De Un Artesano Primitivo a Uno Moderno Punjab

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From Primitive Artisans to Modern Craftsmen: Colonialism,

Culture, and Art Education in the Late Nineteenth-CenturyPunjab

Nadeem Omar Tarar*

Department of Communication and Cultural Studies, National College of Arts, Lahore, 4 The Mall, Lahore

Byclosely reading the debates on the art school curriculum within the Indian civil and educational bureaucracy in the lastquarter of the nineteenth century, this article analyses the fundamental shift in the theoretical and methodological basis ofart education in colonial art schools, which were founded for the revival of Oriental arts and craftsmanship throughwestern ideas of visual literacy. A detailed analysis of the founding decades of the Mayo Schools of Art demonstrates theintersection of aesthetic discourses in art education with the Orientalist views of Indian society as a traditional, tribalcaste-based society. The colonial sociologyof occupational castes became the conduit to recruit and train artisan castes in

the Mayo School of Art. While this colonial policy of caste-based education in Punjab favoured artisan castes in theiroccupational careers, it restricted the enterprising students of artisan families who wished to pursue their careersindependently of their hereditary associations.

Keywords: J. L. Kipling; Mayo School of Art; Richard Temple; Baden Powell; Denzil Ibbetson; H. H. Locke; Arts andCrafts Movement

Scripting an archive: an introduction

This paper is an articulation of an archival experience. It

is, to borrow a phrase, the biography of an archive in a

practical as well as theoretical sense.1 Teaching anthro-

pology to art students at the National College of Arts

(NCA) overlapped with the assignment of turning into

an archive the vast corpus of unkempt records of the

college administration since its inception as the Mayo

School of Art (MSA) in 1875. Prior to that, no attempt

had been made to gather, appraise, arrange, and describe

the NCAs official records. The process of identifying,

classifying, indexing, and arranging the contents of each

set of papers in a chronological order, which went hand in

hand with repairing and conserving the badly damaged

papers, provided, inter alia, an early exposure to the

taxonomic order of the colonial state in nineteenth-

century Punjab. There was an incipient promise here of

applying the theoretical concepts drawn from literature

to actual historical problems, furnished through theknowledge derived from the archives. This was a unique

type of knowledge which, notwithstanding its conceptual

ramifications, was dependent on the grossly physical

exercises of emptying cotton sacks stuffed with paper

records abandoned in storage areas, wrestling with huge

scraps of moth-eaten office files, and making final

appraisals of documents for retention or disposal and

processing them for publication (Figures 12).

The one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the

NCA in 2000 generated the necessary administrative

impetus for a retrospective glance at the history of the

institution. Understandably, this found its primary

articulation in the undiscovered and muted archive.

The publication of a historical chronicle of its early

decades marked the beginning of empirical research to

reconstruct the history of the Mayo School of Art.

A photograph search for its students and teachers, who

have faded out of the folds of history, was initiated, and

the oral reminiscences of living members of the old

school were heard. Artefacts including lithographs,

woodwork, paintings, and other items produced by the

school were located, borrowed, and documented. The

library of the school, which had been salvaged a year

earlier, contained a large collection of South

Kensington-authored and inspired literature on indus-

trial art education, administrative reports on artisanal

industries, state gazetteers, and other pedagogic mate-

rial in the form of folios and photographic albums,which formed a part of the NCA Archive (NCAA).

A retrospective exhibition on the Mayo School and a

few publications on its founding principal, Lockwood

Kipling, and his native student protg, Bhai Ram

Singh, who rose to become the first Punjabi principal

of the school, marked the beginning of the postcolonial

project of writing the biography of a national archive

(Figure 3).2

South Asian Studies

Vol. 27, No. 2, September 2011, 199219

*Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0266-6030 print/ISSN 2153-2699 online

2011 The British Association for South Asian Studies

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2011.614427http://www.tandfonline.com
mailto:[email protected]://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2011.614427http://www.tandfonline.com/http://www.tandfonline.com/http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2011.614427mailto:[email protected]


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Over the years, a project for writing this biography

of an archive began to unfold in a theoretical sense with

the process of archiving the administrative records of the

institution. Not only did these sources have extractiveuses as prized sources of authentic information about

and guarded treasures of the institutions corporate mem-

ory, but they also drew attention to its ethnographic fea-

tures. Far from being a static collection of texts and an

inert site of storage and conservation, the voluminous

records of the Mayo School of Art

ranging from inter-national circulars of the Department of Science and Art,

London, to correspondence with artisans in remote tehsil

headquarters of colonial Punjab offered illustrations of

diverse modes of objectification of colonial subjects and

a structural transformation of fields of knowledge pro-

duction. The experience of constructing an archive

became an epistemological experiment which allowed

me to see archives as both transparencies on which

power relations were inscribed and intricate technologies

of rule in themselves.3

The process of archiving sanitizes the records and, in

many respects, deprives them of their original menace.

It is the hindsight of a scholar, who approaches recordsfrom the safety of a distance, in time as well as in space,

which ultimately reveals the facts of history. A scholarly

use of an archive for extracting information is distinct

from its disciplinarian origin as one of the technologies

of rule.4 The production and maintenance of the records

of administration was one of the central determinants of

the colonial regime of discipline and regulation. The

records generated by the school were classified and cate-

gorized according to their functions.5 The active records

of the school were kept away and secured in official

premises, as if never to be revealed to those they were

about. Power and control are rooted in the very etymol-

ogy of the term archive. True to the etymological rootsof the word in the Latin archivum (residence of the

magistrate) and the Greek term arkhe (to command

and govern), the colonial archive ordered colonial

knowledge by setting up templates of knowledge, and

following a criteria of evidence, proof, testimony, and

witnessing to construct moral narrations.6

The collection of letters, circulars, memoranda, dis-

patches, and reports that make up the bulk of the archive

pertain to communication within the school, as well as

between the school and other state departments within

India and with metropolitan institutions. An elaborate

system of written accountability of the staff and the

students, uninterrupted paper trails between the school

and various departments of the provincial and imperial

governments, private businesses, and educational institu-

tions were the institutional forms which constituted the

scaffolding of the colonial state. As cultural artifacts of

fact production and taxonomies in the making, the

archive was the technology on which the structure of

colonial authority was built.7

The structure of administrative knowledge served as

a reference guide to the administrative policies and

2. The improved condition of administrative records in theNational College of Arts Archives in 2003. Authors photograph.

1. The deteriorating condition of the administrative records ofthe Mayo School of Art in the storeroom at the National Collegeof Arts in 1999. Authors photograph.

