Let Me Show you how it's done.
Yashas Shetty
Introduction
This paper outlines the results of my field notes and interviews conducted at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India. I collected these field notes and interviews over the course of 8 weeks.Srishti Manipal Institute is a small, private art and design college in Bangalore, India. The college bases its pedagogical practice on ‘radical’ and ‘experimental’ ideas. Students are encouraged to take classes across disciplines, grading is based on critiques and essays and it prides itself on encouraging a “community of learners”. It’s official website states that it develops “creative competencies” in students and that it has developed a “distinct multi-dimensional approach to capability development” (About Us | Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, n.d.)
The thesis that I developed over the course of three weeks and one that emerged inductively out of my interviews was this – Does the Indian institution and practice of caste dominate an elite art institution as well? And if it does so - how does this influence the production of art and design artifacts in an art school? Many modern institutions in India pride themselves on being open, free of hierarchies and as platforms of modern, liberal philosophies borrowed both from the West and India. How do these modern views and sensibilities co-exist or clash with the Indian reality of caste hierarchies? My field site within the art school was a campus that houses studios and workshops. These are photography studio’s, for textile, wood, metal workshops, prototyping and electronics workshops. These are essentially spaces where the division of labor in art, craft and design are more stark than spaces where intellectual labor – critical theory, art history or design theory are more dominant. Theorizing about art and design, scholarly debates and conferences happen in other campuses which I did not use as a field site.
Methods
Over the course of six weeks, I used a combination of participant observation and interviews. I conducted 8 interviews. The interviews ranged from over 40 minutes to 2 hours. I divided the field site into concentric circles – with the outer ring of the circle representing the security guards that guard the campus to the inner circle representing the management of the art school including its board of directors and trustees who may influence how the art school is run or what may be taught there. Faculty and Students would be somewhere in the middle of my imaginary circles. My interviews ranged from the security guards to visiting American Fulbright scholars. Except in rare cases, where I would record with a phone, most of the interviews were documented with a notebook. I would conduct interviews during breaks in my own work schedule – which involves teaching, mentoring and administration at the art school. Although I had the tiny seed or germ of a hypothesis of what I wanted to study – caste, a full-fledged hypothesis emerged only later out of these interviews at the field site. My status as an Insider in the art school, gave me access to places, people and data that outsiders might not have. The flipside of this insider status are traces of unconscious or conscious biases, prejudices and political views that I might have had prior to my ethnographic study. Some of these political views also play a part in this study. As a relatively upper caste Indian, I have had to rarely face discrimination at work based on caste. However, the recent dominance of the B.J.P Government and its corresponding philosophies and policies have brought caste dynamics once again to the forefront of social discourse in India. (Majumdar, 2022)
These recent political shifts along with activism and scholarship by both Dalit and upper caste intellectuals and activists have bought the caste debate out to the fore of intellectual discourse. For example, recent scholarships and debates in Carnatic music (Krishna 2018), have brought out the subtle and not so subtle ways in which caste operates in music that is termed ‘classical’. Many such debates were useful in theoretically grounding my interviews and the subsequent questions and themes that emerged after coding the interviews. Sociologists in India, America and Europe have commented on both caste, institutions and art. These were extensively referenced as well. Information about the “vision”, “philosophy” and “the conceptual framework” of the art school, data about its pedagogy and objectives were collected from academic papers and with interviews with its founders and faculty that are posted in online forums and journals. Talking about caste is a sensitive issue. There are significant issues with ethics of interviewing and conducting ethnography based on caste. In my interviews, I would talk about caste only when the subject brought it up or I felt I could discuss it comfortably with the interviewee. My own status as an insider and as an Indian made me infer someone’s caste or religion based on their first names and last names. As a participant observer, I used this judgment when I had to use caste as an inference point. I have also changed the names of my interviewees.
