Visualizing Design and its Values in Postcolonial India

Visualizing Design and its Values in Postcolonial India
Vishal Khandelwal, Harvard University

Wednesday 26 November, 3pm
Memorial Room, The Queen's College, Oxford

Right from its foundation in 1961, the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India, attempted to reorient art and design theory and practice away from the legacy of colonial-era arts pedagogies, and towards internationally resonant ideas borrowed from academies such as the German Bauhaus and Ulm School of Design. New product design methods were joined by crafts documentation endeavours of the kind that continue to be undertaken by faculty and students at the school even today. This talk will consider one such crafts documentary and photography-based project, titled Mata ni Pachedi: A Book on the Temple Cloth of the Mother Goddess (co-produced by Joan Erikson, Dashrath Patel, and Haku Shah et al, and published by the NID in 1968) to explore its visual coordinates and pedagogical value within the context of the NID and the modernization of textile production in contemporary Ahmedabad. As I will argue, the Mata ni Pachedi photographs, although typical of documentary practices at the NID and beyond, are best examined in the context of photographic and exhibitionary practices that deviated from state-endorsed narratives about the role of craft and people in society. Linking visual analysis and archival reconstruction to pedagogical concerns and their attendant values, this research offers fresh perspectives on design practice in postcolonial India that trouble the traditional statist and industrialist assumptions of Indian design of the time.

Following his talk, Dr Khandelwal will be in discussion with Dr Diva Gujral (Ruskin School of Art). Refreshments will be provided. RSVP mandatory.


Vishal Khandelwal is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. He specialises in modern and contemporary architecture, design, art, and visual culture with a focus on South Asia.

Diva Gujral is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and Extraordinary Junior Research Fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford. Her research focuses on Indian lens-based media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in conversation with the country’s changing political landscape.