[Reader-list] RIP Dashrath Patel

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

RIP Dashrath Patel - a moving tribute by Sadanand Menon

best.

Shuddha
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DASHRATH PATEL – 1927-2010
VISUAL THINKER WHOM THE NATION FAILED
By Sadanand Menon

On the morning of December 1, Dashrath Patel sat on his chair by the  
window in his home, gripped his thick-nib bamboo pen, dipped it first  
into the black inkpot and then into the red, placed the tip on the  
open page of his notebook and let the play of light guide his wrist.  
There was a surge of flowing lines. He had whipped up a whirlwind.

He kept his bamboo pen aside and gently picked up the long, sturdy  
pea-hen feather I had found for him, a few days earlier, in the  
campus of the Sarabhai Foundation in Ahmedabad. He had sliced the tip  
to a thin point and was using it as his quill. Once again he mixed  
the inks and let the feather give wings to his imagination. Three  
more pages of abstract forms flew out from within the infinite  
resource of fantasy he was blessed with.

He could summon forms at will. A lifetime of filling pages and  
notebooks with a mind-boggling abundance of lines, and he still felt  
he was nowhere near to being satisfied. Literally hundreds of  
notebooks lovingly inscribed with this unceasing quest for form. When  
he was not doing anything else, Dashrath was drawing. His hands would  
quiver if he had to sign a cheque. But when he was drawing it was  
like a musician catching his shruti. The creator and his creation  
aligned on the same axis.

It always reminded me of the story attributed to Harindranath  
Chattopadhyaya, one of Dashrath’s early mentors while he was a  
student at the Madras College of Art. A shaagird of Ustad Abdul Karim  
Khan, founder of the Kirana Gharana, Harinda was puzzled that every  
single morning Ustad devoted exclusively to practicing the ‘ni’ note.  
This was his daily ritual. One day Harinda asked him, “Ustad, you are  
known as the ‘samrat of nishad’; yet you spend so much time  
practicing only that every day?” Abdul Karim Khan put his tanpura  
aside and said, “Beta, zindagi bhar main is nishad ko maanjta raha  
hoon, maanjta raha hoon; par kambakht haath hi nahin lagti’. [All my  
life I’ve been polishing and polishing this nishad; but the damn  
thing still eludes me].

Dashrath’s daily journey with the line drawing too was his own search  
for the elusive. But that morning on December 1, after doing seven  
drawings, he quietly succumbed to the elusive and became part of the  
light that so fascinated him all his life. It was his last flirtation  
with light. A monumental creative spirit had departed.
In the space of a fortnight, India had lost two unique, yet  
fraternal, souls. We had hardly recovered from the passing away, on  
November 14, of L.C. Jain, than his friend Dashrath too followed.  
Both lucid thinkers with original, non-pedantic, non-formal ideas on  
national culture and the need to harness the skills and capacities of  
ordinary people in creative social organization. Both brought clarity  
of thought to issues, often startling in their simplicity and effect.  
Both had walked out of doors originally opened by Gandhiji, but  
carried no bags or standard wares to sell. Visionaries in short, whom  
the nation largely betrayed. Ultimately, India failed both the  
economist-philosopher L.C. Jain and the designer-philosopher Dashrath  
Patel.
L.C. was part of the limited brigade of economists who practiced  
economics ‘as if people mattered’. After a long innings working with  
traditional economic sectors like rural handicrafts and handlooms  
when, in the late 1980s, he was drafted into the Planning Commission,  
he suddenly realized the mammoth exercise in chicanery that the  
planning process had deteriorated into. Deputed to sit on the State  
Planning Board in Tamilnadu, I remember how his patience was tested  
once by the Board visibly being hijacked by industrial lobbies. He  
delivered a thundering rebuttal and before anyone could get him to  
endorse any proposal he ducked and spent some quality time with  
Chandralekha and me. L.C. has written: “Fifty years after  
independence, there is not a single village out of 350,000 villages  
which is self- governing. Is it surprising we still have 300 million  
people who are poverty-stricken and as many who are ignorant –  
deprived of literacy; and there are starvation deaths in villages  
alongside with buffer-stocks of 60 million tonnes?”
Dashrath too was like one of those innocent, wide-eyed heroes of post- 
Independence Indian cinema, bursting wih idealism and faith in the  
capacity of the artist to transform his society. Gifted with a  
cornucopia of diverse skills and talents, he believed that the  
nascent industry of young India would be automatically on the look- 
out for an indigenous Indian design. Already a well known painter,  
ceramist and photographer, he aligned himself with the ‘national’  
design project without a second thought, as the National Institute of  
Design was set up in 1961 and started its professional design  
practice and pedagogy in 1963. After two decades of training a  
generation of designers and design teachers and having interacted  
closely with Indian industry, Dashrath would be heard saying  
exasperatedly: “The Indian industrial class lacks both dignity and  
courage. They are just sons of merchants, conservative to the core.  
Their sole interest is gathering profit without investing in the  
future of the industry in product, process or human development.” It  
is the kind of scathing critique of the industrial class I have not  
heard even Marxist critics make.