200 Nadeem Omar Tarar


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practices of the Mayo School of Art. The genre of the

official report was a vital component of colonial bureau-

cracy in India, which ordered the information system of

the school administration. The historical contingencies of

the genre derive from imperialist expansion into and con-

quest of remote parts of the world for geographical, mili-

tary, and economic aggrandizement. The report as an

historical genre of writing belonged to the category of

managerial writing or writing for control, and was one

of the techniques of acquiring effective control over

greater distances through effective communication.8 The

colonial state in Punjab was managed by officials profes-

sionally trained to rule by the pen and set standards of

report writing which diffused throughout the administra-

tive hierarchy.9 The reports were characterized by domi-

nant managerial concerns aiming to increase the

efficiency of the administration and develop more effec-

tive responses to exigencies. The colonial reports formed a

representative field as well as textual evidence for formu-

lating policies and procedures to direct and coordinate

administrative thinking at the centre. It help[ed] tighten

the centers control over what happened in the periphery

by constructing systematic, regularized ways of commu-

nicating activity.10

Lahores Mayo School of Art was Pakistans equiva-

lent of the South Kensington School of Design in London

(now the Royal College of Art). It was the last of the four

colonial art schools established in key administrative and

urban centres in colonial India, including Madras (1853),

Calcutta (1854), and Bombay (1857). Despite being the

only art school in Pakistan, the Mayo School of Art has

not been as well researched and represented in the exist-

ing literature as its counterparts in India.11 Through a

discursive reading of a variety of colonial texts, consist-

ing of letters, circulars, memorandums, dispatches, and

reports, this article tells the little told story of the Mayo

School of Art in its founding decades, which brought the

study of the decorative arts of Punjab to the forefront of

the imperial struggle for mastery over Indias visual past.

From the protracted discussions on the very purpose of

the art school in Lahore to its development as the primary

bureaucratic body responsible for art education in

Punjab, I interrogate the ideologies of the British Arts

and Crafts movement and the South Kensington agenda,

3. Research and Documentation Cell at National College of Arts Archives in 2006. Authors photograph.

South Asian Studies 201


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which hinged on anthropological theories of primitive

and modern societies. The specific contention of this

study is that the boundaries established between oraland literate are the folklorist prisms of the colonial

discourse on art education through which the practices

of indigenous communities and institutions of Indian art

and artists were articulated.

The suitable boys: artisans at work and Ibbetsons

anthropology

In the official discourses of colonial India, traditional

Indian artists made their appearance as village artisans

catering to the customary demands of the village commu-

nity for art wares and as urban craftsmen and artists

engaged in private production or employed in karkhanas

(workshops).12 Indian artists were celebrated in the imper-

ial accounts of colonial exhibitions and world fairs, as well

as in the chronicles of the Arts and Crafts movement, asthe legendary industrial classes of India. A subsequent

generation of South Kensington graduates in the Indian

educational service shared and extended their admiration

of the Indian decorative arts and the artisanal communities

responsible for their production. These British advocates

played a central role in collecting, documenting, assem-

bling, and disseminating textual and visual evidence of

authentic Indian artisanal skills and designs.13 For influen-

tial art bureaucrats like George Birdwood, artisans living

in the village communities . . . the stronghold of tradition-

ary [sic] arts of India were the primary sources of the art

tradition that was being threatened by industrialization

and commerce.14 The colonial construction of the artistas the hereditary artisan in late nineteenth-century India

drew upon European theories of race. The notion of

hereditary implied unbroken links to an ancient visual

past as well as the biological transmission of artistic

knowledge through the blood.15 Criminality was

assumed to be hereditary, and so were artistic skills.16

The term hereditary artisan therefore referred to a

skilled body of men who learned artistic skills and

design knowledge, not through formal education in an

institution, but through their family socialization within

an artisan caste (Figure 4).

In the caste discourses of the colonial state in Punjab,

artisans were placed in the anthropological schematic of

castes and tribes as part of the aboriginal stock of non-

Aryan castes. Land settlement reports, censuses, and sur-

veys were the primary sites for the identification of the

artisan castes as non-agricultural groups, responsible

for the agricultural labour and artisanal industries of

Punjab. Forming more than 20 per cent of the total popu-

lation of nineteenth-century Punjab, artisan castes com-

prised blacksmiths (lohars), carpenters (tarkhans),

weavers (julahas), potters (kumhars), leather workers

(chamars/mochis) and goldsmiths (sunars), metal burn-

ishers (siqligars), and metal vessel makers (thathiars).17

Denzil Ibbetson, the first official ethnographer of the

colonial Punjab, reported in 1882 that their unpleasant

manners, rude customs, and unclean work caused an

enormous social barrier between these artisan castes

and the rest of society. In the first Punjab decennialcensus report, Ibbetson claimed that the better classes

of the natives, who called themselves such generic

names as Chuhra, Dum, or Nat . . . think it would degrade

[them] to show any closer acquaintance with their

habits.18 The insularity of the artisan castes, which

formed the mainstay of agricultural labour as lower

menials and which were solely responsible for artisanal

production, turned them into a concealed social group.

While the [artisanal] industries of the province are

almost entirely in their hands, an immense deal of the

hardest part of the [agricultural] field work is performed

by them. At the same time, they are precisely the classes

regarding which it is almost difficult to obtain reliableinformation.19

In Ibbetsons customary hierarchal caste order with

the landowning, agricultural, the priestly, mercantile, and

professional castes at the apex the artisan castes con-

stituted the lowest strata of Punjabi society, along with

vagrant, and criminal tribes, the gypsies, and the

menials.20 Given their lower social and economic status,

he considered them politically irrelevant, but ethnologi-

cally significant. For Ibbetson, they represented the great

mass of such aboriginal elements as is still to be found in

Punjab. The empirical and ethnological account of the

artisan castes, including their customary practices and

moral behaviour, was intended to offer a clue to theseparation of the non-Aryan elements in the customs of

the other tribes.21 Flouting a customary restraint on clo-

ser acquaintance with primitive artists, Ibbetson offered

a penetrating account of their evolutionary growth. By

dividing them up into eleven categories, he charted the

evolutionary path of artisan castes, which he viewed as

part of the historical liquidity and modes of livelihoods

of human societies from vagrancy and scavenging at the

bottom [to] weaving at the top. Vagrant, Hunting and

Criminal tribes, which wandered from place to place and

engaged in hunting, scavenging, prostituting, [and] steal-

ing from village to village, are considered by Ibbetson to

be the most primitive form of artisan caste.22 Ibbetsons

representation of the village artisan as part of primitive

culture became a standard description of traditionalIndian artists in their evolutionary journey, which would

appear not only in colonial administrative accounts but

also in the disciplinary studies of twentieth-century South

Asian anthropology and art history.23

The occupational theories of Indian castes contribu-

ted to the emergence of a colonial discourse that sought

to locate the individual as part of a matrix of castes and



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4. Pencil and Ink Drawing of a Punjabi Wood Carver by John Lockwood Kipling. Source: Journal of Indian Art and Industry, October,1887, No. 20. National College of Arts Archives.



