Re-framing the past: Re-making invisible histories of nineteenth century pedagogies of drawing and re-membering art educators in colonial India

The purpose of this study is to re-frame the institutional histories of two art schools, National Art Training School at South Kensington and the Calcutta School of Art in Calcutta, established during mid-nineteenth century in England and India. This study explores the teaching of drawing in these schools, both from a historical and pedagogical perspective from 1850-1915. Further, the study investigates and analyzes the life and teachings of E.B. Havell, the English Principal of the Calcutta School of Art from 1896 to 1906, and Abanindranath Tagore, the School's Indian Vice-Principal from 1905 to 1915. Together they questioned the colonial methods of teaching drawing at the Calcutta School of Art in the late 19th century, which later led to the Bengali Renaissance, and establishment of a new school of Indian Painting known as the "Bengal School" in early twentieth century. This study raises questions about the teaching of drawing and negotiation of teaching practices in-between cultures of the colonizer and the colonized. Further, by analyzing the similarities and differences between the art training and art teaching of Havell and Tagore, this study argues that the collaboration around ideas on pedagogy and art between the two men can be viewed as a beginning of postcolonial reaction in Indian art education in the late nineteenth century. The lasting impact of this historical moment on the pedagogies of drawing in contemporary India lies at the heart of this historical and cross-cultural inquiry. In a broader context, this study identifies the pedagogy of art as worthy of study, and argues for the need to raise questions about undocumented histories of postcolonial art education. The study will offer a powerful reference point from which present day practices of teaching of drawing and issues of culturally embedded pedagogy in art schools in Bombay and Calcutta can be examined. By re-framing the colonial past, this study invites students especially South Asian students, to establish a relationship with their past in the postcolonial context. It is a historical, theoretical and comparative analysis, providing an opportunity to examine Indian art education from the position of both, the colonizer and the colonized.