Delhi, October 1995 – January 1996. FOR  WAR  RESISTERS’  INTERNATIONAL (This includes only some of several papers intended for circulation amongst WRI members or presented at WRI; a more complete set, ‘Devi Prasad Papers: 1961–2001’, may be accessed at the International Institute of Social History [Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis], Amsterdam.) 1 A Word About The Constitution. Mid-1960s. 2 ‘WRI in 1963’ A report issued along with Tony Smythe, (for WRI circulation). 3 Statement to the Warsaw Conference of the World Council for Peace, WRI Pamphlet, Lansbury House, 28th November – 2nd December 1963 11 ‘A Manifesto on Love on Behalf of the Human Race’ Declared at the Geneva Peace Convention, 30th May 1967. 18 ‘Non-Violent Strategies for the Liberation of Latin America: Report from Devi Prasad’ Paper read at Caracas University, Columbia, 27th–28th February, 1974. WRI  PUBLICATIONS  BY  DP  ON  CONFLICT  SITUATIONS (This list includes a series of short papers and long memos intended for internal circulation for WRI members. A comprehensive holding of these is held as part of the Devi Prasad Papers at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.) 1 ‘The Episode of Goa’. 1962 2 ‘Sino-Indian War and the Peace Movements’. 1963 4 ‘India-Pakistan Relations: A Suggestion’. 1964 9 ‘The People’s Resistance in Bihar’. A study of the Indian situation over 20 years to the State of Emergency in 1975. 1975 19 ‘War Resisters’ International and the Third World’. A working paper for the sub-committee set at the 16th Triennial Conference of WRI to explore ways and means as to how the WRI can relate to the problems of the Third World. 1979. 10 ‘The Growth of Nonviolent Social Change Movements in Latin America’. June 1978 20 ‘Which Way WRI?’ 16th Triennial Conference, Denmark 12th – 12 Report of Sri Lanka visit. Peace Brigade International, 1991. 11 ‘India Today’. 14 June 1978. Publisher: Houseman Publications, London. 306      |      APPENDICES EXHIBITION  DESIGN      |      307 ON  THE  EXHIBITION’S  DESIGN This book was initiated subsequent to an exhibition held at the Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi under their auspices in collaboration with the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. It showcased Devi Prasad’s work as a photographer, painter, designer and, of course, as India’s senior studio potter. Devi Prasad’s work spans the entire latter half of the 20th century - at a moment in the history of Indian art and design which brings India into the modern era. The show spanned 65 years of his work as an artist, from his earliest artworks, painted in Santiniketan in 1938, and ended with some of his last works made in 2003-’04 (the last time he used his studio). The exhibition comprised approximately 500 artworks interspersed with panels of text drawn from Devi’s writings on Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, art, education and politics. This allowed the pots, for which he is so famous, to be seen in the broader context of the history of his motivations and work as an artist to draw out the common sensibility that runs through all his work. All the foyers, landings and connecting spaces in the galleries’ design were concerned with Devi’s philosophy, his writings on history, peace-activism and education: literally positioned as a central intellectual core. As a retrospective exhibition they led into different rooms that were concerned with the chronology of his art practice. The exhibition began with Devi Prasad’s famous photograph of Gandhi’s last meeting with Tagore. They are also the two most significant influences on him. Their philosophical unity is expressed in Devi’s honesty to the medium of his practice. The friendship with the means, tools, materials used, their procurement, their being founded in artists’ physical (i.e. spatial) and spiritual (and corporeal) reality and their adaptation to the artist’s imagination forms one of the central leitmotifs of his life. Adapting the available mediums to the