Deepti Mulgund: Learning to See, Learning to Draw: Vision, Modernity and the Teaching of Drawing in 19th Century Bombay

The project is part of a larger enquiry into the formation of the modern art-viewing subject in a colonial regime. If one begins with the premise that learning to see correctly is critical to an engagement or 'understanding' of art, then the processes by which such knowledge is imparted, become critical to study the development of art publics. From this baseline, the project examines the teaching of drawing within the formal education system in 19th and early 20th century colonial Bombay (now Mumbai) India. The teaching of drawing throws up discourses central to the training of vision and the ability to see and render what one sees, 'correctly.' Hand-eye fidelity, the salutary effects of copying models and exemplars, and the disciplining of bodies were some of the discourses centred on vision that were critical to the formation of a new colonial subject. The project takes into account the shifts in the relationship between vision, knowledge and the body within colonial modernity and reads Bombay's school-goers through this matrix. It will bring together archival and other primary material with secondary literature to delineate the teaching of drawing to school-goers in colonial Bombay. Thus the project will examine a configuration which stretches in the following directions: investigating accounts of the teaching and learning of drawing, the material conditions produced by/for the teaching of drawing and the contradictory approaches to copying as a means of pedagogic transmission.

Deepti Mulgund obtained her doctoral degree in April 2019 from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Her thesis, The Social Life of Art: Tracing the Development of Art Publics in Colonial Bombay 1850-1930s, focused on practices, processes, sites and platforms that created a culture of art-viewing in the colonial port city of Bombay and led to the development of art publics. She is currently working towards expanding her doctoral thesis into a monograph. In 2015, she was a DAAD Fellow, affiliated to the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has worked in a curatorial capacity at the Devi Art Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation that was engaged with contemporary art and has researched institutional history at the Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (formerly the Victoria and Albert Museum of Bombay).