Soon after World War II, the Rockefellers founded the Asia Society, one of New York's most respected cultural institutions, to expand Americans' understanding of Asia. Thirty-four years later, in 1990, Ahmedabad-born Vishakha Desai became the first Asian-American, the first woman, to join its management as director of galleries and introduce New Yorkers to contemporary Asian art through innovative exhibits and cultural programming.
In 2004, she rose to become Asia Society's sixth president and increased its worldwide footprint with 11 branches in Asian and American cities. Now, 22 years later, she's stepping down in September, to “write, reflect, advise and teach.” Laughingly, she says, “I'm not becoming a sanyasi — I'm entering vanaprastha ashram, giving back in a different way.”
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She's finishing a book
More formally, Desai joins the Guggenheim Foundation as senior adviser for global policy and programmes. The most international of museums, the Guggenheim has a global brand, a large international presence in places like Venice, Bilbao and Berlin. Desai will work with its leadership to infuse globality into its programmes, to move it from being a global physical presence to having a global intellectual image. With her experience, it's a logical next step to move to a bigger institution, building similar cultural bridges and focusing on strategy. She's also negotiating with prominent US universities to teach — culture and its intersection with international relations — at graduate-level seminars on non-Western countries like India and China.
Desai, the daughter of Gujarati activists in India's independence struggle — her father a lifelong journalist, and her mother, leader of a women's organisation, met in the Gandhi movement to unite in an inter caste marriage — came to the U.S. at 16 as an exchange student. She returned home for college, graduated, and married a Peace Corps worker she met there. Accompanying him to Cleveland, she got into the museum world by accident, as a Bharatanatyam dancer! Then, working with school kids at the museum, she realised that museums were “amazing places for cross-cultural understanding. I got into art history because of its social potential for cross-cultural connection through objects.” So, if most art historians study art history because they love art, “I was excited by the potential of art to make connections.”
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Now she ascribes the joy of working at Asia Society to the alignment of her intellectual passions and identity with the institution's mandate. “I am a bicultural product; my life is about such connection. It's who I am and what the Society does. My job combined education, policy, arts and culture. That's been amazing.” Moreover, “to understand the rising power of Asia, you must have a three-dimensional engagement with it: That's what this institution does.”
And the challenges? The AS is about all of Asia with its multiple locations, multiple disciplines. Desai says, “The breadth of the institution can be both its strength and its weakness; harnessing it is more complex than solving the Rubik's cube.” Besides, “to get people to think in terms of connectivity goes against the grain of our training.”
Special relationships
Being in the policy arena, the Society hosts Asian leaders, prime ministers, foreign ministers. So Manmohan Singh was hosted, in 1991, long before he became PM. Since the other side of this equation is the U.S., Desai hosted President Bush before his India visit; he used that platform to give a major speech. She developed a special relationship with Hillary Clinton who, as Secretary of State, chose to go first to Asia. Preparing for her trips to China and India, Hillary invited Desai to small private meetings. As head of AS, Desai was often invited to White House dinners by Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama. She was even asked to brief President Obama on India.
Desai says she found Obama's questions, “exploring the intersection of policy and politics,” thoughtful and sharp. She notes, “His Asian connections are strong. Mahatma Gandhi has been an enormous influence; he'd had a picture of Gandhi in his Senate office. He grew up in Indonesia, his roommate was a Pakistani, his sister Maya was an intern at AS in the 1990s.” He's a global president, well-travelled: “No other US President's been as cosmopolitan.”
In her personal life, Desai who divorced her first husband before moving East got to know Robert Oxnam, then president of Asia Society, when she came to work there. They have been married since 1993. “We're real partners. He's a China specialist. Grounded in India and China, we love both places, travel there constantly and love comparing them. We've thought of doing an India-China book together.”
Manhattan's Indians respect Desai for putting the subcontinent on the cultural map in the U.S., where Mughal miniatures, Chola bronzes and Gupta sculptures were admired by the cognoscenti but there was no awareness of contemporary art. Indeed, “Asia” long denoted China, Japan, perhaps Vietnam but not India, which languished in no-man's territory. Now, the Asia Society is the prime venue for the best of South Asian arts —music, dance, theatre, literature along with politics, economics and business.
For her part, Desai finds that “having an Asian-American at the head of this institution has allowed us not to be seen as just an American institution. I'm proud of that: we're a global, transnational organisation, committed to strengthening partnership.”