Design in India: The Experience of Transition

Abstract

C G Road is Ahmedabad's pride: a new shopping boulevard that turns its back on the crowded bazaars of this medieval city. Steel and glass store fronts, coffee shops, Pizza Hut, the latest in home entertainment, sportswear, fashion and ethnic chic?international brand names from India and overseas, flashing in neon to attract Ahmedabad's affluent youth to a place that demon strates the power of what is emerging as the largest consumer market in the world. It wasn't always this way. When I arrived in Ahmedabad in 1975, a happening meant sampling the street life of Manek Chowk, the heart of Ahmedabad's tradition as India's textile capital, around which revolved a rich pattern of community living and craft activity. It was in these lanes and marketplaces that Ahmedabad's craft and merchant guilds flourished for generations, giving the city a reputation that rivaled sixteenth century London. Seven bridges span the dry riverbed of the Sabarmati River, which separates Manek Chowk and old Ahmedabad from C G Road and the high-rise sprawl of the new city. The traffic hurling back and forth?handcarts and camel carts, and an occasional elephant, to compete with the city's passion for the newest in two-, three-, and four-wheeled speeders?is symbolic of India's passage to and from modernity, and its search for a confident identity that can link five thousand years of history with a future in which change is the only certainty. It is from this experience of transition that design in India takes its meaning. Mahatma Gandhi, arriving in India from South Africa almost a century ago, established his ashram retreat along the banks of the Sabarmati. His with truth began in Ahmedabad, experiments intended to bring freedom to his subjugated people and to build a society that could wipe every tear from every eye. Self-reliant systems of design and production were inherent in Gandhi's mission. They were directed at serving basic needs through a demonstration of social justice and a respect for nature's balance. Symbolic of this quest was Gandhi's campaign for the boycott of British textiles, and for the home production of handspun, handwoven khadi, the livery of freedom which was to evolve into a handloom revolution that is in itself India's great est achievement in contemporary design. A few kilometers down the riverside from Gandhi Ashram is the campus of the National Institute of Design. Established here some forty years ago, the NID