Writing institutional history based on archival records has its unique challenges, especially when the bare skeleton of chronological history is a mystery. Two decades of working through administrative records, spread over a century and a half, to tell a story of an institution that has never been told before was like working out a heap of pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle whose shape is unknown. Archival research is marked by intense isolation and in many ways resembles penal isolation. Not only is the labor isolated, but its rewards are unknown. A piecemeal approach for putting the historical facts together was the inevitable outcome, which resulted in a series of snapshots into the history of the formation and transformation of Pakistan's premier art institution. The National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, established as the Mayo School of Art in 1875, is the Pakistani equivalent of London's South Kensington School of Design (presently Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom). The comparative renown of the Mayo School of Art, where Rudyard Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling, was the founding principal, is matched by its relative obscurity in South Asian art history. Unlike other colonial art schools in South Asia, the NCA, with its status of a public university of arts in Pakistan today, has been scantily represented in contemporary scholarship. For the past half a century, the historical knowledge of the NCA did not grow beyond art historical accounts in the first two decades of the institution more than a century and a quarter old history. This book seeks to fill some of that gap.

From protracted discussions on the very purpose of a colonial art school to the development of the Mayo School of Art as the aesthetic center for artisanal industries and modern art and design for the whole of North India, the book analyses in depth the ideologies of the arts and crafts movement and the South Kensington agenda at work in the art and industry discourses in late nineteenth-century Punjab.