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structure that fit their Oriental concept of Indian society

and culture.35 Tomlinson argues that British commitment

to technical education in India was rather limited and was

restricted to developing artisanal industries. He attributes

this to the dominance of Orientalist concepts of Indian

society as traditional and Britains own self-image as a

modern

society.

36

Many early European travellers to India commented

on the intuitive ability of local craftsmen to design and

execute artwork from memory. They were surprised by

the natives immaculate ability to copy from observation

without drawing their subject on paper first.37 However,

this admiration for the oral transmission of Indian art

was coupled with adverse aesthetic evaluations. An

early nineteenth-century traveller, Captain Thomas

Williamson, observed that Indian artists may display

great ingenuity, consummate patience, and often, great

delicacy, but noted that when it came to design, taste,

composition, perspective, consistency, and harmony

they willprove himself to be completely ignoramus

.38

The aesthetic judgments of the colonial officials and art

administrators in Punjab the proverbial men on the

spot entrusted with the task of preserving traditional

Indian art differed little from the fleeting observations of

European visitors. For colonial administrators like Baden

Henry Powell and Richard Temple Sr, all Indian art was

oral and instinctive and the oral transmission of manu-

facturing knowledge was the root cause of the decline of

artisanal industries in India. Even sympathetic observers

like John Lockwood Kipling mourned the absence of

written laws to guide artisanal work, which supposedly

led to the regressive darkness of customary practices

which realized themselves in instinct rather than know-ledge.39 H. H. Locke, the principal of the Calcutta school,

pointed out the hazy way in which witnesses in courts of

justice speak of form, size and color, which posed ser-

ious obstacles in thrashing out legal evidence. While

every other faculty is acknowledged to require training,

the power of seeing should be thought to require none?he rhetorically asked. The habits of confused percep-

tions could only be corrected by teaching the natives as

to how to see before they could be told as how to draw.40

The orality of Indian art, configured through an

absence of drawing, copying methods, lack of perspec-

tive, and monstrous forms of representation in Indian

paintings, was widely questioned in the colonial dis-

course on Indian art education. As objects from South

Asian visual pasts were being hunted for display in inter-

national exhibitions and preservation in European

museums, leading to scavenging in the hereditary centres

of crafts production in India, Indian artisans were

increasingly found to be lacking in mental training.

British art administrators and colonial officials stressed

the essential orality of the process of construction and

transmission of visual knowledge and technical

information, even as they admired the superior stylistic

beauty and craftsmanship of the Indian arts, which were

held up as a model for emulation in the craft curriculum

of British art schools. Despite wide appreciation for the

skills and craftsmanship of the artisan castes of India, it

was clear to British bureaucrats and art teachers from the

outset that traditional karkhanas could not be taken as amodel for salvaging traditional Indian arts. The differ-

ences between modern art schools and traditional kar-

khanas covered much more than their divergent

European and Indian origins. What came to be ques-

tioned were the customary processes and methods of

visual knowledge production and transmission taught in

the workshops or karkhanas through an apprenticeship

system based on hereditary and oral transmission.41 It

was by systematically opposing and displacing the

socially embedded forms of knowledge, as embodied in

indigenous institutions, that the official discourse of art

education took shape in Punjab.

Reviving industry through art: Baden Powell and the

officers of the Punjab administration

As one of those fabled men on the spot officials of the

Punjab Government, who by virtue of their bureaucratic

routine had earned the status of an expert in matters of

Indian art, Baden Powell, a civil servant in Punjab and

the curator in charge of the Lahore Museum, was keen to

share his knowledge of the arts and artisans of Punjab

with the senate of Punjab University.42 Powell had clo-

sely followed its progress over several decades. His

views on the proposed subject of art schools acquired astrategic credence in bureaucratic circles and can be read

as one of the most eloquent statements of British

Orientalist visual literacy in colonial Punjab.43

He built his pedagogic estimation of the Indian arts on

the Orientalist decline theory of Indian civilization made

popular by James Ferguson, which argued that Indian art

had degenerated over the centuries and needed to be

salvaged by expanded institutional supervision by the

British art administration.44 Speculating on the specific

cause of the presumed decline of Indian manufacture what has been called industrial arts Powell attributed

the failure to the oral method of instruction and produc-

tion as practiced in the workshops and karkhanas:

All manufacturing skill in India is wholly empirical; inconsequence there has been no change, no improvement,in any one branch of it; rather manufactures have fallenoff. Whatever change has taken place has done so byreason of models and copies furnished (e.g in the manu-facture of koftgari, cutlery, furniture).45

In Powells formulations, the customary processes and

methods of visual knowledge production and transmission



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were the root cause of decline. They were found to be

inadequate for teaching in Indian art schools. Their inade-

quacy was attributed to oral methods of composition and

transmission and reliance on oral traditions, which were

reflected in their presumed failure to create critical reflec-

tions. In contrast with an empirical and oral mode of

learning and transmission of visual knowledge and skills,which to him was a defining characteristic of primitivesociety in Punjab, Baden Powell advocated arational and

literate mode of knowledge as practiced in civilized

Europe. In his opinion, the school of art at Lahore should

not be a series of manufacturing workshops openedat onceto improve existing manufacture, but ought to require a

fundamental change in the mode of art instruction. This

would involve not only additions to the empirical informa-

tion available to the student in line with the stage of man-

ufacturing knowledge in this country, but also

improvements to his practice . . . [by] knowing why he

works and . . . instructing his mind so as to make his know-

ledge expand and increase:46

It should be remembered that mere empirical teachingof certain improved processes never results in any last-ing improvement: the pupils go away and practice justso much as they have managed to pick up.. . but theyhave nothing whatever in their minds as a basis, whichenables them to reason about what they do, or toadvance from one stage of comparative success toanother.47 (Emphasis added).

What was desired at the school was not mere improve-

ment in techniques of craftsmanship or manufacturing

knowledge, understood as a series of manual and tech-

nical operations, but the acquisition of a set of mentalskills which would impart the ability to discriminate and

classify complex constructions, abstract a pattern, and

account for the observed regularities in visual forms.

