Indian Art School
Practices and
Dissolving of
‘Construed Will’

H. A. Anil Kumar

Art education in the Indian context is an unresolved issue. It is the construed will or the lack of it to address it which is more pedagogically threatening. Earlier, I had roughly classified Indian art schools into ‘well known’ and ‘ill known’ ones1. The reason for this lies in the very acceptance of the legitimacy of historiography of art education institutions in India, more due to its colonial associations and impact. Hence, the institutionalization of art, even in its most contemporary avatar, today, by and large, lingers upon the preset notions or prejudices that were genetically passed onto ‘us’ by the original intention of the colonial authorities. In other words, the reason as to why art schools were set up in the 1850s (at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta) was to prepare a group of Indian ‘image-makers’ (not ‘artists’), perhaps to meet up with a larger colonial project of graphically documenting the anthropological excavations. The attitude that was so construed has been passed on to Indian students of future generations who lack a sense of introspection towards the colonial dimension to them, not to accept or reject but to bring it into the premise of sensibility.
Hence, this attitude carried a lot of residual prejudice that perhaps are alien to contemporary parameters of pedagogic operations, like treating the colonial representational practice as a matter of ‘intimate enemy’. (i) The notion of ‘skill’, (ii) The choice of ‘subject’ among students works, (iii) Fixation to the ‘mediatic’ (as in ‘idiotic’) affiliation; and finally, (iv) The insistence of ‘styl(e)’ization – are the most static and stagnant issues and subjects of art education, that seem to have a time-tested history, which have snowballed into a certain visual faith that evades scientific, rational and contemporary discourse from its agenda. They are not problematic within themselves, but the construed will not to address them in the current situation, is! The idea to ‘communicate’, communicating ideas ‘beyond media’, addressing ‘issues’ rather than choosing subjects from ‘within aesthetic premise’; and endorsing the artistic commodification due to ‘modernist stylization’ are the respective aspects that remain unaddressed, when the latter is pitched against those four classified categories of visual representations, from within art schools.