Themes
The four major themes that emerged from my interviews and observations were caste, art and its related disciplines including design, pedagogy and politics. How do existing social hierarchies influence the production and consumption of art and design artifacts in India? What sort of knowledge is transmitted based on these biases? How does this fit in with larger political notions and discourse on caste? Each of these themes intersect with each other and caste exerts its influence on the operation of the rest of my themes and subthemes. The fact that caste dominates social life in India is not a startlingly new or radical concept but how it exerts its influence in institutions that have a stated radical opposition to caste is far more interesting. In that sense, the art school resembles, the entire institution of the nation state of India which has also professed a ‘war on caste discrimination’.
The story of caste in Indian Anthropology and Sociology
The story of caste and its history is complex. Although Its history is contested, its pervasive influence on Indian social life is not. Caste influences every aspect of one’s life from when you are born to one’s narrative beyond the grave. Even crematoriums and a decent place to be buried restricted beyond the reach of the lower caste. (Murugan, 2021)
The story of caste, its dynamics, ways of operation and its history is beyond the scope of this paper. I will, however, use the works of two prominent Indian sociologists – M.N Srinivas and his student Andre Beteille to outline the study of caste in Indian Anthropology and Sociology. Due to the influence of British Anthropologists, the focus among Indian anthropologists’ pre-independence was on tribe rather than caste, and those who had a wider interest in public affairs were interested not in caste but in class. (Béteille, 2012). Often using a Marxist lens to study social hierarchies, Indian anthropologists gradually turned their attention from tribal studies to village studies. Intensive field work in the Indian village led them to recognise the continuing presence and dominance of caste. These new field studies turned led to Indian anthropologists eventually study relations between caste and politics. (Béteille, 2012).
The earliest work of Indian Sociology, “The Remembered Village” documents an Indian Village. Caste dominates the village with the upper caste handling or dominating power in a village through their roles as land owners or people with positions of power that rituals conferred to them. The Remembered Village, is a sociological tract of a village near Mysore in the South Indian state of Karnataka written from memory. This village is in the same state as my art school. Srinivas spent eleven months here in 1948 and continued to visit until 1964. In the late 1960s all three copies of the author’s research notes were destroyed in an office fire in Stanford and, over the next decade, he worked to reconstruct the village from burned fragments and recollections. On its first publication in 1978 the book was celebrated as a modern classic. The book was perhaps the first to document everyday caste relations. Srinivas concluded through his field studies that caste relations are fluid and dynamic, just as they are carefully regulated and circumscribed. The book is considered a foundational and important text in the sociology of India. (Cross 2013)
Andre Beteiille, a student of M. N Srinivas continued the tradition of examining caste dynamics through field work by exploring a village in South India near Tanjore as his field site. His “Caste, Class and Power” (1965) book examines social stratification. The traditional distribution of power amongst the village hierarchies depended on land ownership and ritual ownership. Although, democratic political structures began making dents in these traditional outposts of power, his conclusions are the same - that there is a power dynamic in the village that is sometimes fluid but oftentimes rigid.
The waxing and waning of caste in modern India.
In urban India, the compulsions of modernity make some of the traditional mechanisms of caste difficult to maintain. For example, secular education and professional employment make inter-dining among members of different castes almost inevitable. (Béteille 2012)
In the college cafeteria or the office lunch room, segregation according to caste is now almost impossible. No matter what one's private sentiments may be, to insist on segregation at meals in such a context would invite ridicule today although it might have seemed the most obvious thing to do a 100 years ago (Béteille 2012)
At Srishti, the receptionist, SP told me this story. Before she joined Srishti, she was working as an administrator at an experimental school for the urban poor. This school was also run by the same trust that runs Srishti. On some mornings, while she was travelling in her school bus, the students would sometimes throw up on her and she would have to clean up after them. SP is a high caste Brahmin from a lineage of Brahmin musicians from Tanjore, Tamil Nadu. Confronted with incidents such as this and having to share meals with these students (something that she had never done before), she had to re-evaluate her caste based restrictions and identity. Yet, separation, if not segregation during meals has not ceased to exist. An officer will not sit and eat with his peon even if the two are of the same caste whereas he might eat in the company of another officer of similar rank but of a different caste. (Béteille 2012)
Another Faculty member at Srishti, Mr. RG was surprised when an administrative officer who was accompanying him on his first job interview for a faculty position at Srishti, stooped down to pick up some dirt from the floor. Mr. RG had never encountered such an extraordinary situation in an institution before. No administrative officer would clean the floor. A janitor, presumably from a lower caste would be summoned to do this job. This act of spontaneous, improvised tidying led Mr. RG to conclude that Srishti might be a very special, radical institution.