needs of the modern studio potter, photographer, carpenter and designer to his environment 308      |      APPENDICES provide an insight right into the specifics of a method that has had tremendous historical impact and it is thus that we entered the first gallery of the exhibition The Making of Devi Prasad, which reconstructed portions of his various studios, the tools he made, the philosophies that made him. The pottery workshop that extended from the garage of his flat, the wheels and kilns he built himself, drawings of kiln and wheel designs, the clays and tools he adapted: his studio-diaries with recipes of clays and glazes and meticulously annotated firing logs were seen here. They showed how, right until the last firing at his studio, Devi remained a faithful student and hence a true teacher. Perhaps Devi’s first moment in launching himself and imbibing his ideology came from a formative experience only a few years after graduating from Santiniketan when he was invited to design the Jaipur Session of the Congress. The aesthetic philosophy was concretised through the architectural design and actual making of 1.2 million square feet of ephemeral architecture. The viewer proceeded thus to some of the photographs and plans of this space. The two other foyers in the building formed the core of the galleries and it is here that photographs of his political work, sections from his prolific publications, were composed into text panels that form the backdrop to the pots. Actual books, pamphlets and photographs provided an insight into his politics and his work as a graphic designer. EXHIBITION  DESIGN      |      309 The first chronologically arranged gallery concerned the 1930s and 40s Santiniketan (comprising mostly works on paper and some photographs), leading to others, which concerned his work in the following decades mostly at Sevagram. Apart from his many student works in varied styles at Santiniketan, there were a number of significant self-portraits in the Santiniketan galleries. Two of these are particularly incisive and reflect the artist’s angst shortly after having graduated in 1944, at a profoundly moving, contemplative moment in his life. The exhibition continued to the Sevagram galleries which showed how pottery and photography had become as much a part of his practice as painting. One of his photographs was selected, blown up and used as a backdrop for the space; this was the near prophetic photograph that Devi took in 1950 of the lonesome labourer marching away, back into some eternal obscurity at Rajghat, where Gandhi was cremated two years earlier. Display cases for pots were designed as windows in all the partition walls thus permitting views to photographs and paintings of that period. The rural countryside and pastoral idyll painted or photographed by him (Jowar and cotton fields, village carts, people spinning at their charkhas...) built up the vision of a Gandhian utopia. This proceeded to works made in the next two decades (1963–83) in England. The focus was sophisticated stoneware and porcelain studio pottery, several landscapes and portraits. Large photographs of the peace marches and demonstrations, the mood of Europe during the ‘flower power’ days, vividly captured by his photographs. Paintings and pottery were juxtaposed to emphasise the common aesthetic sensibility that runs through them, even if they seemingly belong to different art historical ‘isms’. The exhibition then ended with the last few galleries designed to reflect his work when he returned to India and concentrated mainly on studio pottery and writing from 1983 to 2004. This gallery, called ‘Full Circle’, was dominated by a large circular or rather, ring-shaped stand for pots that visitors could enter to see his pots as isolated individual pieces in profile. The mood of the room was nearly zen-like and spartan to reflect the artist’s own life in this phase and to focus the viewer’s attention on the pots. The metaphor of the circle being full even if the room at first seemed