From Primtive Artisan to Modern Artists, Colonialism, Culture and Art Education in Punjab
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From Primitive Artisans to Modern Craftsmen:
Colonialism, Culture, and Art Education in the Late
Nineteenth-Century PunjabNadeem Omar Tarar
a
aDepartment of Communication and Cultural Studies, National College of Arts, Lahore, 4
The Mall, Lahore
Available online: 04 Oct 2011
To cite this article: Nadeem Omar Tarar (2011): From Primitive Artisans to Modern Craftsmen: Colonialism, Culture, and
Art Education in the Late Nineteenth-Century Punjab, South Asian Studies, 27:2, 199-219
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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
By closely reading the debates on theart 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 sociology of 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
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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.
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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.
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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.
South Asian Studies 203
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tribes in order to tap into the hereditary potential of each
caste in the service of the imperial economy.24 The Indian
census generated vast hierarchies of castes, which were
considered to be at multiple stages of evolutionary pro-
gress. The stabilityof British rule was perceived to be tied
up with the natural development ofprogress within each
caste and tribe, in which any mixing of the census cate-gories of population posed a threat to the colonial racial
and political order.25
The stress on customary practices and traditional
institutions acquired a strategic dimension in Punjab
due the non-regulatory status given to the province
after its annexation in 1849. To reduce the infrastructural
costs of developing administrative structures in a newly
acquired province, the British East India Company
favoured a system of indirect rule for the governance of
extensive areas, inhabited by wild and martial people in
Punjab with few elements of civilized administration.26
The colonial state in Punjab therefore attempted to repli-
cate the native apparatus by creating an intermediate judicial and administrative structure from within the
population, to be controlled by selected men from the
British Indian bureaucracy. Out of administrative neces-
sity elaborate systems were established to ascertain the
nuances of local customs in all spheres of Indian culture
including law, education, religion, and folklore.27 Being a
part of the non-regulatory administration in Punjab, colo-
nial education created a new social, economic, and poli-
tical order that was carved out of indigenous social
organization.28 The occupational theories of the Punjabi
customary caste order provided a grid on which to struc-
ture the system of colonial education and employment in
the province. Schools acted as training grounds for dis-ciplined labour, so agricultural castes were highly pre-
ferred by the colonial administrators for admission to the
veterinary schools because of their presumed familiarity
with animals. At the same time, caste was constructed as
a racial endowment of physical and psychological attri-
butes. The art administrators in Punjab reserved purely
artistic education for the exceptionally talented Indian
and European only, while admitting the artisan pupils
into arts and crafts schools on a preferential basis. The
sons and near relatives of the artisan castes were pre-
ferentially admitted to the Mayo School of Art, Lahore,
for more than half a century through generous scholar-
ships and fee waivers. As late as the 1930s no fee was
charged to students of the Mayo School of Art who could
claim descent from an artisan caste. Eligibility for caste
scholarships was assessed through references to census
reports and district gazetteers. The social lives and pro-
fessional careers of a large majority of students were
guided by the markers of their census identity, notwith-
standing the fact that most art schools in India failed to
draw and retain much concerning the idealized indus-
trial classes of India.29
The Mayo School of Art and new Orientalism in
Punjab: discourse on orality and visual literacy in the
Indian colonial educational bureaucracy
TheMayo School of Art, as it came to be known,was called
by various names in the official correspondence of the
British Government in Punjab:Mayo Memorial Schoolof Industrial Arts, Industrial School of Art and Design,
Lahore School, and School of Arts. The fluctuating
emphasis from industry to arts, implied in the various
names for the school, marked divergent conceptions pro-
posed for the art school in Lahore. At issue were questions
over the type of art school it should be; its curriculum and
methods of art instruction were required to match the
governmental vision for the commercial and educational
development of nineteenth-century colonial Punjab.
One of the chief imports from late nineteenth-century
colonial India to the Science and Art Department in
London, under the administration of Henry Cole, was
the role of drawing in industrial art schools. The sugges-tion to import these methods had the mutuallyconflicting
objectives of improving manufacture and industry and
informing public taste.30 What continued to be debated
well into the twentieth century was the question of
whether training in design through the teaching drawing
in art schools was part of general education, with the aim
of cultivating minds and improving popular tastes, or
part of technical education, with the aim of promoting
design manufacture and industry.31 Such questions in
turn focused attention on the usefulness of various
types of curricula and methods of instruction among the
British colonial administrator-scholars and art teachers.
