Colonial governance and art education in colonial Punjab c1849-1920s

This dissertation examines the connection between colonial governance and art education in colonial Punjab after its annexation by the British in 1849. It argues that art education at the Mayo School of Art was part of large project for creating a disciplinary society. It draws largely on archival and printed primary sources for tracing the career of disciplinary technologies of art schools, museums, exhibitions as well as regulatory discourses of colonial anthropology and the folklore, that together constitute colonial sphere of art education.The archives entered the present study both as the source of information as well as the technology of the colonial rule. The disciplinary discourses of the colonial state formed the primary archive for the colonial construction and ranking of indigenous population on the evolutionary scale of "primitive" through the techniques of census and surveys. The ethnological, psychological and intellectual profile of "tribal" population of Punjab along the scale of evolutionary history provided a grid to structure empirical knowledge for vast scale social engineering of indigenous society, including the organization of a system of colonial education for "pre-literate" and "oral" society.The study specifically contends that boundaries between "oral" and "literate" were the folklorist prisms through which the practices of communities and institutions of "art" and "craft", the distinctions between, "primitive" and "modem", "artists" and "craftsmen", "traditional" and "creative", "anonymous" and "individuals", "literature" and "myth", "history" and "legend", and "knowledge" and "folklore" were articulated. The historical contingencies of naturalization of these binary oppositions will be read in the ethnographic project of the colonial state and art educational discourses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Punjab that transformed individuals and social groups into subjects of a particular kind of power through the techniques of discipline and regulation.The institutional career of the Mayo School of Art (from 1875 to 1920s) as a technical as well as an educational institution is located at the intersection of discourses on utility and aesthetics. Through the writings of key exponents of the British craft advocates in India and the administrative discourses of the colonial state in Punjab that had brought the study of "decorative arts" to the forefront of the imperial concerns as well as art pedagogy, the dissertation analyzes the implications of the art school instruction on the production of modern artists and craftsmen and the construction of "customary" sphere and "traditional" Punjabi art and craft