sparse forced attention on the circular shadow cast from one of his suspended pots on the gallery’s floor, while the choice of platters on exhibit also showed the circle to be one full of life, movement and abstraction. His observations of nature have always been a strong spiritual core in his work. Therefore the exhibition ended with two details (Summer and Winter) from his impressive pen and ink line drawings used as wallpaper against which the eternal dance of the ‘Apsara’ painted on a platter was positioned. NPA 3rd June 2010 310      |      APPENDICES BIBLIOGRAPHY        |      311 SELECT  BIBLIOGRAPHY Government of India, New Delhi, 1980. EXCLUDING  WORKS  BY  DEVI  PRASAD,  WHICH  CONSTITUTE  A  SEPARATE   Guha-Thakurta Tapati, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post colonial India, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2004. LIST  IN  THIS  VOLUME Achar, Deeptha ‘Crafting Education: Caste, Work and the Wardha Resolution of 1937’, in Parul Dave Mukherj, Shivaji Panikkar & Deeptha Achar (eds.), Towards a New Art History, 2003, pp. 385–93. Ahuja, Naman P., Ramkinkar through the Eyes of Devi Prasad, Exhibition catalogue, School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, Delhi 2007. Ahuja, Naman P., Mukherji, Parul & Singh, Kavita (eds.), InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia, Sage Publications, Delhi, forthcoming 2011. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992. Havell, EB ‘The Basis for Artistic and Industrial Revival in India” Theosophist Office Adyar Madras 1912. Janah, Sunil, The Tribals of India through the lens of Sunil Janah, OUP, Calcutta, 1993. James, Josef, Cholamandal: an Artist’s Village, Oxford University Press, 2004. Ahuja, Naman P., Devi Prasad Oral History Documentation Interviews, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, Sept. 26–28, 2009. Kaplan, Wendy (et al), The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America: Design for the Modern World, Thames and Hudson, 2004. Bharucha, Rustom, Another Asia, Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2006. Kapur, Geeta, When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, Tulika Books, New Delhi 2000, (reprinted 2007). Bhattacharya, S., (ed.), The Contested Terrain: Perspectives on Education in India. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Kapur, Geeta, K.G. Subramanyan, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi, 1987. Bilgrami, Akeel, ‘Gandhi the Philosopher’, 2001, has appeared in multiple iterations, including Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 38 (39), 2003: 4161–4163. Lal, Anupa and Anuradha Ravindranath (eds.) Pottery and the legacy of Sardar Gurcharan Singh, Delhi Blue Pottery Trust, New Delhi, 1998. Birdwood, G.C.M., The Arts of India, First Edn. 1880, Third edn. (The British Book Company) Jersey, 1986. Leach, Bernard, A Potter’s Book, Faber and Faber, London (first edn. 1940). Brent Plate, S. ed., Religion, Art and Visual Culture: A Cross-cultural Reader, Palgrave, 2002 . Leach, Bernard, Beyond East and West: Memoirs, Portraits & Essays, Faber and Faber, (second imprint) London, 1985. Chattopadhyay, Kamaladevi, Handicrafts of India, ICCR Delhi (revised edn. 1985). Lipsey, Roger, Coomaraswamy, vol. 1: Selected papers, Traditional Art and Symbolism, vol. 2: Selected papers: Metaphysics, vol. 3: His Life and Work; Princeton, Bollingen series LXXXIX, 1977. Chattopadhyay, Kamaladevi, Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces, Navrang Publishers, Delhi 1986. Chattopadhyay, Kamaladevi, The Glory of Indian Handicrafts, revised edn. Clarion Books, New Delhi, 1985. Clarke, C. Purdon, ‘Modern Indian Art’, Journal of the Society of Arts XXXVIII, 1890, pp. 511–27. Coomaraswamy, A.K., Art and Swadeshi, Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi, second edn. 1994. Coomaraswamy, A.K., The Art and Crafts of India and Ceylon, Foulis, London and Edinburgh, 1913 (variously reprinted). Coomaraswamy, A.K., The Indian Craftsman, Probsthain, London, 