Could a single curriculum be adopted in all art schools inIndia or was it better to leave it up to the individual art
schools to devise their own? How much time needed to
be spent in learning the principles of art and how muchof
it was to be devoted to their application in manufac-
ture?32 The AnglicistOrientalist controversy over the
question of the superior educational value given to
the teaching of the English language, which had divided
the colonial bureaucracy and British scholars in the first
half of the nineteenth century, had its parallels in the
official debates on art education.33
The developmental concerns of colonial officials and
art administrators about the application of human capital
to industry reported in the official debates on the art
schools in India were tainted by lurking Orientalist the-
ories of Indian arts and culture as pre-literate, oral, and
non-material, to cite a few of the descriptive indices of
traditional societies developed by nineteenth-century
European social theory.34 As B. R. Tomlinson points out,
the colonial officials and others always stressed the writ-
ten over the oral, the Western over the Eastern, in
devising the educational systems for primary and second-
ary education, and propagated a syllabus and educational
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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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27 May.63 In stressing the need for a workshop at the
Lahore school, he tried to negotiate with the official
emphasis on making it a school of art and design.
Though the principles laid down by the Secretary of
State forbid making the workshop the central feature of
the project, Kipling argued, no Indian school of art can
afford to dispense with it altogether . . . it is only in theatelier that the real power of a student can be justly
tested. More eloquently, he stated:
I can no more understand how a designer is to learnwithout a practical knowledge of the methods of itsexecution than how a man can learn to swim withoutventuring into the water; and if I should say that inIndia, design without technical issue is almost as deadas faith without works.64
His most immediate task, before the building of the
school could begin, was to draw up a list of establish-
ments and materials for elementary drawing and to find a
suitable building to accommodate furniture and drawingtools temporarily. The school of carpentry, which was
attached to the office of the Director of Public
Instruction, made drawing boards, drawing desks, easels,
and tables forthe new school under Kiplings instructions.
The books and casts were ordered from South
Kensington Museum. The possibility of finding a local
building large enough to accommodate the offices, class-
rooms, and workshops and capable of meeting the chief
requirement of a school of art [that] is light was consid-
ered unlikely owing to the local architectural styles.65
Proximity to the Lahore Museum and the proposed site
of the new school were overriding concerns for Kipling,
who cited several different options to temporarily house
the school. These included the building of the General
Post Office, which, according to Colonel Young, was at
an inconvenient distance from the railway station and
was likely to be removed. Captain Nisbet suggested the
site of the old hospital in Hira Mandi near Lahore Fort,
which to Kiplings mind was notoriously unhealthy, and
it would cost as much to make it suitable for school
purposes as a good house in a convenient situation.
Finally, after a long search for a suitable location, the
school was temporarily housed in the building of
Lahore Museum (later remodelled as Tollinton Market).
No one knew at the time that the school would have tostay there for five long years, for the proposed construc-
tion of the permanent building did not finish until 1880.66
The site selected for the building of the Mayo School
of Art was carved out of the ruins of a massive
seventeenth-century Mughal garden built by Shaikh
Ilm-ud-Din Ansari (Figure 6).67 The historic setting for
the school inspired Kipling to conceive of rather ambi-
tious plans for the construction of an imposing structure
for the Mayo memorial school and a museum. It is of
considerable importance that a building intended to be
used as a school of instruction in Oriental art and for the
expositions of its best works should be conceived and
designed in an Oriental spirit, wrote Kipling. He specu-
lated that it is not probable that we could surpass the
beautiful work on Wazir Khans Mosque, but we could
certainly produce something of a distinctive and artistic
character, which might result eventually in the resuscita-tion of a dying craft.68 To design the building he pro-
posed to engage the services of Casper Purdon Clarke, of
South Kensington fame, or Royal Engineer Major
C. Mant, famous for the Indo-Saracenic style of the
Mayo College of Rajputana (now Rajasthan). As befitted
a true pre-Raphaelite, Kipling understood the role of the
proposed architect as that of the master craftsman in a
medieval guild, who would design the main structure of
thebuilding while leaving the ornamental and subsidiary
details for instruction and practice to young draughts-
men, mistris, carpenters.69
To Kiplings dismay, his ambitious plans for the build-
ing of theschool and museum were downsized because ofsparse provincial revenues, and his much-cherished
hopes for the new museum were indefinitely postponed.
