As the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore marks 150 years since its founding, there is much to celebrate and even more to reconsider. Established in 1875 as the Mayo School of Art, the institution has lived through colonialism, nationalism, and globalisation. Its story mirrors the changing ideas of art, craft, and education in South Asia. Yet beneath the commemorative glow lies a more complex question: how do the colonial hierarchies that shaped this institution still echo in our understanding of art today?
The Colonial Blueprint
The Mayo School of Art was born in the high noon of the empire. Founded in memory of the assassinated Viceroy Richard Southwell Bourke, Lord Mayo, it was intended to “revive” Indian crafts while aligning them with the industrial needs of the British Empire. The school’s first principal, John Lockwood Kipling, artist, designer, and father of writer Rudyard Kipling, envisioned it as a place to reform the “native artisan”. The project sounded benevolent: preserving traditional skills, improving taste, and providing livelihoods. In practice, it was a system of classification and control.
Artisans were taught not to imagine, but to imitate. Their drawings and designs were copied from museum specimens and design manuals imported from London. Living crafts became samples of “Indian design” displayed in glass cases at the Lahore Museum next door, where Kipling also served as curator.
Here, art education became ethnography. The artisan was studied, disciplined, and aestheticised—but never allowed to be an artist in his own right. The colonial education system divided mind from hand, theory from skill, creativity from labour. These divisions would prove remarkably durable.
Primitivism as Policy
In Europe, “primitivism” referred to modern artists’ fascination with non-Western forms, a search for authenticity in an industrial age. In colonial India, however, it functioned as a policy. Indian crafts were deemed “primitive”, the products of instinct rather than intellect. The colonial state sought to preserve these forms, not as living practices, but as museumised symbols of a timeless “Oriental” essence.
The colonial regime that professed to protect Indian art also defined its limits, freezing it in an ethnographic present
This attitude seeped into education policy. The 19th-century art schools in Bombay, Calcutta, and Lahore all followed a similar blueprint: students from artisanal castes were trained to serve colonial industries and exhibitions, not to pursue individual creativity. Manuals such as The Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details codified Indian ornament into standardised design templates, stripping them of context and meaning.
What emerged was a paradox: the colonial regime that professed to protect Indian art also defined its limits, freezing it in an ethnographic present.
From Craftsman to Worker
By the early 20th century, industrial education had further reshaped this picture. The artisan was no longer a “native craftsman” but a proto-industrial worker, an “underdeveloped” subject to be rationalised, measured, and modernised. Technical drawing replaced freehand design; pattern books replaced apprenticeship.
Yet within this constrained space, new artistic energies began to stir. Students trained as drawing masters or lithographers, like Abdul Rahman Chughtai, used their colonial education as a springboard for modern expression. Chughtai’s delicate line and revivalist aesthetic were rooted in his training at the Mayo School, but his work transcended it, blending Indo-Persian miniature traditions with the romanticism of European modernism.
In this sense, colonial art education in Punjab unwittingly prepared the ground for a distinctively South Asian modernism—one that carried the imprint of both empire and resistance.
Becoming the National College of Arts
In 1958, the Mayo School was renamed the National College of Arts. The change reflected Pakistan’s desire to build national institutions of culture and progress. With support from international advisers, the NCA was restructured on modern lines, emphasising design, architecture, and fine arts.
Yet the old hierarchies lingered. Traditional crafts were reclassified as “folk art”, valuable as heritage but excluded from the category of modern creativity. The technocratic ethos of development reimagined artisans as data points in a national design project. Initiatives such as the Index of Indigenous Design, funded by the Asia Foundation, catalogued folk motifs for industrial use, another act of preservation through bureaucratic translation.
The postcolonial state thus reproduced the same distinctions it had inherited: art as intellect, craft as labour; the artist as innovator, the craftsman as custodian of tradition.
The miniature, once confined to museums and classrooms, became a global medium of resistance and reinvention
Modernists and Masters
The modernist revival of the 1950s and 1960s brought new prestige to the NCA. European-trained artists such as Shakir Ali, Anna Molka Ahmed, and Zubeida Agha championed abstract forms, self-expression, and international dialogue. Their influence was transformative, but it also deepened the divide between “high” art and “traditional” practice.
Within the institution, masters like Haji Muhammad Sharif, among the last great exponents of Indo-Persian miniature painting, were celebrated as living heritage but denied the status of modern artists. Sharif taught, demonstrated, and restored, but his own creative agency was overlooked. His miniature painting was seen as preservation, not innovation.
This imbalance reveals the afterlife of colonial thought in postcolonial education: the miniature painter remained a “craftsman” even when he innovated; the modernist painter was an “artist” even when derivative.
Rupture and Renewal
The NCA’s global reputation today owes much to the generation that came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, when young artists began to revisit miniature painting as a contemporary language. Figures such as Shahzia Sikander, Imran Qureshi, and Aisha Khalid took the techniques of the miniature and infused them with irony, politics, and personal narrative.
By transforming a “traditional” form into a vehicle for feminist, conceptual, and postcolonial critique, they inverted the very hierarchies the colonial school had imposed. The miniature, once confined to museums and classrooms, became a global medium of resistance and reinvention.
Their success also underscores a deeper truth: that modernism in Pakistan has never been a simple story of Western influence, but a dialogue between inherited forms and new meanings. The “primitive” and the “modern” have always been intertwined, each reshaping the other.
Looking Back, Looking Forward
As NCA celebrates its 150th year, commemoration should not obscure critique. The institution stands as a testament to endurance and reinvention, to the creative energies that have continually redefined Pakistan’s artistic identity. Yet it also bears the sediment of colonial ideologies—the binaries of art and craft, intellect and skill that still structure much of art education in the region.
To truly honour this milestone, NCA must turn its gaze inward. The archives of the Mayo School and the early NCA, including its manuals, student records, and exhibition catalogues, hold vital clues to understanding how the institution envisioned its students and how those students, in turn, reimagined themselves. A renewed engagement with this history can help move beyond inherited categories towards a pedagogy that values embodied knowledge, collective creativity, and cultural plurality.
The 150th anniversary is thus not just an occasion for celebration, but a call to reassess what art education has meant and what it could mean in South Asia. For NCA to remain a living institution, it must confront the ghosts of its own making: the colonial desire to classify, the postcolonial urge to modernise, and the continuing struggle to define what counts as “art” in a globalised world.