1909. Coomaraswamy, A.K., Essays in National Idealism, First edn. England 1909, First Indian Edn: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1981. Cumming, Elizabeth and Wendy Kaplan, The Arts and Crafts Movement, Thames and Hudson, 1991. Dhamija, Jasleen, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, National Book Trust, Delhi, 2007. Elkins, James, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, Routledge, 2004. Mago, Pran Nath, Gurcharan Singh, Contemporary Indian Art series, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi 1995. Mallik, Gurdial, ‘The Masters as I Know Them’, The Theosophist Magazine, 1934–35, p. 205. Mallik,Gurdial Divine Dwellers in the Desert (Mystic poets of Sindh), First edn. Nalanda Publication, Baroda, 1949 (third edn. Indian Institute of Sindhology, Adipur, Kutch, 2008). Mallik, Gurdial Gandhi and Tagore, Navjivan, Ahmedabad, 1963 Mathur, Saloni, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, University of California Press, 2007. Meister, Michael, (ed.) Making Things in South Asia: The Role of Artist and Craftsman. Philadelphia: South Asia Regional Studies Department, 1988. Menon, Sadanand (ed.) In the Realm of the Visual: five decades 1948– 1998 of painting, ceramics, photography, design by Dashrath Patel, Exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi 1998. Michael, Kristine and Bindu Prasad (eds.) A Celebration of Creativity, Devi Prasad’s 80th Birthday, Exhibition Catalogue, Lalit Kala Akademi /Art Heritage and British Council, Delhi, 2001. Gablik, Suzi, The Reenchantment of Art, Thames and Hudson, 1991. Mitter, Partha, Much Maligned Monsters, University of Chicago Press, 1977 & 1992. Gandhi, MK The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Mitter, Partha, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922, Occidental Orientations, Cambridge, 1994. Mitter, Partha, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant Garde, 1922–47, Reaktion Books, London, 2007. Patwardhan, Nirmala, A Handbook for Potters, Allied Publishers, Delhi 1984, (Revised and Enlarged as A New Handbook for Potters in 2005). Perlmutter, Dawn and Debra Koppman (eds.), Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art: Contemporary Cross-Cultural Perspectives, State University of New York Press, 1999. Phillips, Auction Catalogue, The Last Papers of Mahatma Gandhi, Sale No. 30,176, London, Thursday 14 November, 1996. Quintanilla, Sonya Rhie (ed.) Rhythms of India: The art of Nandalal Bose, San Diego Museum of Art, 2008. Sethi, Rajeev, ‘Towards a National Policy’, Seminar No. 553, September 2005. Sheikh, Gulammohammed and R. Sivakumar, Benodbehari Mukherjee: Life, Context, and Work, A Centenary Retrospective Exhibition, NGMA and Vadhera Art Gallery, 2006. Shukla, Sureshchandra, ‘Nationalist Educational Thought: Continuity and Change’, Economic and Political Weekly, July 19, 1997, pp. 1825– 1831. Shukla, Sureshchandra, ‘Nationalist Educational Thought: Continuity and Change’ in S. Bhattacharya (ed) The Contested Terrain: Perspectives on Education in India, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1998. Singh, Gurcharan, Pottery In India, Vikas Publishing House, Delhi 1979. Siva Kumar, R. K.G. Subramanyan: A Retrospective, NGMA & Brijbasi, Delhi, 2003. Siva Kumar, R. Santiniketan: the Making of a Contextual Modernism, Exhibition Catalogue, NGMA, New Delhi, 1997. Subramanyan, K.G. The Creative Circuit, Seagull, Calcutta, 1992. Subramanyan, K.G. The Living Tradition, Perspectives on Modern Indian Art, Seagull, Calcutta, 1987. Sykes, Marjorie, The Story of Nai Talim: fifty years of education at Sevagram, 1937–1987 : a record of reflections, Nai Talim Samiti, Sevagram, Wardha, 1988 (an online version, accessed 10 April 2010: http://home.iitk.ac.in/~amman/soc748/sykes_story_of_nai_talim. html). Wilcox, Tim (ed.) Shoji Hamada: Master Potter, Ditchling Museum, Sussex, 1998. Tagore, Abanindranath, Sadanga, or, The Six Limbs of Painting, Indian Society of Art, Calcutta, 1921. Tagore, Rabindranath, ‘My