John Lockwood Kipling and British Art Education in India

Author(s): Mahrukh Tarapor

Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1, Victorian Imperialism (Autumn, 1980), pp. 53-81
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3826879
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Mahrukh Tarapor

JOHN LOCKWOOD KIPLING AND BRITISH ART

EDUCATION IN INDIA

IF JOHN LOCKWOOD KIPLING IS REMEMBERED TODAY, IT IS PRIMARILY AS

the illustrator of his son's books. Rudyard Kipling, in fact, throughout
his long life, remembered his father as "a mine of knowledge and help,
... a humorous, tolerant, and expert fellow-craftsman," and above all
as "a teacher of teachers."1 The senior Kipling - artist, teacher, scholar,
and author of Beast and Man in India (1891) - spent most of his pro-
fessional career in India, from 1865 to 1874 as a young instructor at
the Bombay School of Art (the scene of Rudyard's childhood, "a mar-
vellous place filled with smells of paints and oils, and lumps of clay
with which I played" [Something of Myself, pp. 8-9]), and between
1875 and 1893 as principal of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore and
curator of the city's famous museum, immortalized in Kim.
As though to embody in literature otherwise scattered tributes,
Lockwood Kipling and his work are deliberately evoked at the be-
ginning of his son's most finely crafted novel. The opening scene of
Kim is before the Lahore Museum, the city's Ajaib-Gher or Wonder
House, filled with a rich trove of "Greco-Buddhist sculptures done,
savants know how long since, by forgotten workmen whose hands
were feeling, and not unskilfully, for the mysteriously transmitted

Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 34, 107.

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54 Mahrukh Tarapor

Grecian touch."2 Even more memorable than the museum's descrip-

tion is the character of its English curator amidst "his mound of books
- French and German, with photographs and reproductions," whose
courtesy and deeply felt knowledge so impress the visiting holy pil-
grim from Tibet that his parting words express the recognition that
"we be craftsmen together, thou and I" (pp. 5-10). In this portrait
of the gentle, white-bearded, pipe-smoking Englishman who presides
over the museum we have perhaps Kipling's most affectionate tribute
to his father (Fig. 1). Much later, recalling the early writing of the
novel and his father's idea of illustrating it with photographs taken
from handmade low-relief plaques, Kipling was moved to add: "And
so much for Kim which has stood up for thirty-five years. There was
a good deal of beauty in it, and not a little wisdom; the best in both
sorts being owed to my Father" (Something of Myself, p. 107).
It thus seems all the more strange - given the massive and
mounting bibliography of Kipling literature and the Kipling con-
glomerate of family notables - that his father still remains a shadowy
and elusive figure.3 For Lockwood Kipling was important not only
for his parental influence; he was also an uncommon man - Rudyard
called him "a great man" after his death - whose own experience and
experiments in India form a major chapter in the history of Anglo-
Indian cultural relations.4 He added significantly to English knowledge
of the sense and style of Indian art, particularly in the area of tradi-
tional handicrafts. His reports from the field on Indian handicraft
practice were an important source for British craftsmen and designers
in the late nineteenth century. Most remarkably, he opposed the'tide
of Victorian imperialism and its concomitant attitudes of cultural
superiority through his practical efforts on behalf of Indian art. In his
writings and even more in his work in the official art schools in India,

2Rudyard Kipling, Kim [illustrated by J. L. Kipling] (New York: Dodd, Mead &
Company, 1962), p. 5.
3See, most recently, Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling (New York: Random House,
1978); Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, 3d ed. (London:
Macmillan, 1978); and Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (New
York: Viking Press, 1978). Mrs. Alice Lockwood Kipling's brothers-in-law were the
painters Edward Bure-Jones, Edward Poynter, and Alfred Baldwin, the father of
Stanley Baldwin, later prime minister.
4 The aspects of J. L. Kipling's life and career that this article investigates, as far as I
am aware, have been almost wholly neglected in favor of the very limited conclusions
that can be drawn from his authorship of Beast and Man in India. See, for example,
K. Bhaskara Rao, Rudyard Kipling's India (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1967), pp. 18-20, who not only misses much of the whimsical humor of the book, but
is also inaccurate in his references to the Bombay School of Art as a School of "Fine
Arts," and to 1880 as the year in which Kipling assumed his duties at the Mayo School
in Lahore.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 55

Figure i. John Lockwood Kipling and Rudyard Kipling, ca. 1890.

University of Sussex Library. Copyright the National Trust.

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56 Mahrukh Tarapor

he dignified and preserved the bases of native handicrafts against the

often debilitating effects of misguided and wholly commercially
oriented government policies.
The roots of this exceptional career lie in Lockwood Kipling's
early training and experience.5 Born the son of a Methodist minister
in 1837, he apparently derived the impetus towards a crafts career
from a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851, which made a considerable
impression on the young teenager. His first appointment was as a de-
signer and modeller at the pottery firm of Pinder, Bourne, and Com-
pany, in Burslem, Staffordshire, where he worked from about 1851
to 1858. During this time, he also attended classes at the Stoke School
of Art, one of the many hundreds of local schools of art formed in
England in the 185os under the general administration of the newly
formed Department of Science and Art which in 1857 established its
headquarters at South Kensington in London. This was followed by a
two-year apprenticeship under the sculptor J. Birnie Philip, who pro-
vided much of the sculptural decoration for such buildings as All Souls,
Halifax, and the Exeter College chapel, Oxford, both designed by Sir
George Gilbert Scott. Between 1860 and 1864, one can reasonably
assume that Kipling was employed to work on the painting and terra-
cotta decorations of the new museum buildings at South Kensington,
renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899.6 His contribution to
this project was probably not a major one, but his participation in it
is marked by a commemorative terra-cotta mosaic in the museum court-
yard which shows the bearded young craftsman advancing in step

6 To date, there appear to be two major sources that shed light on Kipling's early pro-
fessional career. The first is a letter from C. Erskine to the chief secretary to govern-
ment, Bombay, 3 December 1864. Education Dept., vol. 2 for 1865, comp. no. 49,
Maharashtra State Archives, Bombay. Relevant portions of the letter are quoted and
very ably discussed in James Craig, "John Lockwood Kipling: The Formative Years,"
Kipling Journal 41 (1974), 5-9, and 42 (1975), 5-7. I have followed Craig's dates
for Kipling's professional activities between 1851 and 1864, the period reviewed in
Erskine's letter subsequent to the appointment as architectural sculptor for the Bombay
School. The second is "The Memorial of J. L. Kipling, Principal of the Mayo School
of Art, to Sir R. E. Egerton, Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, 1882, Seeking Official
Status within the Education Department," Kipling Papers, 3/11, University of Sussex
Library. The memorial suggests that the early jurisdiction of the Mayo School was
under the Department of Revenue and Agriculture (see note 42) and that it was only
after 1882 that it became the responsibility of the Education Department of the
province. These sources vary slightly from the account by A. W. Baldwin, "John
Lockwood Kipling," in The Age of Kipling, ed. John Gross (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1972), p. 20. It is interesting to note that the insertion of "Lockwood" - his
mother's family name - seems to have occurred shortly before he left England for
India. The reason for this remains obscure.
6 The South Kensington Museum was inaugurated in 1857 under the directorship of
Henry Cole. The erection of more permanent buildings was begun soon thereafter,
and the art schools (which predated the museum by almost two decades) were placed
at the rear of the main building, later known as the Royal College of Art.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 57

