Pottery, Pacifism and Global Politics
By John E. Cort
Devi Prasad: Making of a Modern Indian Artist-Craftsman
By Naman P. Ahuja
Routledge India, 2012, 320 pages, 392 illustrations, $100
Devi Prasad (1921-2011) served as Joint Secretary and then General Secretary of War Resisters’ International from 1962 until 1972, and was subsequently Chairperson of WRI until 1975. This was a watershed period for WRI. The appointment of a person of color from India marked a shift from an organization that was largely white, middle-class and Protestant into a truly global one. Those years also saw the rise of anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia. While many of the advocates of liberation from colonialism at first embraced nonviolent methods, some of them, such as Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, came to adopt a position in which violence was an accepted means for national liberation. Devi Prasad worked tirelessly to maintain WRI’s pacifist principles, while still find ing ways to support the liberation movements. His 2005 book, War Is a Crime Against Humanity: The Story of War Resisters’ International is an essential history of the first five decades of WRI.
After stepping down from the General Secretaryship of WRI in 1972, he returned to India for good in 1983. He continued to be engaged in international nonviolence activities, and helped organize the 1985-86 WRI Triennial Conference in India.
In India, however, he was better known as an artist, pioneering the field of studio pottery. He taught dozens of students and held numerous exhibitions. Today his artwork is found in leading art collections in India.
Who was this remarkable and multifaceted man? How did he hold together his various interests and passions? This sumptuously illustrated book, published in connection with a major retrospective exhibition of Prasad’s work at Lalit Kala Academy in New Delhi, goes far toward addressing this question. The author and curator is Naman Ahuja, Professor of Indian Art and Architecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Devi Prasad was born to a middle-class family in the foothills of northern India. He showed skill as an artist, and in 1939 was admitted to the art school at the Vishvabharati University at Shantiniketan, in eastern India, founded by the poet, Nobel Laureate and social reformer Rabindranath Tagore. Here he was exposed to the pan-Asianist and international arts and crafts practices of this important school. After graduation, he went to work as an arts educator at Sevagram, Mahatma Gandhi’s experimental village in central India. One day in the small library in this remote village, he came upon Bernard Leach’s 1940 masterpiece The Studio Potter, a book that has had a profound influence on artists the world over. Prasad was inspired to take up pottery.
Most of his time at Sevagram, however, was taken up with art pedagogy, first in the village, but increasingly on a national scale after Indian independence in 1947. Prasad put into practice Gandhi’s philosophy of education. Gandhi said that education should shape the whole person, that it should liberate the student from the strictures of conventional education as practiced first by the British colonizers and then by Indian educators interested in creating a new nation-state. Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha resulted in a very child-centered practice of education, one that was instrumental to Prasad’s practice as an arts educator. In his 1998 book Art: The Basis of Education, excerpted in Ahuja’s biography, Prasad wrote, “According to Gandhi’s educational scheme every child should have the best opportunity to blossom into a fulfilled individual and a creative member of the community. He knew that education, as it was being practiced, created a spirit of competition rather than cooperation, encouraged the attitude of separation instead of unity, and instead of teaching to give, it inculcated greed in the educated. In other words it nurtured violence in the minds of the pupils in the place of violence.” Prasad’s writings on Gandhi have recently been collected in another book published by Routledge, Gandhi and Revolution.
Devi Prasad took these Gandhian principles with him to London when he worked with WRI. He also brought the Indian experience of the long resistance struggle against British colonialism. This struggle had been as much a cultural one as a political one. Prasad helped to introduce Gandhi’s concept of an interventionist “Peace Army” (Shanti Sena) to the work of WRI, in the form of the World Peace Brigade and later Peace Brigades International. He led WRI in its protests against the Vietnam War, Communist oppression in Eastern Europe, the civil war in Biafra, Nigeria, colonial oppression in Africa and Asia, and the new wars between the newly independent states such as those between India and Pakistan in 1965 and 1971. He continued WRI’s work of supporting conscientious objection to military conscription throughout the world. In 1968, under the joint editorship of Prasad and Tony Smythe, WRI published Conscription: A World Survey.
Prasad also spearheaded the work of people connected with WRI and other organizations, such as Movement for a New Society in the U.S., in theorizing what a nonviolent revolutionary movement for total change and the creation of an alternative society would look like. This was a time that saw the transition from pacifism as a moral stand against violence, to a broader understanding of nonviolent social change. Devi Prasad and others did important work in conceptualizing (and practicing) ways to link military violence to other forms of economic, social and cultural oppression.
Under Prasad’s leadership, WRI at its meeting in Vienna in August, 1968, drafted a widely distributed working document entitled “Liberation Movements and War Resisters’ International.” The document responded to the liberation wars of the 1960s, and repositioned WRI and the global nonviolence movement. No longer was it a movement concerned primarily with individual conscientious objection to war and military conscription.
Instead, the document argued that the movement must address social, political and economic systems at the root of oppression. Emphasizing the nonviolence is bound up with working against exploitative systems, it read: “From this belief in freedom stems our opposition to war and to systems which exploit and corrupt such as colonialism, capitalism and totalitarian forms of communism.”
Prasad brought more to WRI than a global perspective that could engage with the revolutionary spirit of the times. He also brought his artistic skills. One senses that the line in the 1968 document about freedom for a person to develop to the fullest his powers as a creative human being was deeply important to Prasad. Ahuja writes that Prasad “set about devising a distinctive and modern house-style for a WRI in tune with the radical new culture of the 1960s.” In this he provided a precedent for the many graphic artists whose work has graced issues of WIN and the annual WRL Peace Calendars over the decades.
Ahuja’s text is augmented by selections from Devi Prasad’s own writings, and by invited essays that expand on selected aspects of Prasad’s varied life. His London years with WRI are covered in an essay by long-time British antinuclear activist and peace theorist Bob Overy. Devi Prasad spent his life as an artist, an educator, and a peace activist, who strove to educate and liberate the whole person. This rich book is a suitable tribute to this multifaceted man, who deserves to be better remembered in the annals of the global peace movement.
