In 2025, the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, Pakistan, celebrated its 150th anniversary. This was a curious milestone for an institution that was founded, officially, 67 years ago, in 1958. But by evoking ‘150 Years of the NCA’ on campus and across social media, the college affirmed its complicated inheritance: its claim to the legacy of the older Mayo School of Art (MSA), established by the colonial government of British India in 1875 and on whose hollowed-out campus the NCA was built. This claim is not straightforward: indeed, one powerful narrative in the early decades of the NCA was that its modernising agenda for an industrialising, urbanising Pakistan required a disavowal of its powerful ancestor and the MSA’s concern with the rural and artisanal. But like much in the culture and politics of Pakistan, the drama of rupture and renewal—epitomised in the partitions of 1947 and 1971—cannot mask the resilient traces of earlier histories nor contain fully their ongoing effects.

Nadeem Omar Tarar is the foremost authority on this complicated history, having devoted several decades to untangling its knots, tensions, and contradictions. His authority was forged in part by a condition of intimacy. In 1999, Tarar was teaching cultural studies at the NCA when he was tasked with creating an institutional archive out of ‘a vast corpus of unkempt records of the college administration’ (p. 2). At the beginning of his new book, The Colonial and National Formations of the National College of Arts, Tarar illustrates the state of the documents as he found them: two gloved hands sift through completely fragmented paper debris, collected in a jute sack. Today, the NCA Archives are, in my personal experience, one of the most pleasant places to conduct primary source research in Lahore—a credit to Tarar, as founding director, as well as to his successors in the post and the archive’s skilled team of staff.

In the ‘Introduction’ to Colonial and National Formations, Tarar describes his project as, ‘to borrow a phrase, “a biography of an archive”, in a practical as well as theoretical sense’ (p. 2). This is a slightly misleading statement. A concern for the material history of the archive and the political/social conditions informing its collection recedes entirely in Tarar’s core chapters, which trace four distinct periods in the history of the institution. But this book is not a straightforward institutional history, either. Tarar uses the history of the NCA and its predecessor the MSA to reflect on much wider questions about the nature of colonial knowledge, notions of ‘the primitive’ in art, the relationship between craft and capitalism, the time of development, the nationalist politics of tradition, and much more.

The MSA was founded in Lahore in 1875, the fourth of a series of art schools overseen by the British in India (after the Government School of Industrial Arts in Madras (1850), the Government School of Art in Calcutta (1854), and the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay (1857)). The MSA is famously associated with the English artist and educator Lockwood Kipling (1837–1911), who served as its founding principal. Kipling’s approach to the school was informed by the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement. The MSA was designed to ‘revive crafts now half-forgotten’ in this part of Punjab (p. 70), and this was reflected in the administration of the school, which offered students from artisan caste backgrounds free education. The collections of the Lahore Museum, a ‘sister’ institution tied closely to the MSA (Kipling was also curator), provided object lessons in style and craftsmanship. The emphasis was not just on preservation but also on improvement: namely, the abolition of defects in ‘inherited’ artisanal practices, a focus on efficiency, and the development of a highly disciplined work ethic. Tarar refers to Kipling’s protégé, Bhai Ram Singh (1858–1916), as the personification of Kipling’s faith in the educated native artisan: from a ramgarhia (carpenter) caste background, Singh would design a series of major civic buildings in Lahore, including the MSA campus, and later serve as principal (1910–1913).Footnote ¹

One of the key tasks of the book is to disrupt the much-celebrated association of the MSA (as well as its successor, the NCA) with Kipling. Tarar argues that the impact of Kipling’s individual vision and personality is frequently overstated. In the first place, the focus on salvaging artisan practices aligned with the political imperatives of ‘indirect rule’ and the British empire’s investment in perpetuating traditional social structures in Punjabi society (p. 77). But more importantly, Tarar shows how the MSA’s ‘founding Orientalist vision’ was rigorously challenged in the twentieth century, with educational priorities reoriented from the 1920s to train students (irrespective of their caste status) for ‘employment and business in new fields of modern European industrial arts and crafts and for designing handcrafted artifacts for the [sic] elite consumption’ (p. 88). The MSA, in other words, swiftly adapted its programme to an expanding consumer society. Tarar introduces two principals from the interwar period—Lionel Heath (1871–1938) and S. N. Gupta (1887–1964)—who are rarely noted in South Asian histories of art and design and yet whose influence on the MSA was immense.