with a procession headed by Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave, the

institution's senior planners.7
Lockwood Kipling was fortunate in both his talents and his
timing. His fortuitous association with South Kensington - indirectly
through the Stoke School and more directly through his own employ-
ment there - occurred during the institute's most creative years. The
185os and 186os saw an unprecedented surge of interest in India and
Indian art in Britain, and much of this interest found an institutional
focus at South Kensington, where the critical and pedagogical en-
thusiasm for Indian arts and crafts undoubtedly stimulated Kipling's
initial awareness of Indian craftsmanship. Yet British attitudes in
general towards Indian art and culture remained complex and often
contradictory in the high imperial period.
In this respect the century divides neatly in 1851, the Great
Exhibition marking, as it were, a watershed in British awareness of
Indian art which was to remain influential as a reference point for
decades to come. There was, on the one hand, the excitement generated
by the East India Company's contribution to the Exhibition, by the
general advantages deriving from Britain's control of India's staple
products and raw materials, and by the possible renewal of the
Company's charter. On the other hand, such feelings of imperial elation
had to contend - a scant six years later - with the shock and horror
of the Sepoy Mutiny. The abolition of the Company's rule in 1858
and its transfer to the Crown had further profound consequences on
British policy in India, for it meant, as Harriet Martineau confidently
asserted, that India now "belongs to us," the English people, and
not to one small group with established commercial interests.8 For the
remainder of the century, educated English opinion inevitably came to
be characterized by an equivocal attitude of attraction and recoil,
finding perhaps its most articulate expression in a lecture delivered
by John Ruskin at the South Kensington Museum in 1859. Obviously
embarrassed by the extraordinary sensuality of India's visual arts
and unable to contemplate them without a sense of religious doom,
Ruskin saw in these only a perverse and willful neglect of nature and
natural forms, the parallel in art of the Mutiny atrocities ("cruelty
stretched to its fiercest") of the previous years. At the same time, how-

7 The plaque was designed by Godfrey Sykes, who died about a year before the design
was executed (1866-67).
8 Harriet Martineau, British Rule in India (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857), p. 3.

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58 Mahrukh Tarapor

ever, he was moved to comment on "news of particular interest" that

was

everyday arriving from a country where ... a great deal of art, and art of a delic
kind [is] to be found. Among the models set before you in this inst'tution, a
in the others established throughout the kingdom for the teaching of desi
there are, I suppose, none in their kind more admirable than the decorated wo
of India. They are, indeed, in all materials capable of colour - wool, marble,
metal, - almost inimitable in their delicate application of divided hue, and
fine arrangement of fantastic line.9

What Ruskin was referring to was, of course, the impact made

in 1851 by the East India Company's brilliant display of Eastern ar
and crafts at the Crystal Palace exhibition. Native textiles, metalwor
and woodwork - handicrafts hitherto prized only by a discriminat
and remote elite of nabobs, sultans, and Indian civil servants - wer
for the first time offered up to public and critical review. The resu
was an extraordinary succes d'estime for traditional Indian craftsma
ship and ability which sent reverberations through the leading circl
of British art manufacture and design. The Exhibition had been co
ceived by the Prince Consort as "a living picture of the point of d
velopment at which the whole of mankind has arrived"; but what
Company's display of native handicrafts graphically demonstrated
judges and critics of the Exhibition was the development attained by
supposedly unsophisticated people whose sense of design, color, and
workmanship manifested a degree of artistic excellence unequal
by the manufactures of most European countries.10 "It was but na
tural," the architect Matthew Digby Wyatt declared, "that we shou
be startled when we found that in consistency of design in indust
art, those we had been too apt to regard as almost savages we
infinitely our superiors."" Ralph Nicholson Womum, author of
prize essay on "The Exhibition as a Lesson in Taste," was a mo
severe critic whose uncompromising verdict was that there w
"nothing new in the Exhibition in ornamental design; not a schem
not a detail that has not been treated over and over again in ag

9John Ruskin, "The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations," in The
Two Paths: Being Lectures on Art and its Application to Decoration and Manufacture
(London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1859), p. 4.
10 "Speech given at the Banquet for Ministers, Foreign Ambassadors, Commissioners of
the Exhibition of 1851, and Mayors of the Towns, on March 21, 1851," in The
Principal Speeches and Addresses of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort (London:
J. Murray, 1862), p. 112.
11 Matthew Digby Wyatt, "An Attempt to define the Principles which should determine
Form in the decorative Arts," in Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of
1851 (London: David Bogue, 1852), p. 229.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 59

that are gone"; but even he allowed that the products of the Indian
Collection satisfied

two conditions at least, which are demanded by criticism, namely a general har-
monious effect of the whole, and such a choice and disposition of detail that the
part never interferes with the whole by attracting any particular attention to
itself.12

A Supplementary Report on Design, written by the painter Richard

Redgrave for the commissioners of the Exhibition, further analyzed
the guiding principles of Indian decorative design and the lessons
it offered for the improvement of British manufacturers. Broadly speak-
ing, these were three: the study of ancient art, though not its in-
discriminate imitation; the observance of nature and natural forms;
and the recognition that ornament must suit the material and function
of the object for which it is intended.13 A Times editorial summarized
the general response:
These remarkable and characteristic collections have a value that can hardly be
overrated. By their suggestiveness the vulgarities in art-manufactures, not only
of England, but of Christendom, may be corrected; and [from them] can be
clearly traced those invariable rules of art, a proper definition and recognition
of which form the great desiderata of our more civilised industrial systems.14

As a result, the Company's collection was purchased by Henry Cole,

the principal architect of the Exhibition, for a new museum at Marl-
borough House, where its variety of textiles, inlaid metals, and native
arms was intended to provide "the highest instructional value to
students in design."'5 It thus formed the nucleus of the later South
Kensington complex which for the next ten years continued to be the
center of new theories of design and art manufacture and the head-
quarters of a school whose primary purpose was "the supplying of
Art teachers to all places which seek to establish art schools."'6
Despite the general ambivalence in British attitudes, it is
hardly surprising, then, that high hopes should greet the creation of

12 Ralph Nicholson Womum, "The Exhibition as a Lesson in Taste," in The Great

Exhibition, London, 1851: The Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Industries
of All Nations (1851; rpt. ed., New York: Bounty Books, 1970), p. xix**".
1 Richard Redgrave, "Supplementary Report on Design," in The Great Exhibition
of the Works of Industry of All Nations: Reports by the Juries on the Subiects in the
Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was divided (London: Spicer Bros., 1852),
pp. 708-709.
14 Quoted by J. Forbes Royle, "The Arts and Manufactures of India," in Lectures on the
Results of the Great Exhibition, pp. 533-534.
15 Royle, p. 536. From a letter of the Government Committee for the selection of articles
for the Schools of Design to the East India Company's secretary, J. C. Melvill.
16 Inventory of the Objects forming the Art Collections of the Museum at South Ken-
sington (London: G. E. Eyre and W. Spottiswoode, 1863), p. 16. Published by the
Science and Art Department of the Committee of the Council of Education.

