To whom it might concern
I’m writing to share an ongoing challenge titled “Decolonizing Artwork & Design Training in Pakistan: Linking Analysis, Follow & Coverage”. The challenge recognises the necessity to reassess methods for a extra complete and result-oriented strategy in artwork and design schooling. It proposes contextually engaged studying and techniques of data manufacturing as a promising strategy in the direction of a extra secure society wanting to create an influence globally.
The historical past and politics of the schooling system in colonial India reveal that it undermined the traditional legacy of Indian artwork and India’s standing as a hub of upper schooling because the Axial Age. The colleges of Taxila (5 BC) and Nalanda (5 AD) justify this declare. Indian metaphysicians and logicians made vital contributions preserved by Jain, Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Through the Medieval period, India obtained launched to Islamic conventions of studying specializing in religious elevation and mental heritage. Arabs and Turks who introduced Islam to the subcontinent have been acquainted with the delicate Persian tradition and its achievements in instructional management of the medieval world. It’s believed that for a number of centuries, a sequence of good philosophers and scientists made Baghdad the mental centre of the medieval world. The interpretation of Greek texts into Arabic by Muslim students was a big mental feat that laid the groundwork for the European Renaissance. Therefore, in medieval India, madrassahs and khanqahs supplied an moral and sensible manifestation of a simply and helpful life as the primary purpose of all studying pursuits.
In colonial India, schooling was not a precedence. British officers, belittling Indian literature and dialects as devoid of scientific or literary worth, advocated for English as the only real language of instruction, declaring Indians as champions of errors. George Birdwood, an Anglo-Indian official, whereas chairing the annual assembly of The Royal School of Arts in 1910, claimed that portray and sculpture as ‘high quality arts’ didn’t exist in India. With this mindset, artwork and design schooling was launched “…to satisfy quickly increasing industrial ambitions” of the colonials. Mainly, the British colonial schooling system in India was designed to civilise the barbarous Indians and make them loyal topics of the British crown.
Pakistan’s artwork schooling has been formed by a lingering colonial legacy, resulting in the marginalisation of arts in mainstream schooling and a dominance of Western developments. Policymakers, typically pushed by political agendas, have traditionally ruled artwork apply and schooling by a spiritual lens. In the meantime, famend artwork educators, regardless of their inventive experience, have missed creating culturally related pedagogies for indigenous college students.
The present geopolitics and globalisation intensify the necessity to combine educating, studying, analysis, scholarship and communal growth as a linked exercise. This suggests complicated interactions between numerous streams of data — bodily, metaphysical, religious, philosophical and utilized. One system, one technique and one strategy is not an answer. There might be many applicable solutions to a given query on artwork and design schooling; straitjacketing is certainly not one. We suggest a brand new strategy that challenges the Western hegemony over Japanese pedagogies and recognises cross-cultural influences as a actuality. Colonisation of India is a actuality that can’t be reversed, however its after-effects might be addressed and mitigated. We have to weave collectively components comparable to faith, politics, economic system and the pure world that have an effect on the manufacturing of artwork and cultural industries.
To attain this, we have to rethink Artwork for Twenty first-century Pakistan: Is it nonetheless a luxurious of the elite or a overseas agenda, a priority of the leftists, pseudo-intellectuals or eccentrics or can it’s adopted as a lifestyle? And we have to develop pedagogies that make artwork — a medium of investigation selling vital considering with its core deeply linked with actuality and creativeness each and its scope centred on problem-solving together with enhancing on a regular basis expertise — related to our society and our occasions.
Sincerely Yours,
Bano
August, 2025
