Join us for a talk by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Director and Professor in History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.

Moderated by Atreyee Gupta, Assistant Professor of South Asian Art, Department of History of Art, UC Berkeley.

Sponsored by Institute for South Asia Studies, Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies, Department of History of Art Stoddard Lecture Series, South Asia Art Initiative.

The event is FREE and OPEN to the public.

For DIRECTIONS to the Institute please enter “Institute for South Asia Studies” in your google maps or click this GOOGLE MAPS LINK.

Abstract
Positioning itself in the early decades of the 20th century in Bengal, the lecture will track a critical transition in the vocation of ‘design’ in colonial India from the realm of handicrafts and the artisanal arts to a new social space of middle class training and practice. It will reflect on the way the skills of designing comes to occupy a new median space between those of ‘fine arts’ and ‘crafts’ within the structures of art pedagogy, and the way a new figure of the professional designer emerges in these years in the early guise of the commercial artist. With a focus on the new “Art in Industry” movement in Calcutta of the 1940s, that served as the country’s pioneering corporate forum for the promotion of commercial design, the lecture will look back at two main trends – (i) the discursive shift from the 19th century category of the “industrial/decorative arts” that dominated the colonial Indian art administration to the new livelihoods of modern graphic and commercial art that are nurtured by the Government School of Art, Calcutta during the 1920s and 30s (ii) the negotiations between the traditional aesthetics of the ‘ornamental’ and the new aesthetics of the ‘modern’ that shapes the art of design and advertising in mid 20th century Bengal.

Speaker Bio
Tapati Guha-Thakurta is Professor in History and was the Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) from 2012 to 2017. Her two main books are The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Columbia University Press, and Permanent Black, 2004). She is also the author of several exhibition monographs – among them, Visual Worlds of Modern Bengal: An introduction to the documentation archive of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (Seagull, Kolkata, 2002), The Aesthetics of the Popular Print: Lithographs and Oleographs from 19th and 20th Century India (Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata, 2006), The City in the Archive: Calcutta’s Visual Histories (Calcutta: CSSSC, 2011). She has co-edited two anthologies of essays – Theorising the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee (Delhi: OUP, 2011) and New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices (Delhi: OUP, 2013). Her latest book is titled, In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (Delhi: Primus Books, 2015).

Event made possible with the support of the Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies

Event Contact: isas@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3608