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6o Mahrukh Tarapor

a series of art schools in India during the 1850s. In 1853 Sir Charles
Trevelyan proposed that a network of British-run schools be estab-
lished for training Indian craftsmen and promoting their economically
threatened industries. India's critical success at the Great Exhibition
notwithstanding, the subcontinent was being flooded with European
and especially British articles and manufactures, many of them tawdry
"Indianized" imitations in textiles and furniture designed to appeal
to the newly anglicized Indian middle class and priced to undersell
native products of the lower classes. As a remedy, Trevelyan turned
to lengthy extracts from the Exhibition reports of Cole and his col-
leagues to prove that "the natives have great capacities for art" which,
given the proper encouragement and training, might offset the in-
creasingly precarious situation of many local industries. The general
proposal was to make
the institution at Marlborough House the model for [a] College of Art. Art is taught
there systematically. I would establish [institutions in India] on that model ....
[for] it is our duty to give our Indian fellow-subjects every possible aid in culti-
vating those branches of art that still remain to them.17

One should keep in mind, however, that the overall intent of this
Education Despatch, like that of Thomas Babbington Macaulay's
famous Minute of 1834, was to advocate the launching of a program
that would "set the natives on a process of European improvement"
in such a way that "the national activity [would be] fully and harm-
lessly employed in acquiring and diffusing European knowledge and
naturalising European constitutions."'8
A series of government sponsored art schools were therefore
set up in the major Indian cities, particularly in Madras, Calcutta,
Bombay, and Lahore, where their avowed aim was to "improve the
taste of the native public as regards beauty of form and finish in the
articles in daily use among them," as well as to adapt to a European
market household items fashioned with Indian design and crafts-
manship.19

17 Sir Charles Trevelyan, "Testimony before the Select Committee of the House of
Lords on the Government of Indian Territories, 21 June 1853," reprinted in "The
Education Despatch of 1854," Modern Review (Calcutta), 1 (1912), 347-348.
18 Trevelyan, quoted in Michael Edwardes, A History of India (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1861), p. 256.
19 Papers Relating to the Maintenance of Schools of Art in India as State Institutions
from 1893-1896. Selections from the Records of the Government of India, Home Office,
no. 356. (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1898), p. 62.
Henceforth referred to as Maintenance of Schools.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 61

Despite their central location, the schools of art occupied an

anomalous position totally isolated from the rest of the administrative
machinery, and their early history is not entirely clear.20 The schools
were located in cities that were primarily the seats of government and
European commerce rather than the great centers of Indian art and
industry. Typically, therefore, their students came to them "after
fruitless experiences of other schools.... without having ever felt the
inclination to attempt any form of drawing or construction," while
the relatively unschooled native craftsmen lived and worked within
their local village guilds at several removes from the strongholds of
Anglo-Indian life.21 At the same time the appointments of school
directors and instructors seem to have been part of a random and
circuitous bureaucratic process that originated in England.22
In matters of educational policy and art instruction there was a
similar lack of direction. Despite the positive impulse behind these
schools, occasioned by economic pressure and encouraged by critical
enthusiasm for Indian design in the wake of the Great Exhibition, the
new institutions in practice revealed a less benign view of native
capabilities, reminiscent of Ruskin's reservations on Indian art. The
Indian art student was considered to be

terribly handicapped as compared to his more fortunate brother in Europe [who

is] accustomed, through his toy books, to pictorial art from infancy.... The Indian
child ... as his perceptive faculties are developed, may see a number of mytho-
logical pictures of the usual terribly grotesque kind. . . . When he commences
his art studies, therefore, he has, in an artistic sense to be taught to see.
(Maintenance of Schools, p. 88).

Appeals for financial assistance from the English public to support

the teaching of pottery, design, and stone and wood engraving were
generally accompanied by reminders that "there are no persons born or
educated in this country to be found available for instruction in the

20 Though sometimes founded, as in Madras and Bombay, with the financial support of
private benefactors, the schools came within the jurisdiction of the local Education
Department, while funds for their maintenance came from Provincial Revenues and
were supervised by the Company's Court of Directors. In general, however, the
schools "were looked upon as little better than expensive fads forced upon Govern-
ment . . . and had to struggle through periods of alternate neglect and encouragement,
according to the individual tastes of succeeding Governors and Lieutenant-Governors,
not to mention Directors of Public Instruction, which made continuous development
impossible." Cecil Burs, "The Functions of Schools of Art in India," Journal of the
Royal Society of Arts [RSA] 57 (90o8-og), 635.
2 J. L. Kipling, "Report on the Mayo School of Art for 1883-84," Punjab Public In-
struction Annual Reports, 1883-84, 1885-86, app. D, x. Henceforth referred to as PPI.
22For a description of his efforts in 1857 to secure a post at the newly founded Bombay
School of Art, see Joseph Archer Crowe, Reminiscences of Thirty-Five Years of My
Life (London: J. Murray, 1895), pp. 230, 246.

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 Mahrukh Tarapor

industrial arts above named, for the arts themselves may be said to be
unknown in India."23 Consequently, antique casts, watercolor sketches
and drawing copies, Gothic moldings and Greek statuary were im-
ported from South Kensington to form the basis of the Indian art
student's training, along with drawing-masters to teach them "many
things not found in their own art ... [and] at least to show how to
draw from nature correctly and artistically."24 The Bombay School
by 1896 could boast that its equipment represented "the best collection
of casts of Greek and Graeco-Roman sculpture that exists on this side
of Suez, and [that] no student [could] go in and out of the place with-
out seeing them."25 The outcome of such ubiquitous and strenuously
promoted models was a statue like "To the Temple": a flower-bearing
Hindu maiden in careful contrapposto stance whose unimpeachable
classicism earned her young sculptor a scholarship to South Kensington
by way of Greece and Italy (Fig. 2). As this example suggests, the
early schools operated largely as vehicles for a kind of cultural im-
perialism in which curiously misplaced models of western academic
art were imposed on Indian students to the detriment of any training
whatsoever in native techniques.
This was the prevailing situation when the twenty-eight-year-
old Lockwood Kipling arrived in India in 1865 to take up the position
of professor of Architectural Sculpture at the Bombay School of Art.
Not surprisingly, he found himself almost immediately in opposition
to many of its policies. Kipling's early exposure to Indian crafts at
South Kensington had shown him the sophistication and variety of
traditional ornamental design; what confronted him in Bombay was
the incongruous and deficient handiwork of students thrust into an
alien art tradition and asked to embrace it as their own. Kipling soon
made a blunt indictment of the results: "As a rule," he wrote three
years after his arrival, "those of my students who have come to me . ..
direct from the native town, without having received any instruction
in the School of Art, are decidedly the best."26 Not only were the
schools centers of miseducation, there was a further irony in the pivotal

23 "Society for the Promotion of Industrial Art, Calcutta [Prospectus and Circular of
Colonel Goodwyn, President]," RSA 3 (1854-55), 752.
24 Sir Richard Temple, Men and Events of My Time in India (London: J. Murray, 1882),
p. 279.

