The Great Exhibition in London, 1851: Art Education in India and Britain—Intertwined Histories

• In Event: Capitalizing Art Education: Mapping International Histories

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper focuses on the Great Exhibition of 1851 in England and its role in shaping pedagogical practices in India and England. I argue the Great Exhibition to be a stepping-stone for many international histories of art education.

Theoretical Framework:
Altbach and Kelly (1978) helped define the process of colonization as an attempt “to assist in the consolidation of foreign rule” (p. 2). It is not only useful to look through the framework of colonialism to examine the educational experiences of former colonies, but also, to comprehend the key elements of contemporary education. Understanding colonial education through a postcolonial lens lets us re-search the past and helps re-visit our understanding of the “colonial” (London, 2003, p. 291).

White (1973) frames historical work as chronicle, story telling, mode of emplotment, mode of argument and mode of ideological implementation. Quoting White, “ It is sometimes said that the aim of the historian is to explain the past by ‘finding’, or ‘uncovering’ the ‘stories’ that lie buried in the chronicles, and that the difference between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ resides in the fact that the historian ‘finds’ his stories, whereas the fiction writer ‘invents’ his. In other words, the same event can serve as a different kind of element of many different historical stories, depending on the role it is assigned in a specific motific characterization of the set to which it belongs (p.7).

It is within the context of White’s (1973) theories and postcolonialism, I frame the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a stepping stone where it functions as a story element providing to be the beginning to many other narrative accounts that can be constructed in art education history within England and its colonies across the world.

Modes of Inquiry:
Historical inquiry in art education has formed the basis of any research undertaken in the field. On this path, we may discover undocumented moments, undocumented personalities, and clarify challenging ideas, thus, approaching history from multiple perspectives. The process of historical research may lead us to better knowledge of our past, and in Chalmers’s (1992) words get us to understand, “how we came to be where we are” (p. 254).


Data Sources:
Records from the Royal Society of Arts Journals, Select Committee Records, records from the Department of Science and Art at South Kensington, annual reports of the art schools in England and India were gathered from libraries in London.

Results:
When viewed from the multiple perspectives of researcher, historian, and art educator in the postcolonial present, the pedagogical practices that unfolded in the educational system in the British Empire and the Indian colony were influenced by the cultural context of the time and intertwined each other.

Scholarly Significance:
Mapping international histories becomes relevant to understanding history of art education in local and global contexts. Using different theoretical frameworks, one can understand these exhibitions and establishment of the schools of art as discrete events but also as part of wider historical contexts.

Author

• Ami Kantawala, Teachers College, Columbia University