Pedagogy of art and making at the Schools of Art in British India

Tanya Talwar (Humboldt University Berlin)


Art education in British India was not merely a neutral transfer of skills: it functioned as an infrastructure designed to discipline vision, re-order artisanal practices, and align aesthetics with imperial authority. The South Kensington curriculum is often the starting point to understand the tenets of drawing-based colonial pedagogy. This paper argues that art education in India has generated more complex and transregionally informed practices of making. By examining student works produced at the art schools of Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, and Lahore, the paper traces how regional contexts informed and shaped the understanding and practices of art and making. It further considers how these regimes of making contributed to early architectural decoration projects in the presidencies, revealing the entangled networks of pedagogy, artisanal work, and the built environment.

The ‘Sir JJ School of Architecture’ in Its Imperial Context

Patrick Zamarian (University of Liverpool)


 In the early twentieth century, Bombay (now Mumbai) emerged as the largest and commercially most important city in what was then British India. With its rapid urban development offering opportunities for professional architects, the city produced the country’s first school of architecture, instituted in 1913 and, in terms of student numbers, soon among the largest such institutions in the British world. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) meanwhile claimed to promote and coordinate the training of architects across the British Empire. My paper traces the school’s efforts to attain the RIBA’s “recognition,” which ultimately foundered on the RIBA’s intransigence. In contrast to its handling of schools in the settler colonies, the RIBA insisted on unrealistic metropolitan standards from the Bombay School. This did not prevent it from producing hundreds of fully trained architects and thus the architectural profession in India.