Interestingly, the first ever exhibition in India on the art movement was held in Calcutta back in 1922. Titled “Bauhaus in Calcutta”, it was conceived by the Indian Society of Oriental Art and Stella Kramrisch —who taught Indian and European Art History at Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan—brokered the passage of many prints by Bauhaus artists from Germany to Calcutta. In that exhibition, it was still conceivable to buy a Kandinsky watercolour for 10 or 15 pounds. It was a time when Rabindranath Tagore was the most important cultural interlocutor between India and Europe after winning the Nobel prize in literature. Visva-Bharati, the school Tagore founded, projected a search for universal modernism beyond the rigid confines of realism propagated by British academic curricula. Bauhaus too embodied the values of universal modernism and functioned as “the meeting point of the cosmopolitan avant-gardes” at the time.

"Moving Away" brings to focus how some key design institutions in postcolonial India were influenced by Bauhaus. The development of design education, specifically at National Institute of Design (NID) set up in 1961 and the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai in 1969, drew on modernist sources like the Bauhaus.

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