Dashrath’s politics, as his art, was intuitive and visual. He could  
‘see’ that the Indian bourgeoisie had no interest in sinking any  
money into design which, for him, represented optimization of scarce  
resources. His story of how at NID they developed the first  
differential fan in the 1960s and took it to ‘Usha’, which turned it  
down, has not been publicly repeated often enough. For him, this  
betrayal by captains of industry was unpardonable. He was unsparing  
in his critique of the Indian capitalist’s lust for ‘joint-ventures’  
in which they had ‘nothing to lose’. They just had to buy some  
discarded, obsolescent blueprint from the West, set up a sweat-shop  
and rake in the profits. He would describe the puffed-up ambitions of  
Indian industrialists as ‘dressing up a tractor in a dinner jacket’.
In later years, Dashrath also developed a significant critique of  
‘styling’ over ‘design’. He used to say that while, generally, in the  
design process the emphasis has to be on public 'need', its economic  
capacity, effective deliverance, infrastructural sustenance and  
flexible production methods, designers had failed to comprehend this.  
In a magazine interview earlier this year, he said, “Due to the open  
market strategy followed since 1991, India experienced the incredible  
effect of globalization and the design arena was further degraded.  
Fresh design graduates misplaced their priorities and emphasized  
merely 'product styling' and the 'look' – and this trend continues.  
Design is not for styling; it is to enhance the function". Many of  
his aphoristic sayings and constant concerns are poignantly captured  
in the hour-long documentary, ‘In the Realm of the Visual’, by Iffat  
Fatima made for the MCRC, Jamia-Milia, during Dashrath’s Fifty years  
‘Retrospective Exhibition’ in Delhi, in 1998.

He also used to chuckle loudly at the comical fall-out of  
globalization in our context. His favourite example was the new-in- 
the-market sedan cars. He used to say, “Most of these sedans are  
designed in the West as owner-driven vehicles. So the driver’s seat  
is the best designed, with ergonomic detailing and precision, and is  
the most comfortable part of the car. The back seat is for dumping  
the grocery and kids. But when this car comes to India and is sold  
for Rs.15 – 20 lakhs, the vanity of the owner does not permit him to  
drive it himself. So his poorly-paid driver sits in the most  
comfortable seat, while the millionaire himself sits in the dickey.”
While Dashrath moved all his life from one creative discipline to the  
other with the excitement of a child finding a new toy, he also  
resisted slipping into sedentary celebrityhood. While at NID, one-by- 
one, he had executed some of the most prestigious national and  
international projects of the 1960s and ‘70s. Nehru Exhibition, Tokyo  
Fair, Osaka Fair, Montreal Fair, New York Fair, Gandhi Centenary  
Exhibition, Agri-Expo – he did it all. For each of them, with  
unhesitating back-up from NID founders Gautam and Gira Sarabhai, he  
worked with a new top-of-the-block consultant in design, photography,  
architecture, display techniques, graphics and stadium-scale  
exhibitions – enhancing his own learning in the process.
He travelled the length and breadth of India three times during this  
period carrying his heavy camera bag slung from his shoulder,  
photographing each detail of daily life, custom, ritual and hand-made  
processes in every region. As he used to say gleefully, he returned  
to the same region, village and person every ten years and documented  
them afresh, studying and noting all the changes that had taken place  
in the interim. He was quick to spot the changes in the wares  
displayed in Indian village markets indicating the changes in economy  
and the entry of, first nylons and then plastics in rural and tribal  
lifestyles. With this vast data-bank of visual material, he was to  
literally ‘construct’ the image of India for exhibition purposes. It  
was an India illuminated with the little joys and hopes and  
festivities of thousands of its ordinary people.

But one major negative experience in 1980 at NID made him leave the  
institution, on the heels of being conferred the first Padma Shri for  
Design and Design Education in India. It is interesting that the next  
decade saw him travel two entirely different trajectories. On the one  
hand, almost single-handedly, without the benefit of NID and without  
even a proper design studio, plagued by failing eyesight, he executed  
two of the most ambitious spectacles of the period – the inaugural  
ceremonies of the Festivals of India in France and later, in the USSR  
– both massive in scale and in the human resources they mobilized.  
The other was the dramatic switch he made to working within small,  
negligible economies, for need-based programmes with NGOs and  
activists, developing stunningly simple methods of communication  
through screen-printing and field-darkrooms.
Egged on by the dynamic activist Vikasbhai, it was to lead him to set  
up camp at the Saghan Khshetra Vikas Samiti, the Gandhian integrated  
rural development project in Sewapuri, near Varanasi. It was a ten- 
year period when he virtually turned the place around, getting each  
of their workshops in textile, carpentry, leather and ceramics to  
turn out products no less sophisticated in form and finish than what  
was being made in NID. It instantly changed the profile of the  
subsistence economy of the region. He also set up a Rural Design  
School there for the children of artisans and anyone else willing to  
apprentice with him.

