Naman P. Ahuja is Professor of Indian Art and Architecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His research and graduate teaching focus on periods of artistic / visual exchange in pre-modern societies like ancient Gandhara on the borderlands of Afghanistan and Punjab and in the manuscripts painted in the Sultanate period in India. His studies on early Indian terracottas, ivories and small finds have drawn attention to unique sources for Indian history that reveal much about the private world of Ancient Indians. These objects tell us much about the trade and ritual cultures from a domestic sphere rather than what is normally understood only through public monuments. His book, The Making of the Modern Indian Artist-Craftsman: Devi Prasad (Routledge, 2011), explored the formation of the Arts and Crafts Movement and how it, in turn impacted the aesthetic and political influences of Coomaraswamy, Gandhi and Tagore as shown in the pedagogy of the institutions of Santiniketan and Sevagram. Some of his other publications include: Divine Presence, The Arts of India and the Himalayas (Five continents editions, Milan, 2003, translated into Catalan and Spanish) and The Body in Indian Art and Thought (Ludion, Antwerp, 2013, also available in French and Dutch).

He has held Fellowships, Visiting Professorships and curatorial charges at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, The British Museum, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of Zurich, the Kusnthistorisches Institut in Florence, amongst others. He has curated various acclaimed exhibitions, the most recent of which, The Body in Indian Art was shown at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels for Europalia.13 and at the National Museum, New Delhi.

May 2010 at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi

Presented by Lalit Kala Akademi, in collaboration with the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti House, The exhibition was accompanied by a major book with the same title published by Routledge (India and the UK; ISBN: 978-0-415-60229-7)

The book and exhibition explored the centrality of the methods, materials and art of making art in Gandhian context via a retrospective of Devi Prasad. Reared in Santiniketan under the tutelage of Nandalal, Benodebehari and Ramkinkar, Devi Prasad was Gandhi’s chosen teacher for Nai Taleem, his final and radical new pedagogical structure to create a new, post-colonial and free human. The exhibition of pottery and painting was supplemented with archival sources, letters, photographs, video interviews and writings to contextualise Devi Prasad’s milieu. In turn it sought to present the enormous impact of the Arts and Crafts Movement on both Tagore and Gandhi, and how their ideas were adapted via Devi Prasad to lead the international Peace Movement in the 1960s and 70s.

The ‘Making’ of the Modern Indian Artist-Craftsman: Devi Prasad

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