Tales Left Untold: Reconstructing Oriental School Drawing Books by Ernest Beinfeld Havell (1861-1934)

• In Event: Storying Innovative Practices: International Perspectives on Archives and Schools

Abstract

Drawing books are a vital component to teaching and learning art and serve as an excellent resource for understanding the historical context of teaching drawing. Serving many informal and traditional educational contexts, drawing books can be seen as evidence of how people learned or were taught. Although many accounts of teaching of drawing are known, little is documented about the many drawing manuals developed by art educators in England and its colonies, specifically India. This paper examines 19th century drawing books by Ernest Beinfeld Havell (1861-1934), and the process of re-constructing the story of these drawing books from the ‘dusty’ non-digital archives of Santiniketan in West Bengal, India.

Altbach & Kelly (1978) have argued that 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 research the past and helps revise our understanding of the “colonial” (London, 2003, p. 291). In understanding the phenomenon of colonial education, it has been argued that the development of schools inside colonies reflects the power and the educational needs of the colonizers, and that there are significant differences between the education offered in the colony and the metropole (Altbach & Kelly, 1978). Cary (2004) argued for the need to consider the presence of the local and the need to address the local in postcolonial studies.

This historical study uses archival documents, along with an array of visual and verbal data. A large part of this study involved archival fieldwork. Brettell (1998, p. 518) argues that historical documents must be read with a sensitivity to the social, political and cultural context within which they were produced, and archival researchers must work not only to identify the ethnocentrism of the writer of a document, but the researcher’s own positionality as an evaluator of the material.

Data was gathered from Rabindra Bhavna Library in Santiniektan, West Bengal, India and correspondence with the MacMillan & Co, England.

After re-constructing the drawings books, it was found that a total of six Oriental Drawing Books were published by MacMillan & Co. Limited in Calcutta in 1902 and 1907. These books served as a guide for a step-by-step process of design for the craftsmen, and were also distributed to manufacturers and perhaps used as textbooks in India and England.

This investigation of drawing pedagogies in India invites others to re-view, re-frame and re-use the past to identify the complex relationships between the past and present, colonial and non-colonial education, and the colonizer and the colonized. A study of the philosophies of Havell has conveyed a crucial role that Indianizing the curriculum played in reviving the Indian indigenous practices, then what would this mean for the writing of a revisionist view of the history of Indian art education or other undocumented histories in art education as well as education?

Author

• Ami Kantawala, Teachers College, Columbia University