The official response read thus: The Lieutenant-
Governor regrets that he is quite unable to hold out any
hopes of any early grant of the government money
towards the construction of a new museum, so that the
design of the School of Art must be treated independently
and with reference to the requirements of the school
alone.70 Not to be put off by the dismal government
response, Kipling worked out the designs of the school
building and museum together such that, although they
were designed and built separately, both appear to be part
of same architectural composition. The construction ofthe school building completed in 1880, and originally
consisted of five rooms on the ground floor and a lecture
room on the first floor. The building was also used to
house the Punjab Exhibition of 1881, for which tempor-
ary additions were made, and by the next year the school
had begun its operations in the building. Ten years later,
in 1891, the temporary additions were replaced with four
large ateliers for technical work at the school.71
Art education was part of technical education in colo-
nial Punjab, which was administered by the Directorate
of Public Instruction (DPI) in tandem with the
Department of Agriculture and Industries. The Director
of Public Instruction, although sometimes a military
man, was usually a member of the Indian civil service.
He supervised the industrial education of the province
along with the principal of the Mayo School of Art.72 The
principal of the Mayo School in turn inspected the indus-
trial schools at the primary level in the province, besides
serving as the curator of the Lahore Museum, adjacent
and attached to the school. With the Mayo School of Art
situated at the provincial headquarters of Punjab the
distribution of industrial schools in various parts of the
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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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and Crafts movement Kipling believed it critical for the
revival of dying crafts to admit students from families in
which traditional artisanal techniques were practiced, as
these were considered most likely to obtain the utmost
possible benefit from the institution. Kipling expected
that, besides the intake from government schools, word
of mouth
would attractthe men of various crafts
to theMayo School, bringing in men with a real liking for their
work and patience enough to follow it up.83
In addition to the students from the artisan castes who
were preferentially given free education at the Mayo
School there were students from non-artisan castes who
paid the full fee. In contrast to the artisan pupils in the
school, the students from what Kipling called the nauk-
ripesha (salaried) classes the clerks and the better class
of people were decidedly well educated and enjoyed
higher standing in the native society. But they held a
prejudice against manual labour, which to him was a
silly prejudice not in keeping with modern progress:
On my suggesting to a student engaged on some archi-tectural details that in order to properly understand thechanges ofform from a squareto an octagon and then to acircle he should get a cube of wood and having cut it tothese forms he should draw them in perspective andelevation, he replied with some hauteur But that isCarpenters work. Prejudices of this kind can only beovercome by patience of practice.84
The social distance between the industrial and salaried
classes that shaped educational preferences and occupa-
tional choices was, to Kiplings mind, against the doctrine
of dignity of labour, which he believed was poorly
understood in caste-ridden societies. The students fromthe non-artisan and agricultural castes that consisted of
the salaried classes were inferior to [artisans] in artistic
and practical attainment according to Kipling, but
excelled in their careers by their ability to write and
speak English.85
As a direct result of the colonial preference for
suitable boys drawn from the artisan castes, who by
natural talent and hereditary occupation were found to
be well-suited forart education in India, the Mayo School
of Art began to be densely populated with students from
these communities. Kiplings admiration for boys from
artisan castes was qualified by a complaint: he noted their
lack of education, especially their ignorance of theEnglish language as their most serious drawback,
which not only impeded their early learning at the art
school, but also made them suffer in their occupational
careers.86 Nonetheless, because of the preferential
admission extended to the artisan castes the fee paying
candidates from the middle classes did not enter the
school in equal number. The colonial policy restricted
the entry of students from the salaried and educated
classes, the much desired better material, in the school.
Furthermore, the low social level of the majority of the
boysdeterred those of higher standing from joining the
school.87 Kipling wistfully concluded that it is hopeless,
however, to expect that in Punjab at present, men of
superior caste or intelligence will, as in Bombay, con-
descend to the potters trade even for the sake of the high
profits that might so easily be made from it
(Figure 7).
