The colonial era in South Asia is marked with serious acculturation and early patterns of European influences in almost all walks of life. The imperial India gave way to the British East India Company which, resulted in a changed and evolved art, architecture, academics, diplomacy, democracy, judiciary and even administration. Behind these new ways and ideologies, there were few radical and committed people who contributed to establish the Anglo-Indian lifestyle.

John Lockwood Kipling started his professional life in 1865, at the young age of 28 as an architectural sculptor at the South Kensington Museum, now better known as the Victoria and Albert Museum London. Four years later in 1865, he arrived in India to ‘reshape’ the visual history of this land, especially of Lahore. Kipling started teaching at the Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art, Mumbai, where he spent 10 years before moving and settling in Lahore in 1875.

Lahore and Kipling together, enjoyed almost two decades; shaping and enhancing each other to exist and live distinctively in history. His 25-year stay in India, especially in Lahore, helped him to assimilate his expertise with the local aesthetic canon to bridge the theoretical and philosophical divide between the East and the West, precisely through academic art focusing on the revival of historical crafts and styles with their possible adaptation for the modern needs. This approach resulted in Lahore’s Anglo-Islamic and Anglo-Indian architecture of the British era; Bhai Ram Singh best exercised this mixture of architecture along the Mall Road. Singh was one of the first students to be enrolled at the Mayo School of Arts in 1875, the same year when Kipling joined the School.

John Lockwood Kipling’s contribution in preserving arts and crafts of Punjab is commemorated at a symposium

Kipling’s presence in Lahore proved instrumental in preserving arts and crafts of the Punjab and also the artefacts in the Lahore Museum.

At the one end he depicted, in his drawings, diverse artisans like potters, wood carvers, jewellery-makers, toy-makers, dyers, sweetmeat-sellers, cloth-sellers and metal workers and on the other, he described in his reports, the ideologies and dogmas extracted from the antiquities. As a journalist, Kipling covered a variety of subjects from the sculptures of Gandhara Art to the 11 species of fish found in the Ravi river.

He also wrote on politics, art school education, museum-studies, curatorship and design practice. He is also known as an illustrator for the writings of his son, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936).

The year 2016 started with a commendable activity at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore. The NCA organised a symposium in collaboration with Lahore Museum, British Council and Victoria and Albert Museum London, to commemorate “John Lockwood Kipling in Lahore (1875-1893)”.

Professor Sandra Kemp, Julius Bryant and Rosemary Crill (Victoria and Albert Museum London), Dr Shaila Bhatti (NCA), Dr Nadhra Khan (Lahore University of Management Sciences), Dr Kanwal Khalid (the Punjab University), Professor Pervaiz Vandal and Professor Sajida Vandal (Trust for History, Art and Architecture of Pakistan), Talib Hussain (ex-director of the Sustainable Development of the Walled City of Lahore) and Zeb Bilal (the Beaconhouse National University ) presented their papers and presentations exploring diverse facets of Kipling’s legacy in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, February 28th, 2016