25 Letter to the Editor, Bombay Gazette, 5 December 1896, reprinted

Indian Art and Industry [JIAI] no. 61 (1898), 2.
26 Quoted by J. Forbes Watson, "On the Extension of Commerce between the United
Kingdom and India, and on the Development of the Resources of both Countries by
Means of Trade Museums," RSA 16 (1867-68), 227.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 63

Figure 2. 'To the Temple"

From Journal of Indian Art and Industry, no. 61, 1898.

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64 Mahrukh Tarapor

place they accorded to European instructors and methods at the

very moment English designers were turning for inspiration to the
study of Indian ornament. The counterpart of the Bombay School's
vaunted classical sculpture casts was the Indian collection at South
Kensington, through which many principles of Indian design were
being assimiliated into the general corpus of English design theory
and practice in the 185os and 186os.27 Finally, as Kipling was well
aware, the unrelenting exposure of Indian craftsmen to European
influence was less likely to ensure economic viability than to promote
a rampant commercialism which would prove as fatal to traditional
handicrafts as any financial collapse.
A young and relatively subordinate official could not expect,
however, to reverse immediately the policies of his predecessors. South
Kensington had taught Kipling that India's indigenous styles were
capable of infinite development and ingenuity, and his own convic-
tion accordingly was that "the first thing to study is the actual work
of the country, which alone can give a rational point of departure
for variety of design and improvement of technique."28 His immersion
in such study is evident in the superb series of sketches of Punjabi
craftsmen which Kipling executed for the government of India as
part of its display for the International Exhibition of 1870 (Fig. 3).
Under his supervision, Kipling's students at the Bombay School also
soon began a program of marble, stone, and plaster decoration of
many public buildings in Bombay and Poona. Their decorations were
particularly noteworthy for introducing natural forms into much
architectural ornament in India's official edifices, an innovation which
caused one important government official to salute Kipling in 1873:
I consider you were the pioneer of your art in this country; for, eight years ago,
when I first met you, artistic sculpture of natural objects was unknown in India.
In 1863 an architectural design of mine was said . . . to be 'out of the question'
owing to the introduction of foliated capitals and carving. In 1865, you had, I
believe, performed that which in 1863 had been pronounced impossible.29

In 1875 Lockwood Kipling was appointed principal of the

Mayo School of Art in Lahore, a position he maintained until he left

27As, for instance, in Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Bernard
Quartritch, 1910), chaps. XII and XIII. First published in 1856.
28 Quoted by Lieutenant-Colonel Holroyd, "Report on the State of Education in the
Punjab and its Dependencies, 1882-83," PPI, 1882-83, 1886-87, p. 95.
29 Colonel H. St. Clair Wilkins to J. L. Kipling, 16 May 1873, Kipling Papers. Wilkins,
A. D. C. to the Queen, was the architect of the New Secretariat in Bombay.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 65

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/ .Jf
./ / .' .....- '
/,'- ! II

Figure 3. "Gold Embroidery." Sketch by

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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66 Mahrukh Tarapor

India for good in 1893 (Fig. 4). The institution was founded as a
result of "a large public movement in 1872 to perpetuate the memory
of the late Earl of Mayo, the supporters of which . . . were chiefly
the Native Chiefs and gentry of the Province" (Maintenance of Schools,
pp. 94-95). The Mayo Memorial Fund was placed at the disposal
of the government and entirely financed the construction of the new
building, though maintenance costs from 1875 onwards were provided,
as they were for all the official art schools, by the Provincial Revenues
department. The same year, however, a crisis surfaced in the art
school system which was to identify Kipling through his efforts in
Lahore even more as a pioneering exponent of native handicrafts. The
origin of the difficulties was the Madras School, which was threatened
with abolition due to its evident ineffectiveness -in fact, not one
graduate could be found who had followed an artistic career upon
leaving the school. After much debate, the school was allowed to
continue, but the larger issues raised by the controversy went unre-
solved, and for the rest of the century school policy remained severely
divided (Maintenance of Schools, pp. 62-69).
The essential split lay between European-oriented and Indian-
oriented modes of instruction. Many of the older administrators con-
tinued to favor the inculcation of classical ideals into a "drawing
school" syllabus organized, as in Europe, around the study of the
human figure. But this often led to hopeless confusion, since the
obvious predisposition and talent of the Indian student was for native
themes and techniques. Thus, one instructor expressed his concern
over the dilemma of "carrying the students further without . . . de-
stroying any lingering of native art that might exist, because it would
be impossible, after teaching a student anatomy and the drawing of
the figure to set him down to draw six arms on a single body, or to
study the flesh tones in the green or pink incarnations of Vishnu."30
The way out of such difficulties, argued the younger, reform-minded
teachers, was to make native practices and techniques the basis of art
education in the schools. Such an approach would obviate the problems
of visually "westernizing" the students while also preserving an an-
cient handicrafts heritage increasingly threatened with extinction.
The Mayo School of Art under Lockwood Kipling was the
first to implement many of the more progressive policies. Kipling's
major undertaking at the school was to provide it with a foundation
that was artistic rather than commercial, with the aim of preserving

30 Robert Chisolm, recalling Madras school experiences of the 187os, in "Proceedings

of the Society. Indian Section," RSA 57 (1908-09), 646.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 67

61 s^ ** k

Figure 4. The Mayo School of Art, Lahore, ca. 1907.

The Royal Commonwealth Society, London.

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68 Mahrukh Tarapor

where possible the indigenous world of the Indian craftsman and his
styles of craftsmanship. To this end, his initial measure was to organize
the institution as a "craft" rather than a "drawing" school. Its activities
were based upon the principle of workshop instruction, as in the
local guilds which continued to be the mainstay of the traditional skills
of the Indian artisan classes (Fig. 5). Here the students learned and
practiced ornamental handicrafts, wood and metal techniques, furni-
ture making, and drawing, while encouraged to keep strictly within
the native lines of construction. Skilled workmanship was cultivated
instead of the mechanical routine of the older drawing classes, and
the study of decorative design was stressed where previously it had
been utterly neglected. Although technical precision and proficiency
were emphasized in keeping with Western modes of production, tra-
ditional Indian forms were kept as exemplary models, and the insti-
tute's center of gravity rested firmly on the native tradition Kipling
had studied and admired. The school's woodcarving class, for example,
was organized around his observations of the local carpenters' trade:
They go to work when very young ... carving ornaments in relief on spare pieces
of board, beginning with the dog-tooth notching that used to be popular in
English Gothic furniture thirty years since. From this they are promoted to
foliated mouldings and diapers, and taught to draw the pillar, and all its parts.
. . . In Europe, ornamental carving is not taught to children, but is looked upon
as something difficult and out of the way, and not to be undertaken without a
considerable preliminary expenditure of drawing-paper. ... [In India, the work-
men] gifted with a feeling for design have with this constant practice acquired
a crispness and surety of execution, and a readiness of attack in dealing with
large surfaces and mouldings, which is of the first importance in wood-cutting,
which to be done well should be done 'at once.'31

Kipling's program at Lahore at once identified him as a uniquely

progressive art administrator in India, while at the same time it
allied him with contemporary design currents in England. His ideo-
logical affinity with William Morris and other leading members of
British design became particularly evident around the time of a new
international exhibition intended as a successor to the Great Exhibi-
tion. The Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878, held three years after
Kipling assumed his duties at the Mayo School, included an Indian
pavilion of which Kipling was appointed to supervise the exhibits.
The critical response to the Indian wares, however, was far less happy
than at the Exhibition of 1851; indeed, it was precisely in comparison
with the latter's standards that the Indian display in Paris suffered. Tra-
ditional Indian pottery, for example, which in 1851 had taught English
craftsmen the art of representing natural objects in decoration in

1 J. L. Kipling, "Punjab Wood Carving," JIAI, no. 4 (1886), 3.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 69

'il

--" . A

Figure 5. Woodcarving Workshop at the Mayo School, ca. 1907.