88
Year after year, Kipling was to complain about the
artisans poor educational background and their lack of
receptiveness to the efforts of teachers at the Mayo
School. For example, he wrote that it would scarcely
perhaps be fair to bring a whole sale accusation of idle-
ness against the natives of the Punjab, but there is no
blinking the fact that they are averse to regularity and the
orderly habits of industry.89 The disciplining of artisans
through art school pedagogy did not yield the anticipated
results, nor did artisan families step forward to send their
children to the Mayo School. And we have some right to
complain, Kipling lamented after eight years of service
at the Mayo School,that efforts steadily made to bring
Punjab work to notice, and to improve it, have not been
seconded as they might have been by the artisans of the
province.90
Kipling railed against the inherited artisanal work
practices, in which the rule is rather languor than activity
of mind and most would be quite content to sit day byday
carrying out instruction with an obedience which is more
slavish than satisfactory. He did, nevertheless, hope to
reform the artisan students through the disciplinary tech-
niques of the school, as he expected that this mental
habit may be greatly modified by enlarged intelligence
and the stimulus of competition.91 At the same time,
Kipling also praised the performance of the leading arti-san pupils who were responding to the instruction at the
school. Ram Singh, the leader of carpentry youths, for
instance, returned from his vacation at Amritsar, with a
collection of paper casts from the old wood carvings
there, and on another occasion with sketches from the
marble inlay decorations of the Darbar. Similarly,
another artisan student, Sahib Fazil Ahmad, under pres-
sure, brought drawings of architectural details from
actual buildings.92 Disappointment about the illiteracy
and social habits of the students continued to be a sig-
nificant feature of the official British discourse on colo-
nial art education throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.93 However, regrets and refrains had
the strategic effect of reinforcing the need to establish
rigour in the training of students. To Kiplings mind, the
prejudice against manual labour and the ambition to
wear a white coat could only be to overcome by
patience and practice.94
Unlike at other art schools in colonial India, such as
the Calcutta School of Art, where the artisan castes were
outnumbered by what Partha Mitter has called gentle-
men artists from non-artisan castes, the Mayo School of
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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 theart of design, especiallyof Indianart, 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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terms of a particular craft by the school authorities, he
was obliged to follow it obediently in his studies at the
school. There was little freedom to explore a certain
medium or leave it at will, should a student find it unsui-
table to his personal or occupational interests. It is evi-
dent from Kiplings refrains in the school reports that
many students from artisan castes who perhaps did not
like their hereditary occupation chose to drag their feet
when it came to school work. They were castigated as
lazy and sluggish, and for posing difficulties for his
administration, issues which Kipling mentioned fre-
quently throughout the decades in the school reports.
Conclusion
By the early decades of the twentieth century the Mayo
School of Arts had given up its initial objective the
direct instruction of artisans and turned to the develop-
ment of small industry in Punjab. Similarly, artisan castes
were dropped from the categories included on censuses
in the 1930s.99 However, as a concept the census term
artisan continued to reside at the very centre of admin-
istrative calculations when it came to art instruction in
colonial Punjab. In light of renewed public concern for
the development of small-scale modern industrial manu-
facture for expanding domestic as well as international
markets, and the rising concern with fine arts at the
Mayo School, the hereditary artisan did not disappear,
but was reconfigured into the occupational categories of
modern industry. The emerging professions of modern
industry were regimented into the Ibbetson-inspired
occupational order; the definition of practical artisanin the 1920s included an acquired profession or trade
such as tailor, carpenter, mechanic, mistri, weaver, bar-ber, electrical/mechanical engineer, businessmen,
painter.100
Elsewhere in the colonial Indian educational spec-
trum the mixing of caste privileges and distinctions was
singularly avoided. The art of drawing, even as a supple-
mentary subject, became taboo at the Mayo School of
Arts namesake Mayo College Ajmer, a school for the
boys of Indian royal families established in 1875.101 In
Mayo College the art of drawing was considered a
7. Group photograph of the teachers and staff of the Mayo School of Art, 1880. Sitting: Bhai Ram Singh, John Lockwood Kipling, SherMuhammad. Standing: Gravis P Pinto, Lala Lajpat. Source: National College of Arts Archives.
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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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preferences of a type of primitive artisan, a
Chamaror the tanner, evolved because desiring
of rising . . . [he] took to tanning and working in
leather. Paragraph based on ibid., p. 267.
23. Adam Kuper, The Reinvention of Primitive Society
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
24. See Bernard