These new sets of skills involved the ability to use a

syllogistic form of reasoning, associated with visual

literacy acquired through drawing, as Powell stressed:

I therefore very strongly urge you not to recommend anyschool which does not embrace a sufficiency of theore-tical instructions. . . I would remind you that the theore-tical teaching is far from being unprofitable even astheoretical teaching; drawing for instance; if the pupilwere to go no further than learning to draw (I meanwithout going on to any branch of design-manufacture)[this] is in itself a useful thing, improving the eye and thehand as well as the taste.48

As the central coordinate of visual literacy, learning to

draw became fundamental to the making of colonial

artists. Without visual literacy, therefore, improvements

in technical skills of manufacture could not help promote

the Indian industrial arts. In the context of British state

patronage of art education, the advent of the modern art

school signalled the unofficial closure of traditional kar-

khanas and an end to indigenous art and artists.

The workshop practices at the proposed Mayo school

were aimed at imparting lasting improvements to the

traditional crafts imperfectly taught at karkhanas.

Among others, the industrial arts of carpentry, pottery,

metal work, and leather work were deemedmost promis-ing branches, to be taught by competent workmen . . . to

artisan-pupil[s] at the school. Powell warned against the

error of adopting wholesale, the models and designs

most common in Europe and the indiscriminate intro-

duction of Greek and classical, quasi-classical forms and

ornamentation, as had occurred at the schools of art in

Calcutta and Bombay.49

Draw they must: theviews of a Bombay bureaucrat and

art school teachers

On 24 October 1873, while the plans to establish the MayoSchool of Art as a school of industrial art were afloat in

Punjab, thesecretary of state for India called for theopinion

of leading British colonial officials and Indian art school

teachers in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. He wished to

discuss,among other things, the curriculum of the proposed

school. The Indian art experts who were invited to give

their opinion on the subject included Sir Richard Temple,

governor of Bombay, John Lockwood Kipling, then pro-

fessor of architectural sculpture at the J. J. School of Art,

Bombay, H. H. Locke, principal of the Calcutta School of

Art, Calcutta, and Dr F. W. A. de Fabeck, a maharajas

surgeon who was asked to direct the school only a few

years after it was founded. Although the views of Temple,

as governor of Bombay and a leading patron of the arts,

took precedence over those of junior officials of the educa-

tional service such as Locke, Fabeck, and Kipling, there

was little agreement on what the nature of the curriculum

for art schools in India ought to be. Underplaying the

differences in the interpretations of the functions of art

schools among the Indian art reformers, Temple tried to

forge a bureaucratic consensus with an air of supreme

authority in his note: It was formed before the receipt of

these replies to my enquiries and that nothing in those

replies has at all shaken, while much that Mr Locke has

written has tendered to confirm, the views I entertained.50

The memoranda of these Indian art reformers concur

with the administrator Baden Powell in terms of their

evaluation of the demerits of traditional karkhanas prac-

tices, which European supervision alone could reform in

their view, and of the importance of drawing in reforming

the artisan-pupil. However, the Indian art schools tea-

chers and patron would differ from Powell in recom-

mending an art rather than a craft school for Punjab.

Only Fabeck, the principal of the Jeypore School of Art



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who was known for his enthusiasm for Rajasthani art,

advocated a craft school. Kipling, unaware of his future

role in developing the school of art in Lahore, selectively

responded only to correspondence concerning the arran-

ging of art school exhibitions. Locke drew on his experi-

ence of the art school in Calcutta to offer a detailed

response, arguing for the placement of drawing at theheart of Indian elementary education and for a greater

role for fine art in higher education in the arts.

H. H. Locke cited the curriculum of the Calcutta

School of Art, which he devised in 1865, as a model for

the art school proper in India, which undertakes to train

designers, the men who shall apply true principles of art

to any or all of these handicrafts. A skill-based education

in art school was strongly opposed for both theoretical

and practical reasons by Locke. He considered it an error

to teach the workshop practice of any handicraft in anart

school; ironically, this was something which the Mayo

School of Art under Kipling came to prize. To teach the

natives of this country any branch of art is doing them nogood whatsoever; it is in fact more harmful than imper-

fect teaching in Europe, where students exposure to

exhibitions and galleries could supplement art school

instruction. Locke argued that, for the benefit of the

proper aims of the school of art in India, in the event

of the introduction of artisan trades or industrial arts,

they must be added to, and not substituted for, the sound

and complete teaching of . . . drawing in all its

branches.51 Locke therefore not only presented a com-

prehensive plan for using drawing in industrial art

schools, but also recommended it as a compulsory sub-

ject in all schools in India. Marshalling evidence from the

queens speeches to the British Parliament, the viceroysaddresses to the Indian empire, pages of Ruskins Twelve

Lamps, and Shakespeares Hamlet, Locke outlined his

ambitious plans for developing drawing as an addition

to the proverbial 3 Rs in elementary education. The

general introduction of simple elementary drawing into

every school imparting alphabet literacy would disci-

pline the mind and instruct powers of observation. To

Locke, a proficiency in simple drawing, exact and gram-

matical, could be acquired by a boy with much less

irksome labour than was involved in attaining the

power to write. The habit of confused perceptionmust be rectified through the acknowledgement of the

value of drawing as an educational instrument condu-

cive to the mental discipline and its introduction as a

recognized element in primary education throughout the

British Indian empire.52 He strongly advocated the use of

drawing and the history of the fine arts in university

education, especially in subjects related to construction

and engineering. Rather than being places of scanty

instruction in individual crafts, art schools should be

centres . . . radiat[ing] influences that were beneficialto the entire public instruction of the country.53

Richard Temple responded favourably to

H. H. Lockes recommendations, finding his paper able

and earnest, and rephrased in his memorandum much of

what Locke had said. Temple rejected Fabecks sugges-

tions for a craft school. He considered him not eminently

qualified to give a weighty opinion on the matters

because of hisout of way

location in

an industrialschool [rather] than a school of art proper. Kiplings

memorandum was approved as thoughtful and consis-

tent, and Temple felt obliged to support it. Temple

echoed Baden Powell in his estimation of traditional

Indian art pedagogy, which was instinctive rather than

rational. Traditional Indian art was the result of the nat-

ural instincts of a traditional artisan locked away in the

regressive darkness of customary practice, a quality

which most of the nineteenth-century scholars associated

with primitive art; it was not a product of a reflective

knowledge of the arts.