Higher education and professional employment and access to the two were meant to speed up development and modernisation. Old practices, habits and attitudes have shown greater resilience than was expected. For example, there is tremendous opposition to the idea of “reservations” in higher education and government jobs. Reservations are a form of affirmative action that are meant to give equal opportunities to those who have been traditionally discriminated against. The often vocal, violent protests and demonstrations against reservations are usually carried out by upper-caste students and their supporters.
Although India is a very large country where few things disappear altogether, Globalisation and the demands of modernity have caused some cracks to appear. For example, with regards to rural India, Ethnographic studies of villages from all parts of the country indicate a general relaxation of the restrictions on inter-dining. One of the best among these is the study of a village in central India by Adrian C Mayer which he kept under observation through repeated visits between 1954 and 1992. Mayer noted that while the old rules of commensality still remained, their observance by men as well as women had become more relaxed. He assigned some significance to increased travel outside the village and to the emergence of eating places along the roadside outside the village (Mayer 1996) (Béteille 2012)
Caste, Labour and Craft
One of the unique features of caste is its association with division of labour. Crafts and services in India grew within this division of labour. There is a close association between each specialised occupation and associated caste. Every village boasted a number of crafts and every member of a community of craftsmen and woman are each associated with a particular caste. A village was expected to be self-sufficient with each village hosting a full complement of crafts and services along with the associated castes. (Bose 1975)
The Art and Design Education Institution in India and at Srishti
Since caste, craft and division of labor are so closely related, it should come as no surprise that the discipline of design and design institutions should also deal or grapple with caste dynamics. The design institute in India was set up with the explicit notion of looking at how Indian craft could compete with western industrial imports. The National Institute of Design which was set up in 1966 had a mandate of confronting “the mammoth task of nation building, of balancing age-old traditions with modern technology and ideas. The Modern Movement, the philosophy of Machine Aesthetics, and revolutionary experimentation in the arts, architecture and design (History of NID, n.d.)
The traditional craftsman, who dominated India’s design and art landscapes could not compete with the dreams of industrialization. On the other hand, they could not be cast off because they produced artifacts that had sentimental and aesthetic value – a value that transcended mere market value. They also constituted the bulk of ‘pre-industrial labor’.
Design education, and to large extent, art education in India had to confront its traditional crafts, art practices and aesthetic traditions. Design schools then became the grounds where the work of the craftsman and artisans is repackaged for a global audience. Many of the founding faculty of Srishti were trained at the National Institute of Design.
In one of my interview with Mr. N, a faculty at Srishti, he is clear that designers are the middle-men/women who repackage these traditional artifacts and then use language borrowed from a global design discourse to promote or sell these artifacts in the global market. Students, therefore, are taught to speak a language commensurable with modern design discourse but essentially use or appropriate, sometimes remix the labor, the artifacts, materials and designs of traditional craftsman. He recounts an episode where a traditional craftsman in a design conference says the following: In 2015, while he was attending the craft congress, a craftsman raised his hand to speak and said that he had travelled by bus from Belgaum to Hyderabad, a journey of 600 Km for over 2 days to attend this conference, He said he did not want his son to become a craftsman but wanted to come to conferences like this by airplane and open his laptop and then proceed to instruct the craftsmen about craft and show them how it is done. The conference attendees fell silent.
