Indian Christian Art

Dr. Jyoti Sahi studied art at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and gained a Doctorate in Divinity from Serampore College. Over the years he has taught art at various institutions and centres in India and worked free lance, at the Kurisumala Ashram with Dom Bede Griffiths and Laurie Baker, designing works for Indian Churches.
Coming from a mixed religious background having Hindu and Christian roots, Jyoti has spent the last forty years trying to see how it is possible to bridge/integrate these religious and cultural divides through art. He is particularly interested in the relation of Christian symbols and stories to the sacred images that are found in other faith traditions, particularly in the Indian tradition. As an artist, he has been actively involved with various non governmental groups in India concerned with social change.

In 1975 he supported and worked with his wife Jane Sahi to start a school in the village where the Sahis live outside Bangalore. The school has drawn a number of creative ideas from the Rudolf Steiner understanding of education, and Jyoti has conducted art workshops at the Emerson College in the U.K.

In 1976 he helped to start an educational experiment called SEARCH which introduced young people in India to concepts of development from an Indian cultural perspective. Later he was one of the founding members of the "Pipal Tree", a group of activists concerned with the part played by cultural forms in social change. This is now situated at Fireflies Ashram in Bangalore, which Shelley Sacks visited in 2000. Jyoti has worked with the director of Fireflies Ashram, Siddhartha, from the mid seventies, and participates regularly in various programmes organized at this center.

In 1984 Jyoti and his wife Jane started the Indian School of Art for Peace (INSCAPE) which was conceived of as an Art Ashram, following the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore at Shantiniketan.

In 1997 Jyoti joined the staff of SRISHTI, a school of Art Design and Technology in Bangalore, where he has been giving courses to young art and design students for the last ten years. It was through his work at SRISHTI that he first came into contact with the work of Shelley Sacks and visited Oxford Brookes for the first time in 1999. In 2000 Shelley was invited to visit SRISHTI and in 2002 Jyoti took up an artist-in-residence for a term at Oxford Brookes. The design courses at the school have been much influenced by his involvement with the Social Sculpture Research Unit.

Jyoti has continued to work with Shelley exploring the link between aesthetics and ethics, in the context of Indian philosophy and social movements. A particular interest is the Gandhian understanding of Sarvodaya and its parallels in the work of Joseph Beuys. Jyoti currently teaches in seminaries all over India, lecturing on the relation of art to Indian aesthetics and spirituality.

Publications:
Stepping Stones: Reflections on the Theology of Indian Christian Culture (ATC 1987)
The Holy Ground (Asian Christian Art Association 1998)