The art of the natives of this country was instinctiverather than systematic; that it was the result of sympathywith the surrounding forms and colours of nature and adesire to select and embody such forms and colours asgave the artist pleasure not of any reasoning processwhereby the superiority of one combination of lines or

juxtaposition of colours, could be demonstrated as super-ior to another.54

Positing a view of the artist as an organic subject whose

instinctive feeling for love and beauty could only survive

under sovereign rule, Temple feared dwindling prospects

for the patronage of customary art practices: I suppose

that the love of and aptitude for fine art, once abundant in

India, is now only exceptionally met with among the peo-ple under our rule . . . Indeed, the inevitable tendency of

our rule is to repress native genius and originality. While

lamenting bureaucratic marginalization of the traditional

artists, Temple recommended fully fledged institutional

intervention for the education of indigenous artists through

European methods. Casting colonial rule in pedagogic

terms, he concluded: It behoves us, therefore, since the

original instinct is lost, to mould the opinions and tastes of

the natives on a rational system.55 For this purpose,

Temple stressed the need for inviting trained art teachers

from Europe while casting serious doubts on the abilities

of Indian teachers to impart to others what they them-

selves understand, and know, and feel. He also suggestedthat picked men be sent through the Secretary of State to

be Principals, Professors, and Assistant Masters in art

schools, just as they were selected and deputed to other

departments of the civil bureaucracy.56

To translate his view of Indian art into a coherent

policy for art schools, Temple considered it fundamen-

tally important to have asingle curriculum to be strictly

laid down and adhered to in all the art schools in the

British Indian empire. He set out the guiding principles



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of art instruction in the following words: To develop art

and to produce a knowledge and love of truth and beauty:

not to develop industry, or to produce marketable com-

modities.57 Rephrasing it in what he called the educa-

tional terminology of the day, Temple recommended that

the curriculum be gymnastic and not technical, such that,

following H. H. Locke,the completion of the curriculumin the school of art is the point of divergence. Comparing

art education with classical education at public schools,

he expected the art schools to do similar work: offer well-

rounded education in drawing and aesthetics and leave

room for professional advancement in the fields of the

students choice:

So with the students in a true school of art; some perhapsbecome painters and sculptors, and in their case thetraining they have received is beneficial technically aswell as gymnastically, inasmuch as their study becomesdirectly applied to their profession; but even if theybecome builders, or potters, or goldsmiths, still the ben-

efits they have, or may have, received from their instruc-tion in the broad rudiments of fine art proper is large, inso far as it has improved the tone of their perceptions andmade them capable of recognizing what is beautiful innature and right in art.58

The benefits of a school of art were articulated in terms of

a disciplinary control over the mind and body learned

through the correct use of the hand and the eye. To

imbue the natives of India with right ideas of form and

colour Richard Temple recommended a curriculum,

based on a rigorous set of physical and mental exercises

to stretch their minds and bodies. He emphasized that

aesthetics, the line of beauty, the law of preponder-ance, harmonies and contrasts of colour, and the rules of

composition were not a matter of taste or of fancy but

established principles. . . laws [which] can be learned,

illustrated, and applied, and on them practical rules can

be founded.59

For Temple, it was the natives inability to design

through drawings that was the central challenge of

British art education in India. In order to render the

pupils eye capable of delineating as they see, Temple

recommended a curriculum divided into stages of pro-

gress, each involving varying scales of mental and phy-

sical operations which required the coordination of the

hand and the eye. The first lessons were to be directed

towards correct delineations of form in black and white

by means of lines on a plane surface. This would be

achieved through the teaching of drawing on outlines

and shading from flat copies and models first, graduating

to drawing from nature. Principles of perspective were

recommended to be taught at the preliminary stages

through lectures and blackboard demonstrations. With

the visual understanding of forms having been estab-

lished, the second lesson would move to the reproduction

of form in plastic media. A similar sequence of cumula-

tive lessons were to be adopted for the teaching of paint-

ing, defined by Temple as the expression of colour and

form combined, whereby painting from copies would

lead on to copying models in colour and sketching from

nature.60

Industrial art education and the making of the Mayo

School of Art

The secretary of state in India approved the views of the

committee headed by Sir Richard Temple in his submis-

sion to the governor general of India in council on

24 September 1874. He used the following words: The

object kept in view should be instruction in drawing and

designing rather than in mechanical work, the latter being

in fact treated as purely subordinate and supplementary

to the former. The Punjab Government started looking

for a suitable person endowed with enough potential andsagacity to nurture the ambitious scheme into material

reality. J. L. Kipling, professor of architectural sculpture

at the Bombay Art School since 1865, was appointed

principal of the new school in February 1875 on a salary

of Rs. 800 per month.61

From an appraisal of the art educational debates in the

colonial bureaucracy and their final outcome in the form

of imperial dictates for starting a drawing and designing

school in Lahore, it appears as if the views of superior

British officers like Richard Temple, then the governor of

Bombay, prevailed over those of junior officials in

Punjab like Baden Powell, regardless of the relative mer-

its of their respective positions. In the recommendationsof the governor general of India, in line with the views of

Richard Temple, a pronounced stress was placed on

developing arts rather than industry, the complete

opposite of what Baden Powell had separately argued

for in the senate of Punjab University. Temples views

also directly contradicted the recommendation of the

Mayo Memorial Committee and subsequent committees

of the Punjab government to make the school emphati-

cally an industrial one, which was also popular with the

vast majority of colonial officials, Indian landed aristo-

crats, and rulers of the princely states of Punjab, who had

donated substantial sums to the Mayo Memorial Fund.

Kipling reluctantly accepted the official recommenda-

tions for a school of design where the industrial arts

were to hold a secondary place. This was hardly the

type of the school most desired by the promoters of the

movement, he later recounted with an air of resignation

in one of his travelogues.62

Lockwood Kipling arrived in Lahore from Bombay

on 24 April 1875 and reported to Director of Public

Instruction Major Holroyd. He submitted a proposed

plan for the establishment of the Mayo School of Art on



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province became a deliberate expression of the colonial

administrative hierarchy, which spread from the centre to

the periphery. The Mayo School was financed partly

through provincial revenues and the Mayo Memorial

Fund, while district boards and municipal committees

sponsored students from their areas at the school while

financing industrial schools at the primary and secondarylevels.73

The Directorate of Public Instruction made a com-

prehensive plan for the organization of primary and sec-

ondary education in industrial arts for the whole of the

province. State manuals like the Punjab Education Codecomprehensively detailed the procedures for grant-in-

aid, fee, scholarship, and general rules for school admin-

istration in the province.74 It determined subjects, rules of

admission and leave, teachers qualifications, teaching

methods, text books, timetables, buildings, furniture,

etc. The performance of the school was routinely reported

to and inspected by provincial authorities and written

sanctions were sought for the undertaking of any fresh

initiative. The annual reports of the Director of Public

Instruction in Punjab contained progress reports from all

the educational institutions in the province, including the

Mayo School of Art. A detailed break-down of all schools

in the province was given along with tabular comparisons

of the performance and expenditure of each school. This

genre of school reports encouraged strict record keeping,which aimed to monitor individuals and institutions in

the province closely. As official documents the annual

reports functioned as instruments of centralized educa-

tional administration and formed a part of a system of

surveillance and control.

