Ushmita Sahu

Ushmita Sahu is a visual artist, curator and scholar based in Santiniketan, West Bengal. She has completed her Master’s in Fine Arts from Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan. She has curated several exhibitions both nationally and internationally; and as a practitioner, exhibits her work frequently. She has two solo shows to her credit. She conducts workshops, delivers lectures, writes for art journals and magazine and mentors young artists regularly.

This grant will enable her to research on artist-designer Riten Mozumdar’s life and work as one of the most significant figures in the history of modern Indian design. Riten Mozumdar alongside a remarkable group of designers and merchandisers such as Nelly Sethna, Ratna Fabri, John Bissell, Lola Basu, Seena Kaul, Suman Bengal and Shona Ray opened up Indian design to creativity and innovation. Yet the scholarship on this important period of design history and the contributions of its makers is almost non-existent. By exploring certain areas of undocumented cultural, political and institutional histories, Ushmita intends to address this lacuna of scholarship in modern Indian design with Riten Mozumdar at the centre of her enquiry. 

She will analyse the glaring gaps within the discourse on visual culture in design between the 1950s and 1970s. This period is considered the era of artistic ferment in modern Indian art. While on one hand, the revival of traditional Indian arts was breathing a new life into the dying art forms, on the other, modern Indian visual art was slowly catching up pace with international artistic trends. Riten Mozumdar dwelled in both these worlds: he was trained under the forefathers of the revivalism in Indian visual art at Santiniketan – Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij and Benodebehari Mukherjee; and had exposure to the international art world through his exhibitions abroad which pushed him to diversify his practice. Despite having a prolific career, Riten Mozumdar’s name was consigned to the footnotes of the history of modern Indian art. Through this project, Ushmita will argue for Riten Mozumdar’s rightful place as one of the most influential and important proponents of modern design in India. By analysing his career as emblematic of his times, Ushmita will explore new inquiries and attempt to place design as a new growing profession against the background and within the socio-cultural and political landscape of India after Partition.

The Nehruvian vision of independent India and the project of nation-building sought to reconcile Western science, technology and modernisation of agriculture concurrently with the revival of the small rural cottage and indigenous handicraft industries. This impacted aesthetic sensibilities, expectations and ideals in most fields, especially in design by setting up a stage for a new contemporary design idiom. Riten Mozumdar was an integral part of this transition. Ushmita will inquire into this transition and Nehruvian socialistic aesthetics that shaped the practices of later designers.

Ushmita will gather information about Riten Mozumdar from archival sources, news and media databases, personal and institutional collections and libraries. Riten Mozumdar’s estate at Santiniketan will be a key resource in her research. She will document the archival material such as texts, photographs and objects housed at the estate to build a comprehensive database around his life and work. She will also conduct a series of interviews with experts in the field about their views on the history of modern Indian design and their memories of Riten Mozumdar.

The outcome of this project will be an essay on Riten Mozumdar. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA with the final reports will be the essay, extensive visual documentation, audiovisual interviews with experts from the field and an archival presentation on Riten Mozumdar’s life and works.

This grant is made possible with support from Titan Company Limited.