The Royal Commonwealth Society, London.

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70 Mahrukh Tarapor

a strictly conventional manner, in 1878 was represented by extremely

mediocre products from the Indian schools of art. George Birdwood,
an eminent British civil servant whose long career in India had made
him an early champion of the country's decorative arts, was also the
author of the official Handbook to the British Indian Section of the
Paris Exhibition in which he bluntly condemned the offensive practice
of applying designs and colors indigenous to certain areas of India
to an assortment of shapes and forms taken "neither from Eastern nor
Western India, but from Chinese sugar jars, Japanese flower vases,
and English jam and pickle pots."32
Indian carpets, which had been in considerable demand in
England after 1851, had met with a similar fate. To increase produc-
tion, the Indian government had devised a plan of jail manufacture
whereby reformed criminals were set to work under the energetic
supervision of military officers. Less expensive materials were supplied,
patterns were crudely copied from Persian and European books, and
cheap aniline dyes were obtained from the jail medical stores. To
compound the harm, these penal products began to influence carpet
making elsewhere. "The jails," Kipling wrote, 'have set a pattern
which is followed too closely by industrial schools. This type is the
design known as 'old shawl,' an equal and formless sprinkling of some-
what hot colour all over the field. ... The slavish and spiritless copying
of both jails and industrial schools does not seem to promise much
for the future."33 Despite his own efforts to counteract this trend by
setting up "carpet-pattern drawing" classes in which "the patterns have
to be carefully worked out on paper divided into minute squares, each
representing a stitch" (PPI, app. D, xii), the Indian carpet trade be-
tween 1851 and 1878 had almost died out beyond every hope for its
revival.34
For men like William Morris and other leading designers in
England, such alarming deterioration in India's local industries could
hardly be counterbalanced by the dazzling wealth also displayed at
the Paris Exhibition - the private jewelry collections, the lavish gifts
made to the Queen by local princes and rajahs, and the endless scien-
tific samples of India's staple products and raw materials. Against this
opulence, the degeneration of native handicrafts seemed even more
stark and disturbing. Morris's reading of Birdwood's Paris Handbook,
as well as his own scrutiny of the gifts presented to the Prince of
32George Birdwood, Handbook to the British Indian Section (London and Paris:
Offices of the Royal Commission, 1878), p. 102.
33 J. L. Kipling, "The Industries of the Punjab," JIAI, no. 20 (1888), 39.
34 For a very similar decline in the Kashmir shawl trade, see John Irwin, The Kashmir
Shawl (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1973), pp. 15-18.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 71

Wales during his visit to India the same year, called forth his most
explicit statements on Indian art, at a lecture before the Birmingha
Society of Arts early in 1879. The finest craft work of the country
he commented,

is fast disappearing before the advances of Western conquest and commerce - fa

and everyday faster. While we are met here in Birmingham to further the sprea
of education in art, Englishmen in India are, in their short-sightedness, actively
destroying the very sources of that education. Jewelry, metalwork, pottery, calic
printing, brocade-weaving, carpet-making- all the famous and historical arts
the great peninsula - have been for so long treated as matters of no importance
to be thrust aside for the advantage of any paltry scrap of so-called commerce.3

These sentiments found even stronger expression a few months late

in an eloquent letter addressed to George Birdwood by Morris, Phili
Webb, Norman Shaw, Walter Crane, and several other prominen
artists later associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement, on t
subject of the Indian display in Paris. In effect a forceful plea f
the preservation of Indian handicrafts, the letter blamed their l
mentable deterioration on "the manner in which they are now being
dealt with by Europeans that are brought in contact with the Asiat
workmen," a statement that was as much a condemnation of the art
school policies as of the government's commercial exploitation of th
country's village crafts.36 Birdwood, needless to say, was wholly in
sympathy with the concerns voiced in Morris's letter, echoing them
precisely in his own guidebook and concluding in no uncertain term
that "it is not for Europeans to establish schools of art in a country, the
productions of whose remote districts are a school of art in themselve
far more capable of teaching than of being taught" (Handbook
p. 103).
Morris and Birdwood represented a new stage of concern in
Britain for Indian design practice. Where Cole and the older group
of South Kensington designers had focused their attention largely on
studying and analyzing Indian patterns, color, and motifs, Birdwood
went beyond these formal concerns to attribute the excellence of Indian
handicrafts specifically to the country's traditional social structure.37
In stressing the role' of the Hindu community guilds which fostered
the accumulation of craft skill and its transference from one generation
to the next, Birdwood was in effect encouraging the younger genera-
tion of English artists, themselves the organizers of guilds and work-
35 William Morris, "The Art of the People," in The Collected Works of William Morris,
24 vols. (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910-15), XXII, p. 36.
36 William Morris et al. to George Birdwood, 1 May 1879, reprinted in JIAI, no. 65
(1899), 51.
37 For a fuller exposition of Birdwood's ideas, see his major work, The Industrial Arts
of India (1880; rpt. ed., New Delhi: Idarah-I Adibayat-I Deli, 1974).

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72 Mahrukh Tarapor

shops, to look to India for a living tradition in the decorative arts.

The heart of the concordance between the two men was the recog-
nition that mechanical industry had eliminated fine work both in
England and in India, but to Morris's vision of a "decorative, noble,
popular" order of things in life and art, Birdwood brought the reality
of India's preindustrial culture, threatened by British commercialism
but not yet destroyed.
The critiques of Morris and Birdwood identify precisely the
trends Lockwood Kipling's new program at Lahore had set out to
rectify. Its organization as a "craft" school, principles of workshop
instruction, and traditional native techniques were intended to estab-
lish the Mayo School as an outpost against further encroachments of
the vulgar commerce Morris deplored. Moreover, Birdwood's endorse-
ment of the guild system here found formal embodiment under the
official auspices of a government institution. In short, Kipling's col-
laboration with Birdwood in Paris, his participation in Birdwood's
important lecture on "Indian Pottery at the Paris Exhibition" before
the Royal Society of Arts (February 1879), and his exposure to the
dynamic impetus of Morris, all combined to reinforce his conclusions
about the art school program already made evident by his own experi-
ences in India.