At the school level, careful records of performance

for each student and teacher were kept in daily aggregate

registers, along with the records of financial assistance

and expenses incurred on education and employment in

the Mayo School of Art. In Benthams science of school-

ing, teachers were subject to examination and surveil-

lance by school headmasters and inspectors. As members

of the educational service, the private and public conduct

5. Photograph of Wazir Khans baradari, which became the site of the Lahore Museum and the Mayo School of Art, Lahore. NationalCollege of Arts Archives.



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of teachers was subjected to an exhaustive system of

discipline and punishment.75 The division of time

became central to school pedagogy and detailed instruc-

tions for the regulation of students and teachers were

issued. Every hour of the day was marked out and divided

into separate activities, the boundaries of which were

established not in the unfolding of the activity but in theabstract dimensions of hours and minutes set in the

schools timetable. The Mayo School prospectus laid

down rules guiding the classroom behaviour of the

teachers: All teachers and clerks must be in their rooms

10 minutes before the classes open each day to see that

that their rooms are tidy, and also must stay 10 minutes

after the boys have left.76 The craftsmen teachers

employed in the school were to work the usual number

of hours of their trade. From April to July the hours of

attendance for the students ran for five hours, from 6 a.m.

to 11 a.m., while from October to March they ran from

10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The young boys from the school of

carpentry attached to the main school were taught foronly two hours per day. The school was closed for two

months of annual vacation in August and September. The

timetable for the opening and closing of the school was not

a matter of arbitrary control by the principal, but was

regulated through a stringent application of industrial law.77

Colonial sociology of occupational castes and

Kiplings ambivalence: the Lahore Model

In his autobiography Rudyard Kipling celebrated his father

J. L. Kipling who has mainly been remembered in

history as the lively illustrator of his sons tales of India as a mine of knowledge, and help . . . a humorous,

tolerant, and expert fellow craftsman.. . [and] a teacher

of teachers.78 Lockwood Kipling (18371911), the much-

venerated first principal of the Mayo School of Art and

the English curator of the Lahore Museum, was the first

in a series of South Kensington graduates in India.79

Along with John Griffiths, Henry Hoover Locke, and,

later, Ernest Binfield Havell, most of the British South

Kensington graduates who came to India for employment

were to become principals of the Indian art schools. They

were strongly influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin and

the Arts and Crafts movement, the reigning ideologyof art

education in the late nineteenth century (Figure 6).

The curriculum of the school drawn up by Lockwood

Kipling was adapted from the School of Design in South

Kensington, but tailored to suit the needs of Indian

students. It is as a strong advocate of the Arts and

Crafts movement in India that he pursued the objectives

of the school curriculum: to impart instruction that shall

make both carpenter and colourist more intelligent and

effective, each in his degree.80 Drawing on his teaching

experiences in Bombay and London, Kipling grouped the

instruction broadly into elementary and advanced stu-

dies. In the elementary part of the work blackboard

demonstrations of the first principles of drawing, ele-

mentary outlining from flat copies, and elementary geo-

metry were taught in vernacular Urdu to young boys. The

rudiments of perspective and outline from objects were

also taught. Lessons in reading, writing, and arithmeticalso took place. There was a high drop-out rate from the

junior classes, attributed to the poverty of the students.

With an elementary training from the school, the young

boys could find quick employment in the workshops in

the bazaar.

At the advanced level, studies of Indian ornamental

compositions from objects in the museum, folios, books,

and drawings of foliage from nature were conducted to

make students conversant in Indian design. Practical geo-

metry, based on textbooks used at South Kensington, was

also taught in the Hindi and Urdu languages; however,

attempts were made to employ English terms instead of

Arabic or Sanskrit ones. Modelling from clay and cast,studies in ornament colour, original design and still life,

and drawing from living models were also taught.

Advanced perspective, which was considered a new and

perplexing subject for the Indian students, held special

interest. Since the sons of artisans who demonstrated a

strong aptitude for crafts were found to be deficient in

drawing, the elements of drawing were taught in elemen-

tary classes from demonstrations on blackboards and flat

examples. Practice in drawing objects was added later, in

the senior classes, along with exercises in making original

designs for craft objects, which were mainlychosen from a

set of museum items, including collections from the

adjoining Lahore Museum as well as from historicalbuildings.81

The disciplinary time of the school was divided into

various stages of progress attained by students learning

and practicing a designated craft. Each student, as

Kipling had proposed, had to pass through the first

three grades. In his scheme, instruction in woodcarving,

lithography, and copper etching was necessary for all

students during the first three grades. Once the students

had acquired a facility with drawing in the fourth grade,

they were then geared towards a course of practical

instruction that was in line with their hereditary occu-

pation. It was that hereditary occupation which provided

the dominant indicator of the aptitude and will of a given

student. As Kipling put it, after the foundational courses

the instruction should begin to have special reference to

the work by which the student proposes to earn his

bread.82

For Kipling, one of the principal ways to achieve the

object of the Lahore School (to revive crafts now half

forgotten) was to attract the communities of hereditary

artisan castes, the traditional bastions of the artisanal

industries of Punjab. As an ardent supporter of the Arts



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Art continued to attract large numbers of artisan pupils.

The gentlemen artists were held back in the Mayo School

by the colonial sociology of occupational caste groups

which required modern education in the arts and sciences

to be offered according to the customary caste privileges

authorized by the ethnographic state in Punjab.95 As a

result, colonial art administrators were concerned withapplicants family background, which formed the basis

for admission and scholarships at the Mayo School.

