The imperial fame of John Lockwood Kipling based on his writing and art pedagogy is being celebrated until this day, despite his early retirement from the Mayo School of Art and permanent departure from India in 1893. In South Asian art history, he is remembered as the founding father of the Mayo School, who devised the curriculum, perfected the pedagogy of workshop instruction and trained the first generation of teachers, thereby perpetuating his vision and legacy. Signs of Kipling's presence are palpable in the very architecture of the Mayo School of Art (presently the National College of Arts [NCA]), built in the Indo-Saracenic style and designed under his mentoring by his protégé Ram Singh. In the annals of South Asian art history, the Mayo School appears under the shadow of Kipling, whose vision functioned as a master narrative for Indian art education. Locating him through an imperial lens, South Asian art historians conflate different periods of the institutional history of the Mayo School of Art, spread over half a century, into an unfolding narrative of Kipling's founding mission.

The celebrated pedagogic influence of Kipling, however, does not echo in the art educational discourses of twentieth-century colonial Punjab. Among “the men on the spot”—the succeeding generation of provincial bureaucrats and art school teachers in Punjab who were responsible for preserving and encouraging the traditional crafts in twentieth-century India—none of the arguments raised or the policy suggestions made by the leading late nineteenth-century British metropolitan and Indian experts on Indian art education was quoted, except for administrative reference. If Kipling's vision of industrial art education was to keep the artisans tied to their hereditary occupations by making them more skilled than their forefathers, the Mayo School of Art in the twentieth century began to train its students, irrespective of their hereditary caste status, for employment and business in new fields of modern European industrial arts and crafts and for designing handcrafted artifacts for the elite consumption.