School’, in Personality, London, Macmillan, 1917/1933. repr. Visva Bharati Publication, n.d. Thapalyal, Ranjana, ‘The Culture of Making: Profile/Devi Prasad’, in Ceramic Review, issue no. 184, July/August 2000, pp. 40–41. Vajpeyi, Ananya, ‘Notes on Swaraj’, in Seminar, No. 601, Delhi, September 2009. de Waal, Edmund, Bernard Leach, Tate gallery Publishing, St Ives Artists, London, 1998. Yanagi, Soetsu, The Unknown Craftsman, A Japanese Insight into Beauty, (Adapted by Bernard Leach with a Foreword by Shoji Hamada), Kodansha International, Tokyo, New York and London, revised second edn. 1989. Illustration 386. Three pen and ink postcards of the Hills approximately 8 x 14 cm Santiniketan circa 1942-44 312      |      APPENDICES ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS        |      313 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Any attempt at forcing an artist who makes things with feeling, to discuss his private responses for the sake of bracketing them in a series of historical/art-historical ‘isms’ is irksome. Devibhai, despite his profound reluctance at being the subject of historical scrutiny, has been accepting of my invasion. Thanking him for it is too small a gesture, asking forgiveness is more appropriate. We have argued over and discussed much of what is in this book over a period of many years (since 1990, in fact). But far beyond the discussions, I have been privilege to many years of his making art. Much of my admiration and learning happened thus as an unconscious osmosis. I have tried to communicate that truth in these pages. this book was completed. Much sympathetic support has been drawn for this project from Professor Mridula Mukherjee, Drs Vagish Jha and Bhashyam Kasturi at the NMML which, I’m sure, was far beyond what other Fellows may have demanded. Thank you. His wife Bindu Prasad is the world’s greatest research assistant! A meticulous keeper of Devibhai’s spirit and his body of work, she has my most profound thanks. This large project would never have seen completion without her. My colleagues at the School of Arts and Aesthetics: Parul Dave Mukherji, Kavita Singh, Shukla Sawant and now Rakhee Balaram have been responsible for more than they are aware in creating a collegial intellectual environment that I have learnt much within. Udayan Prasad, keeper of Devi’s archive of photographs: Thank you. In his son Sunand Prasad I have grown to respect a sharply honed mind that has been my best intellectual critic. He has, above all, led me to have the confidence to ask the many questions that arose in my mind. I have incorporated his ideas, many unpublished, in my work here and I am deeply appreciative of this. Kristine Michael is, amongst India’s contemporary ceramic artists, one who has been most intimately connected with Devibhai’s studio and his students over the past fifteen years. She has herself authored several projects on the history of pottery in India. Her insights as a widely-travelled practitioner and teacher have been shared with me over many stimulating sessions in London and Delhi and they have greatly helped shape my ideas. It is with tremendous gratitude that I acknowledge her as I do Bob Overy and Krishna Kumar who made their texts for this book available at short notice despite the overwhelming demands on their time. A retrospective exhibition on Devi Prasad curated by Kristine Michael and Bindu Prasad was held at the Lalit Kala galleries in Delhi on the occasion of his 80th birthday in October 2001 (with support from the British Council and Art Heritage in Delhi and Cymroza Art Gallery in Mumbai). That exhibition was the first attempt to bring together his works as a potter, painter, photographer and perhaps most importantly, to try and showcase these against a backdrop of his work as a pacifist and activist. It forms the basis for this book, much more comprehensive in its scope and more complete in its historical analysis. I must thank my university, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), for