The Mayo School of Art, as it came to be known, was called by various names in the official correspondence of the British government in Punjab: “Mayo Memorial School of Industrial Arts,” “Industrial School of Art and Design,” “Lahore School” and “the Mayo School of Art.” The fluctuating emphasis from industry to arts and design, implied in the various names for the school, marked divergent conceptions proposed for the art school in Lahore. At issue were questions over the type of art school, curriculum and method of art instruction required to match the vision for commercial and educational development of colonial Punjab.

One of the chief imports for late nineteenth-century colonial India of the Department of Science and Art in London under the administration of Henry Cole (1808–1882) was the role of drawing in industrial art schools. The suggestion came with the mutually conflicting objectives of improving the manufacture and industry as well as informing public taste. What continued to be debated well into the twentieth century was the question of whether training in design through teaching drawing in art schools was part of the general education to cultivate minds and improve popular tastes or a part of technical education to promote design manufacture and industry. Such questions, consequently, turned attention to the usefulness of various types of curriculum and methods of instruction among the British colonial administrator-scholars and art teachers. Could a single curriculum be adopted in all art schools in India or was it better to leave it up to the individual art schools to devise their own? How much time ought to be spent in learning the principles of art, and how much of it was to be devoted to their application in manufacture? The Anglicist–Orientalist controversy over the question of superior educational value given to the teaching of the English language, which had divided the colonial bureaucracy in the first half of the nineteenth century, had its parallels in the official debates on art education.