The book told the century-old story of the NCA that has never been told before. It offered a picture of institutional development at variance with official images and proverbial wisdom. Rather than attempting an exhaustive history of the NCA, the book tried to trace the colonial and post-colonial genealogies of crafting arts education, woven into the fabric of institutional history. While trying to explain the disciplinary knowledge of the institution, embedded in the archive, that has founded and sustained the configuration of art education, the intent 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.

One of the central themes of the book has been that what archives hold and how it is interpreted has implications for the writing of history. Despite dense readings of the institution's administration within a broader historical and political context, the book remains a partial and fragmented biography of a muted archive. The power of the archive, as the source of authoritative texts, rests on its material features. The very structure of physical space and the organizations of records impose its meanings and determine its significance. From carefully kept records of the school administration to the scraps of old files and papers, which were left unattended for more than a century, the records of the Mayo School existed at the NCA without a trace. They remained under erasure, never archived, preserved and studied before. The book has attempted to deconstruct the logo-centrism of art educational discourses of the postcolonial state, which configured institutional history in a structure of binary opposition of art versus crafts and traditional versus modern, among others. As argued in the book, the history of the Mayo School of Art, filtered through the national modern lens, was seen as the institutional residue of a tradition-bound rural industrial education. The archives of the Mayo School were erased from the national memory, not due to official neglect or public oversight but rested on the discursive nature of Pakistani modernism, which led to the active forgetfulness of an undesirable educational past.