This was perhaps, his most resounding critique of the Indian elite  
design project – that after twenty years at its helm, he chose to  
create not one more ‘national’ school or ‘urban’ design school, but  
that he chose to link the otherwise pompous idea of design in India  
to a sustainable economy of needs and resources. It was this ‘return’  
to basics which prompted his friend L.C. Jain to comment, “If  
Gandhiji were alive today, he would have been proud”.

Dashrath’s spontaneous austerity was as genuine as his immense  
delight in high-end gadgetry. Almost 75, he took to digital  
photography and to the Mac Notebook like a duck to water. He  
possessed, along with an old (and still working) Braun spool  
recorder, a state-of-the-art Sony digital recorder. He played with  
some of the most fascinating collection of pens and, till almost the  
last day, was happy speaking into a smart little digital voice  
recorder-cum-pendrive. And yet, he never moved away from his khadi  
shirt or kurta and, in the last decade of his life was always seen  
wearing a starched South-Indian handloom veshti – even when he drove  
his second-hand Mercedes.

Madras/Chennai had a special place in his life and heart. For one,  
there was his lifelong friendship with the equally versatile and  
diversely creative Chandralekha, who had made Chennai her home, which  
yielded some feisty collaborations – ‘The World is my Family’  
exhibition for the Gandhi Centenary Year; ‘Stree - Women of India’  
exhibition for the Festival of India, USSR; the ‘Pudu-Paavu’  
exhibition of South Indian sarees, were all projects executed with  
great elan. There were also the masterly concepts for the Bronze  
Gallery, Madras Museum and the Art & Science Pavilion for the  
‘Discovery of India’ exhibition for the Nehru Centre, Mumbai, which  
did not get actualized. Together, they did some striking photo- 
essays, including published works on the vessels of India, ‘Hasta- 
Mudras’ and the recently released ‘Why the Sky is Blue’, a collection  
of photographs and sentences from Sir C.V. Raman’s famous lecture.  
Dashrath has documented all of Chandra’s dance work from ‘Navagraha’  
through to ‘Sharira’, besides having created stage backdrops for  
‘Lilavati’, ‘Yantra’ and ‘Mahakal’. But what he enjoyed doing most  
was ironing her exquisite collection of sarees or fixing taps and  
plug points in the house.

Beyond this too, Dashrath has left his mark on the city. He was the  
first assistant to his teacher Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury in the  
execution of the two iconic sculptures along the Marina Beach – the  
‘Triumph of Labour’ and the Gandhi statue. For these Dashrath created  
the plaster-of-Paris macquets in various shapes and sizes before the  
famous bronzes were eventually cast. Fifty years later, he was  
thrilled to be invited to create a sculpture at the junction along  
the IT corridor, near Tidel Park, on the theme of fire. The 35’ tall  
coloured plumes in reinforced concrete will remain his visible  
signature on the city.

Just a few weeks earlier, Dashrath had celebrated his 83rd birthday  
with an evening’s outing for a round of ice creams. Since his cardiac  
surgery last October, he had lost his appetite and had dropped over  
35 kilos. He had turned uncomfortably frail. But ice cream was a  
magic word to get his excitement level up. The other adrenalin was  
the smell of some ‘new’ work. The evening before he passed away, when  
I called him, he sounded very feeble and it was clear there was not  
much time. To perk him up, I told him about my new appointment on the  
Apex Committee of the National Museum. Immediately his voice  
stabilized and he said, “They have ruined the museums. Suggest some  
good ideas to them and I will join you. We will do that together”.

This was quintessential Dashrath – mercurially in the present; and  
looking ahead. Whenever the ‘nation’ seemed to goof, he was there  
offering help, a handyman, a visual thinker, a man of his times.  
Suddenly, the dappled light seems profligate.
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Sadanand Menon learnt and worked with Dashrath Patel for 35 years. In  
1998, he curated ‘In the Realm of the Visual’, Dashrath’s 50 years  
‘Retrospective Exhibition’ in painting, ceramics, design and  
photography for the NGMA, Delhi. This was re-mounted in 1999 for  
NGMA, Mumbai.

The Dashrath Patel Museum in Alibagh, off Mumbai, houses under one  
roof his collected works. Created with the help of his designer  
friend Pinakin Patel, it is open on weekends.



Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The Sarai Programme at CSDS
Raqs Media Collective
shuddha at sarai.net
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net