The originality of Kipling's methods is particularly noteworthy

when contrasted with the government's response to such critiques
as Morris's. The official response took the form of a state museum
system and a new journal, each of which illustrated the primarily
commercial concerns of the imperial administration. So much was
evident at least from a government resolution of 1883 that "collections
should be made to fulfil more thoroughly than hitherto the important
purposes for which they were made, namely, among other things, the
improvement in art manufactures, and the promotion of trade in art
manufacturers."38 To this end it was decided to organize in India's pro-
vincial capitals a system of "trade-museums" or "sample rooms" in
which the best examples of the region's craftsmanship were to be dis-
played, each under the directorship of a committee whose secretary
was the principal of the local school of art. An Indian Art Journal was
also to be issued quarterly to publish accounts of "the Art Manu-
factures of India, considered in the first place in their relations to the
history of the country and the daily life of the people, and in the
second as to possible European applications and uses and to the

3 "Resolution on Museums and Exhibitions," in "Proceedings of the Government of

India, Department of Revenue and Agriculture, Calcutta, March 14, 1883," JIAI,
no. i (1886), 1.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 73

extension of trade."39 Despite their local affiliations, however,

the museums and the journal fell under the national administrat
the Department of Revenue and Agriculture rather than the Bo
Education, providing yet another index of their trade rathe
cultural status.
Such steps could hardly reassure critics like Birdwood,
later deplored the fact that museums and art schools in India ha
"debased to the status of commercial factories."40 Equally unflat
was the reaction of Rudyard Kipling himself, who contrasted t
tractive and effective organization of the privately run Jaipur M
with its miserable government counterparts: "our starved barn
are supposed to hold the economic exhibits not of little States,
great Provinces," where labels are bungled, cases are warp
cracked, and the curator's office is "a shed or a bath-room, or a
box partitioned from the main building."41
An important exception among government museums, how
was the Central Museum at Lahore, directed by his father,
Rudyard Kipling himself had once acted as an unpaid deputy cu
for six weeks.42 Under his father's able curatorship between 18
1893, the museum could boast a large and varied Textile Section
an Industrial Art Department which displayed "actual specim
models and photographs of artizans showing the stages of man
ture, materials and designs [of] all the arts and crafts of the P

9 Sir Edward C. Buck, in the preface to JIAI, no. 1 (1886), ii. Sir Edward Buck was
secretary to the government of India, Department of Revenue and Commerce. Con-
temporary references to the journal frequently contradict each other as to the dates
of its earliest publications. I incline to the view that the first issue appeared in 1886,
though a report ("Address of the President of the Art Conference held at Lahore,
January 1, 1894," in Maintenance of Schools, p. 20) states that it was published "by
Mr. Griggs of London with great regularity every quarter since 1884," and that
"the question of editing such a journal, in cooperation with the publisher, is one that
requires consideration, as at present Mr. Griggs acts for the most part in both capaci-
ties." At the same time, J. L. Kipling's "Report on the Mayo School of Art for 1885-86,"
reads: "The Journal of Indian Art has passed from my hands into those of Sir
George Birdwood, and the present series of monthly issues will be devoted to the
illustration of objects in the Indian Courts of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition."
The title of the journal was expanded, probably around 1890, to read Journal of
Indian Art and Industry. For convenience's sake, I have chosen to refer to it only
by its later title.
40 "Proceedings of the Society. Indian Section," RSA 57 (1908-09), 643.
41 Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (New York: Doubleday, 1923),
PP. 33-34.

42 The museum was founded in 1864 as a result of the first Punjab Exhibition and was
intended to house the agricultural products of the province as well as its arts and
manufactures. With public funds, a new museum building was erected in 1890. See
Syad Muhammad Latif, Lahore: Its History, Architectural Remains and Antiquities,
with an account of its Modern Institutions, Inhabitants, Their Trade, Customs, etc.
(Lahore: New Imperial Press, 1892), who adds: "The Mayo School of Art adjoins
the Museum and Technical Institute, and is indeed part of the same architectural
composition, the whole group having been designed by the Principal of the School
assisted by Bhai Ram Singh . . . of Lahore" (p. 274).

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74 Mahrukh Tarapor

. . [and] examples from other provinces and countries."43 This was

also the museum of Kim, with its "hundreds of pieces, friezes of figures
in relief, fragments of statues and slabs crowned with figures that had
encrusted the brick walls of the Buddhist stupas and viharas of the
North Country and now, dug up and labelled, made the pride of the
Museum" (p. 5). That its Department of Archaeology and Antiquities
in fact had made the Lahore Museum an exceptionally rich storehouse
of recent finds in the Greco-Roman art of Gandhara is amply confirmed
by a fifteen-page Descriptive List of Photographic Negatives of Bud-
dhist Sculptures in the Lahore Central Museum published by Lock-
wood Kipling in 1889.44 Of special interest is also another little-known
essay by him on "The Classical Influence in the Architecture of the
Indus Region, and Afghanistan," in which he may be said to have
struck the first small blow at the popular fallacy that attributed all
Indian art to Greek, Roman, or Byzantine influences. Such theories
of imitation, Kipling argued, failed to "explain precisely the most
wonderful and difficult points of the Gandharan sculptures," admit-
tedly the products of a hybrid school, but testimonies nonetheless "to
the existence through several centuries of a high state of civilisation
. . and a marvellous development of a faith of which they are the
only vestige now left in the land."45
Whether Kipling's administrative duties as art school director,
exhibition organizer, and curator of a rapidly expanding museum ever
also included the editorship of the Journal of Indian Art and Industry
is uncertain, but his numerous contributions to its earlier issues are
yet another reminder of the range of his interests and activities on
behalf of Indian art. He wrote authoritatively on subjects as diverse
as Punjab wood carving, rustic ornamentation, Indian ivory carving,
Mooltan pottery, Burmese silver work, and Punjab cotton prints, but

43 Colonel T. Holbein Hendley, "Indian Museums," JIAI, no. 125 (1914), 47.
4I have only been able to locate one copy of this list, published by the Punjab Govern-
ment Press in Lahore; it is in the State Paper Room of the British Library. The
Lahore Museum, because of its proximity to areas being excavated by Alexander
Cunningham (director of the Archaeological Survey of India, 1861-85) and his suc-
cessor James Burgess (director of the survey till 1901), was very naturally made
the official repository of sculptures and coins discovered in the ancient Gandhara
country, today the northwest Indian frontier provinces and Pakistan.
5 J. L. Kipling, "The Classical Influence in the Architecture of the Indus Region, and
Afghanistan," Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 1 (1894), 138.
Kipling's essay was in part a response to an earlier paper by the historian Vincent
Smith in which the Gandharan sculptures were declared to be "only echoes of the
second-rate Roman art of the third and fourth centuries," ("Graeco-Roman Influence
on the Civilisation of Ancient India," Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 68
[1889], 173). Later researches (for example, A. K. Coomaraswamy's History of
Indian and Indonesian Art (New York: Weyhe, 1927) were to prove the accuracy of
Kipling's early insights, and it is to his credit that his was among the earliest efforts
to evaluate India's fine arts on their own intrinsic merits rather than by the classical
standards of the West.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 75

the common focus was always the traditional characteristics of the

crafts and their methods of production.46 In 1886, for example, h
published a detailed and scholarly account of "The Brass and Coppe
ware of the Punjab, and Cashmere," noting as he did so that "to th
Indian Department of the 1871 Exhibition, six articles only were c
tributed, and in the elaborate catalogue of objects of Indian Art, com
piled by Lieutenant H. H. Cole, R. E., in 1874, not one is mentioned
while Mr. B. H. Baden-Powell, in his Handbook of Punjab Manuf
tures, describes the contributions to this class in the Lahore Exhib
tion of 1864 as uninteresting." Yet, Kipling argued, "no Europe
process of chasing or stamped ornamentation gives so much richne
for the same amount of money," while there was not a little irony
the fact that "the decorative stand-by of [English] designers
India] is imported English cast-iron, painted with bronze powder o
covered with tinsel."47 He was quick to recognize also that misguid
art school policies were not the only impediments in the way o
revival of local industries:

The noble and wealthy among the natives delight in trivial feats of minute work-
manship, which it were better never to attempt, such as cutting a solid piece of
ivory into a horse-tail chauri or fly-flap, each strand separate . . . while the
European is content to buy small wares which have an Oriental air and are clean
in execution. The indiscriminate purchases of the yearly increasing number of
tourists, and the entire absence of any taste or knowledge of art, combined with
the unblushing rapacity of the Hindu dealers who serve them, perpetuate a series
of inanities which have neither invention, variety nor charm. The artist is seldom
seen by Europeans, but those who know him best are persuaded that he is capable
of good design if it were demanded from him.48
Kipling's career in India was in fact a fruitful oscillation between
theory and practice, interpretive criticism and artistic creation, best
illustrated perhaps in his involvement with Indian architecture.
His major statement on the subject was the article "Indian
Architecture of Today" (1886), a study which stands out both for
the originality of its ideas and for the new directions it suggested for
the study of Indian art.49 The subject itself marked a departure from
the prescribed concerns of the art schools, which were conventionally
limited to the country's minor arts. But one should bear in mind that
the 187os and 188os in India saw a brilliant phase of activity in which
the pioneering architectural and archaeological investigations of men
like James Fergusson, Alexander Cunningham, and James Burgess over-
4 See JIAI, nos. 3, 4, 6, 7, io, 14 (1886), and nos. 19, 20, 22, 24 (1888), for a repre-
sentative selection of Kipling's writings.
47 J. L. Kipling, "The Brass and Copperware of the Punjab, and Cashmere," JIAI, no. 1
(1886), 7-8.
48J. L. Kipling, "Indian Ivory Carving," JIAI, no. 7 (1886), p. 53.
49 J. L. Kipling, "Indian Architecture of Today," JIAI, no. 3 (i886), 1-5.

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76 Mahrukh Tarapor

lapped, and in the course of which the foundations for the historical
study of Indian architecture were laid.50
Kipling's ideas on architecture were animated by a conception
of the subject and its artistic importance which reflected many of the
progressive attitudes evident in England over the previous decades.
Ruskin in particular had made popular the notion of seeing in archi-
tecture the living index of a people's capacity for art and had stressed
its organic interrelationship with the minor arts. Fergusson had drawn
attention to the fact that architecture in India was still "a living art ...
[with] buildings as important in size as our medieval cathedrals" and
therefore necessitating more organized study.51 "Indian Architecture
of Today" reflects similar ideas in turning away from the slavish imi-
tations of British styles often favored by wealthy Indians and instead
directing attention back to India's native building traditions, to the
"domestic architecture of the country . . . to form a just idea of the
present state and future prospects of Indian design as a living force"
(p. 1). More significant was Kipling's thrust against the monopoly
which the Indian Public Works Department in effect exercised over
architectural design in the country. That such a department, with its
purely engineering expertise and its responsibility for road, canal, and
railroad construction, should also have control over architectural
design, Kipling found an intolerably misguided policy:
The highly centralised departmental system which prescribes the form of all
buildings in one uniform pattern is fatal to right movement in art, while measures
which develop local intelligence, and which, leaving a district under the guidance
of its own natural leaders to form its own projects and employ its own agency,
relieve it from the necessity of submitting designs for departmental sanction,
may give free play to the skill and fancy of the native craftsman in his own line
(P. 5).

With architecture properly belonging to the domain of art rather

than public works, Kipling criticized the ineptitude of an official policy
which sent all students of architecture to the government's engineering
institute at Roorkee, while local schools and colleges ignored "the
matchless art of the land" (p. 2). The lack of progress in this area must
have been the more galling to Kipling since he believed firmly in the
creative and assimilative capacities of native artisans, given only a
minimum of instruction. He was convinced that if a local craftsman
were provided with only very elementary plans and guidelines, these

"O See, in particular, Alexander Cunningham, Archeological Survey of India Reports

1862-67; James Fergusson, The History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (London:
John Murray, 1876); and James Burgess and James Fergusson, Cave Temples of
India (London: Allen, 1880).
61James Fergusson, "On the Study of Indian Architecture," RSA 15 (1866-67), 75.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 77

"might be left to him with the certainty that in some way, at presen
unforeseen, foreign elements would be absorbed and transfused into
something rich and strange" (p. 2). A similar conviction underlying
all of Kipling's writings was his unshakeable confidence in the craft
man's ability to adapt his designs to new functions without sacrificin
either artistry or utility. The problem was the common foreign as-
sumption that Indian design somehow was inflexibly wedded to in-
digenous needs and uses alone:
Unfortunately, it is not given to all persons of taste to perceive that, while per
suading an Indian workman to fashion his ware to European uses, it is by no mea
necessary to compel him to copy European design. That all these uses can b
fulfilled with strict adherence to the plastic and readily-adapted elements o
Oriental decoration, and with no restraint on Indian fancy, is a self-evident
proposition, but it is also one which awaits general and conclusive demonstr
tion.
("Brass and Copperware," p. 7).
It was certainly to provide just such a demonstration tha
Kipling directly involved his students in several of his most importa
final commissions on buildings, completed between the publicati
of "Indian Architecture of Today" and his final departure from Ind
in 1893. The first was a request to design in the Indian style a b
liard room in the house of Bagshot Park belonging to the duke o
Connaught, who had served as Bombay Commander in the Briti
army. The Bagshot room had furniture and elaborate wood carvings
in the eighteenth-century Punjab style, designed and executed in th
Mayo school workshops and brought for assembly to England when
the duke and duchess returned from India in 1890. They were pr
sumably satisfied, for Kipling had impressed the duke's senior advise
(and intermediary on the commission, Sir Howard Elphinstone
whose daughter later recalled that "few Englishmen can ever hav
understood Indian art better than Rudyard Kipling's father."52
This success led to an even more prestigious assignment throug
the duke's mother. Queen Victoria's diary entry dated 22 August 18
records that

I went with Louise, Arthur [the duchess and duke of Connaught], Louisechen
and Mr. Kipling (a gentleman Arthur knows well, who is at the head of the
School of Art at Lahore, and who arranged things for him) to the new buildin
I want Mr. Kipling to design the decoration of the interior of the new room, wh
is to be Indian. We agreed upon what was to be done.... 53

The Queen's new room was the Durbar Room at Osborne House
completed in 1892. In this case Kipling delegated even more authorit
5a Mary McClintock, The Queen Thanks Sir Howard (London: J. Murray, 1945), p. 247.
63 Quoted in a letter from Owen Morshead, Librarian, Windsor Castle, Berkshire, to
Lord Baldwin, 31 May 1945, Kipling Papers, 1/23.