granting me leave for the year to spend it at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) who awarded me a Fellowship for the year 2010–11 under the auspices of which the research for Ashok Vajpeyi, Chairman, Lalit Kala Akademi has supported this project wholeheartedly right from its inception. Dr Sudhakar Sharma, Secretary and Vinay Kumar, Deputy Secretary at Lalit Kala have been meticulous administrators, fully cognisant of the curatorial and sarkari intricacies in thinking through and making such a venture possible. I owe them all my thanks. Before I complete my list of people I would like to thank, I feel I must make special mention of Devibhai’s studio: a microcosmic environment of multiple art practices and varied people where I grew to gain faith in a sense of community, where flights of imagination, whimsy and excess always came comfortably back to a respectful centre. It was here that Devibhai created ‘a potter’s family’ and several of that family’s members have come to my help at different stages — Mamta Singhania, Rajneesh Dutta and Soni Dave among them. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Mamta and her husband Harsh for providing a financial grant that has allowed this book to be published. I was reintroduced many years ago at Devibhai’s studio to Inca Roy every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in a school uniform in camouflage, covered as she was in clay from head to toe! I could not have worked with a better friend for the book and exhibition’s graphic design. Radhika Bhalla, former student, now my assistant, has lent good cheer through the process of editorial corrections. And finally, I want to thank my brother Sukhad, not for his excellent photographs of all the artworks in this volume, but for being back and sharing. The artworks in this book have been almost entirely sourced from Devi and Bindu Prasad’s personal collection. A few pieces have been borrowed from the following: Anuradha Ravindranath, Anusha Lall, Ein & Ashok Lall, Jeet Seth, Kamlesh Lathey, Madhukar Khera, Mamta and Harshpati Singhania, Manisha Mukundan, Naman Ahuja, Nina and Indra Shah, Radhika Bharatram, Raj & Asha Kubba, Reena and Ravi Nath, Soni & Adit Dave, Sunand Prasad. Illustration 387. Fog in the Forest Himalayas circa 1955 314      |      APPENDICES AUTHORS        |      315 A  NOTE  ON  THE  AUTHORS AUTHOR NAMAN P. A HUJA is Associate Professor of Ancient Indian Art and Architecture at the School of Art and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi where his research and publications focus on Indian iconography, sculpture, temple architecture and Sultanate period painting. Previously he was a Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He has been Curator of Indian sculpture in the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, London. He was Lecturer of the MA programme on the Religious Fine and Decorative Arts of India at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, London University) from 1998 to 2000 and Tutor of the SOAS / Christie’s and latterly the British Museum’s Diploma in Indian Art. In 2010 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library to work on the Devi Prasad papers. CONTRIBUTORS PROF. KRISHNA KUMAR is one of India’s foremost educationists. He was Director of the National Council for Educational Research and Training from 2004 to 2010. He is the author of several books in English and Hindi, the most recent ones include Education and Social Change in South Asia, (jointly edited with Joachim Oesterheld), Battle for Peace (Penguin, 2007) and A Pedagogue’s Romance (Oxford, 2008). Professor Kumar also writes for children. KRISTINE MICHAEL is a practising ceramic artist with her works in international collections like Cartwright Hall Bradford Museum UK, The Clay Studio Philadelphia USA, Penland School of Craft, USA ,World Ceramic Centre, Icheon Korea, Essl Museum Berlin, among others. She has curated exhibitions of contemporary Indian ceramics as well as pioneer studio pottery