Postindustrialism and the Long Arts And Crafts Movement: between Britain, India, and the United States Of America

Abstract

Taking two journeys as its fulcrum, this essay traces how Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) and his wife Ethel Mairet’s (1872–1952) photographs and studies of craft in India and Ceylon in the 1900s relate to Charles and Ray Eames’ India Report (1958), a photographic research journey through craft communities of India that sought to find form, function, and “Indianness” in a bid to exemplify the future of design in India in the 1950s. Unpacking the different contexts of the two moments, the essay analyses how international interventions on the “Indianness” of Indian design were forged in early and mid-twentieth-century India, particularly within what it posits as the “Long Arts and Crafts Movement” between Great Britain, India, and the United States of America. If the British Arts and Crafts Movement was a combination of progressive and conservative tendencies, this essay investigates how the vexed design historical continuum between the British Empire and the Cold War, Victorian socialism, Indian nationalism, and American development-oriented aid programmes played out in the space of the Indian village. Following the intellectual and design historical trajectories of “post-industrialism” (a term that Coomaraswamy introduced in 1914 when thinking about future anti-industrial societies) to think through the complex and moving parts of the Long Arts and Crafts Movement, the essay pursues the paradoxical nature of the term as it is mobilised in the Eameses’ mid-century America and routed back into the Indian village through American technocrats.

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