Crafting knowledge and knowledge of crafts: Art education, colonialism and the Madras School of Arts in nineteenth-century South Asia (India)

This dissertation examines the institution, ideology and practice of art education in South Asia during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In particular, it focuses on the Madras School of Arts, the earliest of the surviving colonial art schools. Established in 1850 by Resident Surgeon, Dr. Alexander Hunter, the Madras School of Art functioned as a mediator of ideas about art and aesthetics between England and other art schools in the Indian colony. It also served as a site for the production of a new kind of visual culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this dissertation, the history of the Madras School of Art has been gleaned from a specific set of archival documents dating between 1850 and 1870 that have received little scholarly attention yet constitute an important point of entry into the early history of a cultural institution on the margins of the colonial administration.; Specifically, this dissertation explores the history of the Madras School of Arts and its intersection with nineteenth-century British art education and colonialism. The strategy of the using the visual past as a model in art education, a characteristic of the larger arena of nineteenth-century art education, prompted colonial art schools to draw on South Asia's visual past from their inception, contrary to Nationalist narratives that claim colonial art schools as bastions of western art education. Further, art schools also intersected with colonial discourse, formulating ideas about art and art education in terms of differences between colonizer and colonized. The intersection of the nineteenth-century art schools in South Asia with colonialism and the larger arena of art education produced a particular notion of the "Indian Craftsman" as the cause of Indian art's decline and the hope for its revival. The figure of the "Indian Craftsman" came to be represented as the craftsman-at-work, a representational trope that communicated the contradiction. The figure of the "Indian Craftsman" is one example of the role nineteenth-century art education played in the production of knowledge in the discipline of South Asian art history.