A candidates aptitude for a particular crafts subject in

the school was not a matter of his own volition, but

always pre-judged in terms of his association with his

hereditary occupation. Since boys from different age

groups were admitted to the school in different classes

depending on their hereditary experiences, the efforts to

ascertain their stage of educational attainment began

right after admission to the school. To quote the direc-

tor of Punjab Instruction in the school report for the

year 187677:

Mr Kipling points out that whilst insisting on the essen-tial unityof the artof design, especiallyof Indian art, carehas been taken to keep each student engaged, as far aspossible, on studies within his own line. Thus threeyouths, who are draughtsmen by hereditary occupation,

and who have developed considerable aptitude for orna-mental design, have been kept to such work as would[enable] them to excel as decorative designers of thevarious objects of Indian Industry. . . Two who are car-penters by trade have practiced, beside their own handi-craft, the design of wood construction and ornamentationwith great industry and commensurate improvement.96

Kipling firmly believed that the training of artisan stu-

dents in the principles of their own trade would make

them more skilled than their fathers. The practice of

assigning students to their hereditary trade his line was not a voluntary option, but a compulsory choice

made for the students by their teachers. The training

they received at the school was intended to make them

proficient in their designated trade. In most cases the

students had to live by the choices made for them by

their school masters for the rest of their professional

lives, as was the case with the most promising studentsof the Mayo School mentioned by Kipling in the schools

annual report of 1876. These had begun to exhibit spe-cial technical aptitude in their very first year at the

school. They were subjected to the course of instruction

that best reflected their hereditary trade. Muhammad

Din, the son of an engraver who had made some cred-

itable pen drawings, was assigned to make an originaldesign for a casket to be executed in chased steel. Ram

Singh, the son of a carpenter, was instructed to design an

ornamental drawing-room desk, and was deemed to have

shown the promise of being a very capable draughtsman

and designer in his own craft. One Edwin Holder, from

the Hissar district, was considered too young for it to be

decided in what particular line he is likely to excel.97

However, some exceptions were made, as in the case ofSher Muhammad, a Luhar (blacksmith) who, on the

basis of two copies of encaustic panels of coloured dec-

orations from Wazir Khan Mosque, was acknowledged as

showing a taste for decorative painting. The Director of

Public Instruction favourably cited Sher Muhammad in

his annual school report. He is, the principal remarks,

one of the very few natives he has seen with a strongly

marked vocation for pictorial art and love of the work for

its own sake.98 Most of the students who were identified

on the basis of their aptitude continued to work in the

particular craft that was chosen for them at the Mayo

School (Figure 7).

In this educational endeavour, the colonial sociology

of occupational caste groups became a guiding theory for

the recruitment and training of craftsmen from the artisan

castes. The very prospects of admission and the career of

students from artisan castes at the school were tied to the

putative links with their hereditary occupation. From

the fee waiver granted to sons or near relatives of arti-

sans to the subjects offered at the school, an individuals

inheritance extended or constrained his range of choices.

Once the technical aptitude of a student was defined in6. Oil portrait of John Lockwood Kipling by Sher Muhammad.National College of Arts Archives, Lahore.



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function of lower caste occupations. It was regarded as fit

only for female education, in which it turned out to be a

popular subject, even though, as one of the drawing

masters at Mayo College vainly argued in its defence,

it was started as an experiment for the young Rajput

princes for whom the feeling of art is entirely acquired

and not in the least hereditary. The warrior princesshowed great promise to develop into true artists. The

colonial officials grudgingly allowed drawing to be

taught for some years before the department was closed

due to a presumed lack of interest among Rajput

students.102

NOTES

1. See Nicholas B. Dirks, Colonial Histories and

Native Informants: Biography of an Archive, in

Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament:

Perspectives on South Asia, ed. by Carol

A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1993).

2. The Official Chronicle of the Mayo School of Art:

The Formative Years under John Lockwood Kipling,

ed. by Samina Choonara and others (Lahore:

National College of Arts, 2002); Pervaiz Vandal

and Sajida Vandal, The Raj, Lahore, and Bhai Ram

Singh (Lahore: National College of Arts, 2006). For

an earlier work on Bhai Ram Singh and the Mayo

School of Art, see Naazish Atta Ullah, Stylistic

Hybridity and Colonial Art and Design Education:

A Wooden Carved Screen by Ram Singh, in

Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material

Culture and the Museum, ed. by Tim Berringer andTom Flynn (London: Routledge, 1998). Also see

Mahrukh Tarapor, Art and Empire: The Discovery

of India in Art and Literature, 18501947 (unpub-

lished doctoral thesis, Harvard University, 1977).

3. Ann Laura Stoler, Colonial Archives and the Art of

Governance, Archival Sciences (2002), pp. 87109.

4. Ibid., p. 88.

5. A random list of subjects under which the school

bureaucracy archived and regulated the school

includes admission, appointments, boarding house,

books, budget, building, certificate, circular, confer-

ence, contingencies, establishment, examination,

exhibition, fee, fine, prizes, holidays and vacation,

leave rules, personal files, private orders, prospectus,

reports and returns, scheme, scholarship, stationery

and store. From an unpublished List of Holdings,

NCAA, 2000.

6. Stoler.

7. Ibid., p. 91.

8. Rebecca J. Sutcliffe, Feminizing the Professional:

The Government Reports of Flora Annie Steel,

Technical Communication Quarterly, 7 (1998), 15373.

9. Will you be governed by the Pen or by the Sword?

Choose! was the motto of the Punjab School of

Colonial Administration, carved under the statue of

John Lawrence, the first Lieutenant Governor of

Punjab.10. Sutcliffe, p. 159.

11. See N. M. Kelkar, The Story of the Sir JJ School of

Art: 18571957 (Bombay: Government of

Maharashtra & Sir JJ School of Art, n.d.). See also

Jogdesh Chandra Bagal, History of the Government

College of Art and Craft, Centenary Volume

(Calcutta: Government College of Art & Craft,

1966); Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a

New Indian Art: Art, Aesthetics and Nationalism

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);

Mussarat Hassan, Painting in the Punjab Plains

(Lahore: Ferozsons (Pvt.) Ltd, 1998); Akbar

Naqvi, Image and Identity (Karachi: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000).

12. Tirthankar Roy, Traditional Industry in the Economy

of Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1999).

13. Peter H. Hoffenberg, Promoting Traditional Indian

Art at Home and Abroad: The Journal of Indian

Art and Industry, 18841917, Victorian

Periodicals Review, 37.2 (2004), 192213.

14. See George Birdwood, The Arts of India (repr.

Calcutta: Rupa, 1992), p. 137, on the ill-effects of

Victorian industrialism on Indian arts.

