[Extract …] In October of 1900, the Journal of Indian Art carried an article on “The Salt Industry of Rajputana.” As its title indicates, the Journal’s purpose was to focus on visual, not gastronomic, taste. Why then an article on salt production in a publication devoted to aesthetics (Figure 5.1)?

The Journal had originally been launched as an accompaniment to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. Its patrons were the Department of Revenue and Agriculture in India and, in Britain, the India Society and the Department of Science and Art (DSA). This last institution was critical, for it provided the principal ethnographic and tabulation system on which the information made available in the Journal was notated: region, skill, material usage. By the year 1900, every one of India’s art schools, and by extension the vocational schools, was operating under the shadow of this distant institution. The heads of the four principal art schools in Bombay, Lahore, Calcutta and Madras – John Griffiths, John Lockwood Kipling, Henry Hoover Locke and Ernest Binfield Havell – were all alumni of the DSA’s normal school at South Kensington, now known as the Royal College of Art. Much of the pedagogical model of art and artisanal training in India, the drawing textbooks, the casting formats, the pattern models, drew from the DSA’s monopoly on art education in the British Empire.

The DSA was founded by the cultural commissars who had organized the Great Exhibition of 1851. To perceive the DSA as a simple case study in design pedagogy, however, would belie the force of the tremendous administrative engine assembled by its creators, the circle of aesthetes gathered around the bureaucrat Henry Cole. Cole and his compatriots belonged to the reform-minded, “Utilitarian” circle around Jeremy Bentham and the India Office bureaucrats James and John Stuart Mill. The abiding preoccupation of this caucus was to devise “means” by which public institutions could be restructured to benefit the average citizen and worker. Particularly critical in this respect were the theories of political economy forwarded by the younger Mill as a response to the perceived depredations of industrial capitalism. This liberal coterie of aesthetes and pedagogues were therefore significant not only as artists but as significantly influential experimentalists in what Marxists later termed the “modes of production debates” – the correlation of social formation to productive paradigms – of the nineteenth century. The principal faculty of the DSA included, at different times, stalwarts such as Owen Jones, Gottfried Semper, Richard Redgrave, Christopher Dresser, William Morris and, in India, John Lockwood Kipling and Ernest Binfield Havell.

Britain’s imperial preponderance at this time meant that the DSA’s influence would be global in scope. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston to a provincial museum in Kabul, Afghanistan, museums using the DSA template were set up in every nook of the world. In India, DSA acolytes would occupy preeminent positions in all the art schools, from which vantage point they indirectly influenced or directly supervised the functioning of myriad “vocational” schools aimed at refashioning traditional or artisanal labor. The DSA agenda of the World Exhibitions percolated into the myriad rural and agricultural fairs staged by the British administration to reorganize the traditional economies of India.