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78 Mahrukh Tarapor

to native craftsmen: here a certain Ram Singh, who designed and

supervised almost the entire decoration of the room, while keeping
Kipling abreast of developments through a meticulously written cor-
respondence to India. He informed Kipling equally of design changes
by royal request and of tangible expressions of royal approval:
The Queen is very much pleased. ... I have also designed perforated ventilators
for the room and lamp stands for light and hanging lamp for Bay Window in
centre of arch .... The Princess Louise wants the Electric Light in the room but
the Queen does not like it. ... 54

Kipling described the room in a letter as "a sort of Hinduized version

of the work of the Akbar period. They wanted a music gallery at one
end, and this gives us an opportunity for some pretty screen work
in both wood and plaster."55 The room accommodated some sixty feet
of heavily carved teak, richly ornamented ceiling and walls, paintings,
Buddha figurines, and a large sculpted peacock over the fireplace
(Fig. 6). Aside from its impressive splendor, moreover, the room pro-
vided a fitting summary to Kipling's thirty years in India: a royal
commission completed the year before he said farewell to India, the
Durbar Room embodied and perpetuated Lockwood Kipling's un-
swerving faith in the abilities and traditions of the Indian craftsman.
Yet if this commission seems to crown Kipling's career with the
seal of royal approval and patronage, it should not obscure how much
that career had been one of consistent opposition to official policy in
India. Kipling played a vital and pioneering role by offering, at a
critical historical moment, an alternative path for Indian artistic de-
velopment. In the midst of commercial expansion and mechanical
standardization, he drew attention to India's traditional, preindustrial
culture. Within an entrenched and derivative education system, Kip-
ling was among the first to advocate the revival of Indian handi-
crafts based on training in native techniques. His example also sparked
on occasion similar efforts by Englishmen in other areas of art. One
prominent official, F. S. Growse, for instance, acknowledged adopting
the principles which "inspired Mr. Kipling in his admirable adminis-
tration of the Mayo School" in an effort to alter the unimaginative
official architecture of his province.56 He proudly reported that a
locally financed and executed building program had transformed the

4 Ram Singh to J. L. Kipling, dated Osborne House, 25 February 1892, Kipling Papers,
1/15.
55J. L. Kipling to Lockwood de Forest, 31 March 1891, Kipling Papers, 1/2.
56 F. S. Growse, "The Art of 'Tar-Kashi' or Wire-Inlay," JIAI, no. 2 (1888), 52.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 79

Figure 6. Durbar Room, Osborne House, Isle of Wight, in 1920.

National Monuments Record, London.

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8o Mahrukh Tarapor

area into a picturesque medley of gateways, towers, and bathing ghats,

all constructed in "easy and unconscious adherence to ordinary tra-
ditional practice."57
Ironically, however, Lockwood Kipling's reforming ideas were
to have their major impact only after his return to England - and then
not in ways he might always have approved. While in India, his ap-
proach remained more prophetic than practiced, reduced to a limited
experiment by the lack of appeal native handicrafts carried for the
anglicized Indian middle classes. Their somewhat disdainful attitude
towards Indian products and styles - one of the pernicious social
effects of the British imperial system - effectively deprived the Mayo
and similar schools of a natural and needed market. It took the rise
of Indian political and cultural nationalism at the end of the century,
plus a new generation of scholars and artists, to set the stage for a
more comprehensive and radical extension of Kipling's notions to
Indian art and culture as a whole.
Kipling's successors in this effort were a new group of like-
minded teachers, scholars, and artists - Ernest B. Havell, Ananda
Coomaraswamy, and William Rothenstein - who around the turn of
the century began to probe more deeply into India's cultural identity.58
Havell taught at the Madras School of Art from 1884 to 1895 and
immediately adopted Kipling's ideas of craft instruction in workshops
placed in the charge of "exceedingly fine Madrasi craftsmen.... [and]
excellent teachers . . . who were perfectly well able to adapt their de-
signs to any new idea I suggested to them."59 As principal of the Cal-
cutta School of Art between 1896 and 1905, he went on to urge both a
nationwide handicrafts system and the acceptance of Indian painting
and sculpture as major art forms deserving of inclusion in the art school
curriculum. As late as 191o, after the publication of a pioneering
text on Indian Sculpture and Painting (1908), he was still trying to
persuade official authorities and the English public that it was "hope-
lessly illogical to teach, as we have been . . . and are still teaching,
that Indian applied art is admirable and Indian fine art barbaric."60
In this he was joined by Coomaraswamy, a Ceylonese scholar and

57 Growse, Bulandshahr (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1884), p. 63.

58 These figures, as well as a number of others who contribute to the history of cultural
interchange between India and England, are treated in much greater detail in my
Ph.D. dissertation, "Art and Empire: The Discovery of India in Art and Literature,
1850-1947," Harvard University, 1977.
59 E. B. Havell, "Indian Schools of Art," in The Basis for Artistic and Industrial Revival
in India (Madras: Theosophist Office, 1912), p. 96.
60 E. B. Havell, "Art Administration in India," RSA 58 (1910-11), 275.

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J. L. KIPLING AND ART EDUCATION 81

ardent admirer of Morris who, inspired by Birdwood's Handbook of

188o, documented his own society's living handicrafts tradition in the
monumental study Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (1908).61 Rothenstein,
on his own admission, was drawn by "men like Lockwood Kipling
and Havell, who have appreciated the genius of the Indian people,"
to study their art for himself, a pursuit which found him in the winter
of 1910 painting pictures by the Ganges and assembling his own col-
lection of Indian drawings and miniature paintings.62 Collectively,
the efforts and informed enthusiasm of these men mark a new plateau
in British awareness and understanding of Indian art a half century
after the Great Exhibition.63 In retrospect, they also illuminate the
achievement of John Lockwood Kipling and his pioneering advocacy
of Indian handicrafts and the reform of British art education in India.
Compared with the later, more radical critique and ambitions of
Havell and others, Kipling's advocacy may appear modest. But it
is his efforts and example which mark the beginning of that long
process of discovery which ushered into the twentieth century a new
vision of India's artistic heritage and the first foundations for its
serious study in the West.

Asia House Gallery, New York

1 Coomaraswamy's book was printed by himself "upon the press used by William
Morris for printing the Kelmscott Chaucer." Coomaraswamy's association with the
English Arts and Crafts Movement and the implications of this association for Indian
art have been documented more closely in an unpublished paper I read before the
Victorian Society Conference on the Arts and Crafts Movement (Birmingham, England,
1978) on "Indian Influences on the Arts and Crafts Movement."
62 William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein, 900oo-
1922 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1932). See especially his chapter entitled "An
Indian Pilgrimage." A brief but comprehensive account of Rothenstein's involvement
with Indian art education is given in Mary Lago, Imperfect Encounter: Letters of
William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore, 1911-1941 (Cambridge, Massachu-
setts: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 300-302.
63 The cooperative efforts of Havell, Coomaraswamy, and Rothenstein culminated in the
founding of the India Society in London in June 1910, with the aim of prompting
"the study and appreciation of Indian culture in its aesthetic aspects, believing that
in Indian sculpture, architecture, and painting, as well as in Indian literature and
music, there is a vast unexplored field, the investigation of which will bring about a
better understanding of Indian ideals and aspirations, both in this country and in
India" ("The India Society," The Times, 11 June 1910, p. 18).

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