Howard Becker, in art worlds – states that art is a communal affair. The manufacturers of materials for the production of art – paint, brushes, photo paper, Virtual Reality headsets. ballet shoes are as important as agents, publishers, curators. The artist as an individual is subject to the force of a community enterprise. Art Worlds challenges the tenets of traditional aesthetics-the artist as genius and the beautiful work as expression and embodiment of genius. In their place, Becker begins with a simple premise that art is the work that some people do. It requires an "extensive division of labour" (p. 13) and "elaborate cooperation" (p. 28) among many people: artists, patrons, critics, gallery owners, librarians, jazz club owners, teachers, audiences, and even those who make the tools of the trade (ink, canvas, paints, instruments). (Becker 2008)
Becker himself notes that ‘Art Worlds’ is more "a sociology of occupations applied to artistic work". But it is this division of labor which is essentially a defining feature of caste and its subsequent association with craft. Dalit theorists and activists like Kancha Illiah write about the relationship and appropriation of craft and labor of Adivasi (or the original inhabitants of India who are now labelled by the state as ‘scheduled tribes”).
Traditional medicines, healing practices and food habits of the Adivasi are appropriated by village and urban folk often without acknowledgement. The labor of weavers, potters and leatherworkers is similarly appropriated but they are also subject to discrimination in both social life and educational opportunities.(Illiah, 2019)
However, at elite, educational institutions like Srishti, this traditional practice is then repackaged and reframed in the language of “sustainable”, ecological design. Bourdieu’s insistence that language is the vehicle for power seems to fit here.
Conclusion
There are cracks in the caste hierarchies but new walls emerge. With experiences like Srishti’s SP’s encounters with students, traditional boundaries and perceived stigmas of caste are broken. Acts like the cleaning up encounters that Mr. RG describes in his interview, show that radical acts of breaking caste hierarchies often occur in simple everyday acts. However, in its educational theories and practice, the appropriation of labor of traditional craftsman continues. This appropriation is now cloaked in vocabulary that is borrowed from contemporary Design. Even in spaces that appear “critical” and open to changes, this appropriation is not challenged or acknowledged. Caste hierarchies, therefore, when not operating on an overt level of physical segregation or similar rituals, operate by appropriating labor in design, art and academic discourse. The liberal, progressive and upper caste elite who usually are in power in such institutions and who have rarely faced overt discrimination are invested in breaking the traditional mechanisms of caste operation with regards to segregation or purity rituals. These seem to be already in the process of being broken not just in educational institutes but elsewhere. However, deeper issues of labor, craft and caste are generally unacknowledged even in conceptual, academic or theoretical discourses. It would seem that this acknowledgement would challenge current status quo and power dynamics.
References
Becker, Howard, (2008, April). Art Worlds. University of California Press.
About Us | Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology. (n.d.). About Us | Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology. Retrieved December 13, 2022, from https://srishtimanipalinstitute.in/about-us
Béteille, 2012.. The Peculiar Tenacity of Caste. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 47(No. 13 (MARCH 31, 2012),), 41–48.
Bose, N K (1975): The Structure of Hindu Society (Delhi: Orient Longman)
Cross. (2013, September 5). Book Review: The Remembered Village by M.N. Srinivas. LSE Review of Books. Retrieved December 13, 2022, from https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/09/05/book-review-the-remembered-village-srinivas/
History of NID. (n.d.). History of NID. Retrieved December 13, 2022, from https://www.nid.edu/about/history-of-nid
Illiah, Kancha(2019 April) Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land : Dignity of Labour in Our Times, Navayana Press.
Krishna. (2018, March). Unequal music. Economic and Political Weekly, 53(12).
Majumdar. (2022, April 6). Column: Caste Is More Relevant to Indian Politics Than Ever. Time. Retrieved December 13, 2022, from https://time.com/6156124/india-hindu-muslim-caste/
Mayer, Acrian C (1996): "Caste in an Indian Village: Change and Continuity" in C J Fuller (ed.), Caste Today (Delhi: Oxford University Press), pp 32-64
Murugan. (2021, January 26). Perumal Murugan: “The Limits of Freedom Now Are Exactly as They Were in the Past.” The Wire. Retrieved December 13, 2022, from https://thewire.in/books/perumal-murugan-book-excerpt-caste-hierarchies-freedom-expression