Tarar does not reveal much about how the rising tide of anti-colonial politics spilled into the MSA, or even how the catastrophes of partition rattled its corridors. This may be a result of limitations regarding what was recorded in the administrative documents Tarar had access to, and yet a reflection on how MSA staff and students were implicated in this mass upheaval would be very welcome. Instead, the book jumps from the late colonial period right into the decade after independence. Its final chapter details how a shrunken MSA was harnessed to the wider mission for public education set by the new state of Pakistan: the goal of transforming a ‘traditional’ society into a ‘modern’ Islamic republic.

The partition of British India was also a partition of resources and institutions. As Tarar notes, there were 87 industrial and agricultural institutions operating in colonial India in 1945. Pakistan inherited only six: five engineering and commerce colleges and the MSA, the only institution of technical education. The decision to ‘upgrade’ the MSA and create the National College of Arts emerged from wider government planning initiatives around education, supervised closely by a new global power, the United States of America, in the context of an emergent Cold War. The US offered ample advice, funding, and indeed teaching personnel. The first principal of the NCA, which was established on 6 October 1958, was the American sculptor Mark Sponenburgh (1918–2012), who served in this role until 1961.

Sponenburgh oversaw a ‘founding’ but also a ‘return’. Like Kipling, he was determined to preserve traditional practices in the face of rapid modernisation. In a 1961 address to the World Congress of Craftsmen, he defended the NCA as a ‘citadel’ for the traditional visual arts (p. 169). He also exhorted his Pakistani students to recognise the importance of reviving and preserving local histories of art and design as part of developing a new ‘national’ culture. Here we see some of the recursive histories that linked the NCA to the MSA, and which are animated in that celebration of ‘150 Years’. Fluctuations between inheritance and disavowal have shaped the NCA’s history. Shakir Ali (1916–1975), Sponenburgh’s successor as principal and one of Pakistan’s most important modern painters, saw an emphasis on handicrafts simply as ‘historical residue’ and a digression from NCA objectives around art education (p. 171).

Tarar’s history provides a welcome challenge to linear histories of education and their emphasis on progress, enlightenment, or emancipation. The book reveals how both the MSA and the NCA have served as stages for the playing out of different hierarchies. Tarar is particularly concerned with how the ‘binary opposition’ drawn between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ created schisms and inequalities in educational programmes and amongst staff. The distinctions of caste are also a striking and recurring theme in the book. Kipling’s desire to facilitate the entry of members from artisan castes into the MSA (for instance through fee waivers) produced a stigma around the institution, such that ‘gentleman artists’ were ‘reluctant to enrol’ (p. 72). But even those students selected due to their caste status found themselves confined to it. In the early decades of the MSA, such students were assigned to study their hereditary trade; the son of an engraver could not, for instance, ‘choose’ to study painting or carpentry. Education, in this sense, was a vehicle for caste consolidation. When these approaches to admission and study were relaxed in the early decades of the twentieth century, this was partially for financial reasons—that is, to dilute stigma and attract those fee-paying ‘gentleman artists’ (p. 110). The changes also modelled emerging languages of ‘meritocracy’ which, as scholars like Ajantha Subramanian have assessed in other contexts, can function to obscure class and caste inequality.

Tarar’s book ends around 1960, and so there is much more to say in this vein, especially in terms of how the NCA has operated as a ‘national institution’ in Pakistan, navigating and staging distinctions of ethnicity, class, gender, and indeed caste. Colonial and National Formations demonstrates the crucial insights that can be garnered from critically oriented and conceptually sophisticated histories of education in Pakistan. Tarar’s interest in the ‘colonial and postcolonial genealogies’ constituting the NCA’s history has political force. His intent, he writes, ‘has been to expose the violence of colonial and postcolonial binaries that creates prejudice and discrimination in our institutional policies and practices, both past and present’ (p. 185). This volume invites further work, and I will eagerly await a similarly spirited history of the NCA that takes us from the 1960s to the present, through popular uprisings, another partition, dictatorships, market liberalisation, and more. Thanks to the efforts of Tarar and his colleagues, the documents required for such a study are ready and waiting in the NCA Archives.