GRCs were introduced in India in 1973 by Gouranga Chattopadhyay who was instrumental in organizing a series of working conferences and other learning events in the period 1973-1991, with IIM Calcutta, where he worked as a professor, being a key sponsor of conferences. He continued to direct Conferences in the subsequent years with different sponsors, which were offered intermittently throughout the 90s. In this phase of development of group relations in India, Zahid Hussain Gangjee and Dipankar Banerjee, also Kolkata based, played key roles staffing and facilitating the sponsoring of conferences and workshops, contributing in important ways to the body of knowledge and practise of GR in India. While this is not a detailed history of group relations’ trajectory in India, mention must also be made of MM Kumaraswamy who led social sector focussed organisations Aikya and SHSD, which sponsored several conferences.
From the early 2000s, conferences were offered regularly by different sponsoring organisations. Around this time GRCs in India began to speak to the socio-political context, an innovation spearheaded by Rosemary Viswanath, which extended the relevance of GRCs beyond just leadership in the organizational context to leadership in the socio-political and cultural context of India. This was reflected in the conference titles such as Identity, Authority, Leadership – Resistance, Self-Empowerment, and Transformation in Organizational & Social Systems (2003) and Authority, Leadership, and Role – Exploring Resistance and Transformation in Organizational & Social Systems (2004). These were sponsored by social development organisations and academic institutions, and the interests of the sponsors were reflected in the titles.
A series of international conferences, sponsored by Business World and other corporate and academic institutions between 2005 and 2008 had the title Managing transformation of self & organization in a globalized economy (2005, 2006, 2008). From 2006 onwards, a series of conferences sponsored by Human and Institutional Development Forum (HIDF) with social themes such as Gender and Authority were also offered.
In parallel, Rosemary Viswanath worked on her conviction that it was critical to build an institution in India that would exclusively focus on Group Relations frameworks and their application in multiple contexts. This became a reality in 2013 when GRI was registered as a Trust, with Rosemary Viswanath as the Managing Trustee and Anuradha Prasad, Ivo Rodrigues, and Gouranga Chattopadhyay as Trustees.
With the forming of GRI in 2013, conferences and other programmes and events have spoken to themes reflecting the world around us as it was transforming under the increased presence of social media, digitization, along with rapidly changing political, social and economic realities. Some themes we have worked with have been:
-Exercising Leadership in a Gendered World (2006 & 2008)
-Leadership for Transformation in Self, Groups and Systems (2013 & 2014)
-Transforming Systems - exploring the place of compassion in the exercise of leadership (2015)
-The Brahmin in the Mind - exploring the nature and dynamics of caste and constructed hierarchies in oneself, groups and society (2016)
-Knowing and Not Knowing - exploring intention and risk in self and systems (2016 & 2019)
-The Courage to Lead - exploring dynamics of collaboration and dissent (2017)
-Meeting the Other, Meeting Oneself - fear and longing in working with difference (2018) -Interrogating Narcissism - towards leadership for the system (2021) -Taking & Making Roles - towards leadership for the systems we belong to (2023)