15. Deepali Dewan, Body at Work: Colonial Art

Education and the Figure of the NativeCraftsman, in Confronting the Body: The Politics

of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India,

ed. by James H. Mills and Satadru Sen (London:

Anthem Press, 2004), pp. 11833.

16. The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. by Peter

Robb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

17. Harish Chandra Sharma, Artisans of the Punjab: A

Study of Social Change in Historical Perspective

18491947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996).

18. Denzil Ibbetson, Punjab Castes (Lahore: Sh.

Mubarak Ali, 1974), p. 266.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., p. 206.

21. Ibid.

22. Chuhra or village menials evolved from the primi-

tive state of wandering tribes when they settled in

villages as servants of the village community, and

cease[d] to hunt and eat vermin. Moreover,

Chuhra who refuses to touch night soil becomes a

Musali. According to the evolutionary theory of

artisan castes in colonial Punjab, with changes in

settlement patterns the dietary habits and work



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state: The schools were precisely distributed by

size and rank, as expressions of the correct ordering

of the separate elements the individuals, villages,

towns, and provincial and national capitals in

terms of which a nation-state could be conceived

as an integrated and bounded reality.

74. Punjab Education Code (Lahore: GovernmentPrinting Press, 1910).

75. They were debarred from running any private trade,

buying property, criticizing the government, com-

municating to the press, and political meetings. See

The Government Servants Conduct Rules, 1904,

NCAA, Box File: 19/D.

76. Prospectus, Mayo School of Art, Lahore, 1882,

NCAA.

77. Ibid. See also S. R. Samant, Industrial

Jurisprudence: A Treatise on the Theory and

Practice of Industrial Law with Special Reference

to India (Bombay: N. M. Tripathi, 1961).

78. Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself for MyFriends Known and Unknown, cited in Tarapor, p. 53.

79. John Lockwood Kipling was born in 1837 in

England to a Methodist Minister, Rev. Joseph

Kipling, and educated at Woodhouse Grove,

London. He began his practical life as a designer

and modeller at the Stratfordshire pottery. In 1865

Kipling came to India from South Kensington in the

capacity of a teacher in decorative sculpture at

J. J. School of Art, Bombay. Here he busied himself

as an academic, and, in addition to that, as a

designer of various buildings, planned and con-

structed in a style peculiar to colonial architecture.

In 1875 he joined the Mayo School of Art, Lahore,as first principal. Apart from various duties that he

performed in that capacity, he founded the Journal

of Indian Art and Industry in 1884. He also authored

Men and Beast in India in 1891. He sought retire-

ment from the Indian Education Service in 1893

because of ill health and bade farewell to India for

good. He breathed his last in early January 1911.

See Kipling Archives, Special Collections,

University of Sussex, Box File: 3/11. See also

Arthur R. Rankers, The Pater: John Lockwood

Kipling, His Life and Times, 18371911 (Kent:

Pond View Books, 1988).

80. Proposed Plan for the Organization of Mayo

School of Art (see note 63), p. 162.

81. Ibid., p. 159.

82. Ibid., p. 159.

83. Ibid., p. 160.

84. J. L. Kipling, Report on the Mayo School of Art

for 18761877. Reprinted in Choonara and others,

p. 38.

85. The prejudice in favour of the comparative respect-

ability and gentility of mere draughtsmanship by

which mechanical drawings with compasses is

usually understood over practical works, acts a

minor hindrance especially with regard to clay and

plaster. Modelling is considered to bepotters work.

Ibid., p. 38.

86. J. L. Kipling, Report on the Mayo School of Art for

1886

1887. Reprinted in Choonara and others, p. 73.87. J. L. Kipling, Report on the Mayo School of Art for

18821883. Reprinted in Choonara and others, p. 45.

88. J. L. Kipling, Report on the Mayo Schoolof Art for

18841885. Reprinted in Choonara and others.





91. Ibid., p. 49.


for 18761877. Reprinted in Choonara and

others, p. 38.

93. The principal of the Calcutta School of Art,H. H. Locke, also made a similar remark when he

mentioned that the habit of treating artists and

artisans alike, which is so strong in this country, is

likely to give way ere long. See also Jogdesh

Chandra Bagal, History of the Government College

of Art and Craft (Calcutta: [n. pub.], [n.d.]), p. 18.

Similarly, S. N. Gupta, a scion of the Bengal School

and theprincipalof the Mayo School of Art between

1929 and 1941, complained about the policy of the

school towards artisan castes which gave the school

a bad name. See Report on Artisan Students at the

Mayo School of Art, 192728, NCAA, Box File:

15/C.94. J. L. Kipling, Report on the Mayo Schoolof Art for

18791880. Reprinted in Choonara and others.

95. Although the figure of the artisan had been the

mainstay of British educational and administrative

discourse regarding the suitable boys of Indian art

education, artisans appear at the margins of modern

Indian art historical scholarship as the other com-

pared to the gentleman artists of the art schools.

Based on his selective reading of Indian history,

Partha Mitter prematurely announced the eclipse

of the figure of the traditional artisan as a sign

of the industrialization and modernization of the

Indian economy. As he emphatically stated, the

government failed to see the profound shifts in

the class composition of artists in India; the new

western-educated gentlemen artists spelt the end

of artisans in the art schools. Partha Mitter, Art and

Nationalism in Colonial India, 18501922,

Occidental Orientation (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1994), p. 30.





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18751876. Reprinted in Choonara and others,

pp. 3334.


for 18791880. Reprinted in Choonara and others,

p. 40.

99. The last Indian census to enumerate caste was con-ducted in 1931. See Ram B. Bhagat, Census and

Caste Enumeration: British Legacy and

Contemporary Practice in India, GENUS, LXII.2

(n.d.), 11934.

100. Student Employment in Business and Industry,

19201930, NCAA, Box File: 17/D.

101. J. A. Mangan, Eton in India: The Imperial

Diffusion of a Victorian Educational Ethic,

History of Education, 7.2 (1978), 10518. The

coat of arms of the Mayo College was designed

by J. L. Kipling.

102. See Richard Carline, Draw They Must: A History

of the Teaching and Examining of Art (London:

Edward Arnold, 1968), pp. 12022. While provid-

ing an overview of art education in the British

empire, Carline downplays the colonial intent ofcreating a regimented social order through caste-

based education by attributing the failure of colo-

nial policy to the static Indian caste system: The

teaching of drawing in the Mayo College Ajmer

must be seen against the curious and peculiarly

Indian background of caste and privilege, prevail-

ing in an institution that sought to graft the tradi-

tions of the British public school upon a country

that inherited an entirely different social system.



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