of India. She has specialised in 19th century Indian art School pottery at the V&A Museum UK and has recently written and curated about this collection at the Albert Hall Museum Jaipur. BOB OVERY is a British anti-nuclear peace activist who was inspired by Gandhi as a young man and was awarded a PhD for his study of Gandhi as a political organiser. Also a professional town planner, Bob has spent many years as an emergency planning officer working for a local council in northern England. Now in semi-retirement, he continues to work as a consultant advising the British government on emergency planning. Illustration 388. Lovers Crayon sketch in a notebook 15 x 26 cm London 1970-72 Illustration 389. facing page Fetching Water Crayon on paper 40 x 28 cm London 1971 SUNAND PRASAD is a founding partner of Penoyre & Prasad LLP, a London-based architectural practice known for designing a diverse range of award winning buildings. He was the President of the Royal Institute of British Architects 2007–2009 and a founder member of the UK Government’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. Sunand’s theoretical work includes architecture and cultural diversity, the exploration of the value of design, North Indian urbanism and domestic architecture, the work of Le Corbusier. His published work also includes Changing Hospital Architecture and Transformations: The Architecture of Penoyre and Prasad. Sunand has taught and lectured in many schools of architecture in the UK and India and has championed sustainable action to counter climate change and is part of the London Mayor’s Architectural Advisory Panel. 316      |      APPENDICES INDEX        |      317 INDEX PEOPLE,  PLACES,  HISTORICAL  MOVEMENTS  AND  ORGANISATIONS 52 Godavari Apartments, Alaknanda, New Delhi 252 67 Sutherland Road, Edmonton, London 137, 247 Elmhirst, Leonard 90, 145, 230, 232 ffrench, John 6, 89, 98, 143, 160, 240 Leach, Bernard 31, 42, 68, 89, 90, 93, 95, 163, 230, 232, 247, 258, 281 Ambedkar, B.R. 121 Bernard Leach and (also see Leach, Bernard) 42, 281 Art Heritage Gallery, New Delhi 262 Arts and Crafts Movement 9, 13, 15, 19, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 47, 55, 281, 285, 286 Appasamy, Jaya 47 Aryanayakam, Ashadevi 113, 115, 258 Ashbee, Charles 37, 39 Galtung, Johann 137, 182 Gandhi, M.K. (Mahatma) 16, 24, 29, 31, 33, 49, 61, 89, 90, 95, 102, 103, 138, 143, 145, 180, 182, 230, 242, 252, 281, 292, 307, 308 Philosophy of 9, 13, 15, 19, 21, 25, 35, 39, 41, 45, 47, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59, 68, 70, 80, 113, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 123, 124, 128, 131, 133, 137, 140, 176, 179, 187, 225, 232, 240, 245, 258, 282, 285, 286, 299 Letter from 58, 60, 120 Hind Swaraj 41 Sarvodaya 41, 67, 68, 70 Gandhi Marg 133, 252 Golden Bridge Pottery, Pondicherry 252, 265 Great Exhibition, 1851 15, 35 Guha Thakurta, Tapati 35, 43 Gupta, Tapan 143 Madhukar 47, 225, 239 Mairet, Ethel (née Partridge) 42 Majumdar, Sharmishta 80 Mallik, Gurdial 43, 52, 103 Mandeer Gallery, London 159, 247 Manniche, Peter 59 Matisse, Henri 89 Meccano 29 Menon, Sadanand 16, 33 Michael, Kristine 15, 21, 33, 42, 225 Mirmira, S.K. 89, 93, 242 Morris, William 35, 37, 39, 281 Mukherjee, Benodebehari 29, 47, 49, 51, 80, 89, 240 Muste, A.J. 138 Havell, E.B. 13, 35, 37, 47, 226, 230 Hindustani Talimi Sangh 31, 67, 115, 117, 121, 245 Hussain, Zakir 103, 115, 116, 121, 123 Hutheesingh Visual Art Gallery, Ahmedabad 247 Narayan, Jay Prakash 176 National Institute of Design 16, 33, 252 Nayi Talim/Nai or Nayee Taleem 31, 47, 55, 67, 68, 80, 113, 115, 117, 120, 121, 131, 138, 176, 245, 258, 286, 299 Nayyar, Sushila 113 Neogi, Pritish 47 Niemoeller, Martin 137, 182, 185 Nivedita Jiten Kumar (née Paramanand) 47 Baez, Joan 138 Baij, Ramkinkar (Vaij, Ramkinkar or Ramkinker) 29, 49, 51, 103, 165, 170 Bhave, Vinoba (including Bhoodan or Gramdan) 29, 67, 68, 70, 80, 103, 113, 115, 116, 123, 242 Birdwood, Sir George 226 Black House 49 Bose, Nandalal (Master Moshai) 29, 31, 32, 33, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 68, 70, 93, 103, 120, 121, 128, 196, 232, 240, 285 Buber, Martin 252 Burns, Cecil 226 Cardew, Michael 232 Cartier Bresson, Henri 79 Cheena Bhavana 47 Cizek, Franz 128 Communitarianism 29, 45, 232, 252, 285, 286 Santiniketan and 42, 47, 131, 232 Sevagram and 89, 113, 131, 133, 242 Congress Sessions Faizpur (Tilak Nagar) 121 Haripura 121 Jaipur 67, 68, 104, 308 Lucknow 68 Conscientious Objection / Objectors 179, 180, 182, 199, 305 Coomaraswamy, A.K. 9, 13, 15, 19, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 55, 56, 58, 60, 79, 90, 196, 232, 281, 282 Craftsman Potters Association (CPA) 159 Cymroza Art Gallery, Mumbai 262 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai 262 Jena, Kalindi 93, 113, 242, 245, 265 Dolci, Danilo 138, 179 Kala Bhavan (Sevagram) 45, 67, 68, 80, 90, 93, 123, 240, 242, 245, 246 Kala Bhavana (Santiniketan) 29, 43, 47, 165, 170, 232 Kaplan, Wendy 13 Karsh, Yousuf 79 Khan, Abdul Ghaffar Khan 102, 103 Khan, Ustad Faiyaz 145 Khan, Ustad Sharafat Husain 145 King Jr., Martin Luther 137, 182 Kipling, Lockwood 226 Kirti Mandir, Baroda 47 Kowshik, Dinkar 33, 43, 47 Kumar, Brijendra 29, 80 Kumar, Krishna 121, 123 Kunstzalle, Oirschott, Holland 247 Eames, Charles & Ray 16 Lalit Kala Gallery, Delhi 67, 247 Okakura Tenshin/Kazuko Okakura Tenshin 43 Old Bull Gallery, London 159, 247 Overy, Bob 7, 176 Patel, Dashrath 16, 33 Patwardhan, Nirmala 247 Prasad, Bindu (née Parikh) 145, 153, 165, 247, 252, 258 Prasad, Janaki (née Varier) 67, 103, 113, 137, 138, 143, 258, 294 Prasad, Sunand 40, 56, 59, 60, 61, 67, 70, 127, 138, 140, 143, 246 Quit India Movement 29, 32, 89, 184, 242 Rajghat 61, 106, 310 Ramkali Ramanand/Bajaj 29, 255 Ruskin, John 37, 39, 41, 58 Santiniketan, extensively referred to throughout text 9, 13, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 25, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 61, 68, 79, 80, 93, 98, 103, 104, 126, 137, 138, 143, 145, 148, 165, 170, 225, 232, 240, 247, 252, 255, 285, 291, 292, 307, 308 Sarvodaya Exhibition, see Congress Sessions: Jaipur Satyagraha, also see Gandhi, Philosophy of 52, 113, 133, 258, 265, 299 Sen, Prabhas 33, 47 Sethi, Rajeev 16 Sevagram, extensively referred to throughout text, including an entire chapter 67–133, and further, 9, 13, 15, 16, 19, 29, 31, 35, 47, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59, 137, 138, 140, 143, 160, 176, 179, 196, 225, 230, 240, 242, 245, 246, 252, 255, 291, 296, 308, 320 Shah, Haku 33, 93, 240, 246 Shinners Bridge 232 Shyamali 49 Singh, Gurcharan 31, 33 Sister Nivedita 13 Smythe, Tony 138 South Kensington Museum 226, 230 Sriniketan (Sri Niketan) 32, 45, 165, 225, 232, 240 St. Exépury, Antoine de 59 Straight, Dorothy 232 Subramanyan, K.G. 33, 47, 49 Svavalamban 35, 68, 70, 113, 138, 246 Swadeshi 15, 19, 33, 35, 39, 41, 43 Swaraj 41, 52 Sykes, Marjorie 113, 143, 145 Tagore, Rabindranath (Gurudev) 9, 13, 19, 29, 31, 32, 33, 37, 41, 42, 43, 45, 47, 49, 52, 55, 58, 80, 90, 95, 103, 104, 117, 120, 123, 124, 128, 131, 143, 145, 225, 230, 232, 240, 247, 281, 285, 291, 292 Tagoreans 143 Tennyson, Margot 143, 145 Terry, George 226 Thich Nhat Hanh 137, 182 War Resisters’ International, occurs widely throughout text, and in the subject of an entire chapter 135–221, and further, 93, 123, 129, 245 Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 55 Wonderland Pottery 226 Yanagi, Soetsu 42, 226, 230, 281 318      |      APPENDICES SELECT  WRITINGS  OF  DEVI  PRASAD    |      319 Illustration 390. Lidded Jar Stoneware H 17 cm Diam. 16.75 cm London 1974 Stamped ‘dp’ on wall Illustration 391. Jug Copper, red and green glaze stoneware H 20.7 cm Delhi 2000 Signature in hindi on the underside Illustration 392. Untitled Pen and ink on paper London circa 1968-72 (another preparatory sketch for this is amongst Devi’s WRI notebooks) Illustration 393. facing page Meditation Brushwork on paper 23 x 30.5 cm Sevagram Undated Illustration 394. next page A mountain and a lake Oil on board 24.5 x 17 cm London 1971