A custodian of culture

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It was the great human spirit that inspired Deborah when she first came to India, as a blushing young bride married to K.M. Thiagarajan, fondly known as Raj — a man who seemed to be far ahead of his times. While Raj belonged to the

illustrious Karumuthu Thiagaraja Chettiar family in Madurai, Deborah was a 60’s child from Philadelphia, who believed the whole world “to be as one”. So when she met Raj as a student at the University of Pittsburgh, it was no surprise that the tall white American woman followed her man to Chennai in 1970.
“He was a sweet guy,” she says of Raj, who passed away in 2007. “The city was such a different place then. Medical facilities were low. There was no proper milk, eggs or vegetable distribution and the country seemed very resistant to computers,” says Deborah, who before her marriage, was working for a computer company in the States. “But,” she interjects, “The human landscape was so well connected and there were so many personal spaces, that one never felt left out.”
Deborah, whose in-laws did not find it easy to accept a foreign bride, kept her head above water and followed her husband to Coimbatore, where her love affair with arts and crafts began. “I was working on the mid-day meal scheme in the villages in Tamil Nadu and the generosity of the people really won me over. It was in the villages that my grounding for DakshinaChitra really began. My husband’s family were also instrumental in shaping my ideas, for as Chettiars, they were the custodians of arts and crafts in their village. The Chettiars supported every form of art — wood, terra-cotta, stone, and this certainly made an impression on me,” says Deborah. Immersed in her work as a volunteer with CARE and Tamil Nadu’s nutrition programme, Deborah visited China with her family in 1981. It was then that the seed for the cultural hub DakshinaChitra was sown. “It was a horrendous time in China and it was then that I realised the freedom that a democracy enabled. Every society needs volunteers to fill in the gaps.”
And finally in 1996, the Madras Craft Foundation was born, when Deborah collected a team of seven and invited Laurie Baker to design the building. “It was an exhilarating time. I had decided early in my life that I would never work for money. India is a chaotic country and that’s what the fun is. So my group, a bunch of bright and competent women, acted as a catalyst and suddenly we were ready. And then we realised ‘Now, we have to run it’.”
In its 15 years of existence, DakshinaChitra has firmly established itself as a cultural stronghold in the city of Chennai and continues to run with its motto of conservation of art, craft, culture and architecture. “A democracy lets you dream and I was enabled by India to pursue the human connectedness that binds us all. The country has changed since I first came here — both for the better and for the worse. But I believe that we’re certainly progressing in the right direction,” says Deborah with a buoyant smile.