The City as a Museum, Delhi, Edition 2

As DAG’s ‘The City as a Museum’ returns for its second edition, here is a preview of the events and the thematic contexts that the festival will try to unpack this month.

In postcolonial India, pedagogical discourses in the arts were closely intertwined with the changing spatial and infrastructural life of the city. Delhi offers a particularly revealing case, where the expansion of art schools, museums, cultural institutions and public buildings accompanied the city's transformation into the capital of an independent nation. Institutions such as the College of Art, Jamia Millia Islamia and, later, the National Crafts Museum and many community-led initiatives like The Community Library Project do not simply provide spaces for training: they participated in producing new ideas of citizenship, public culture and modernity.

Anupam Sud, Composition (seed), Intaglio on paper, 1969, 10.5 x 13.2 in. Collection DAG

The pedagogical emphasis on drawing, design, craft, architecture and applied arts also connected artistic education to the infrastructural ambitions of the new state that was ‘reborn’ after Partition and had to be built from the ground up. Artists and designers were increasingly imagined as contributors to the built environment—designing public spaces, educational materials, exhibitions, handicrafts and visual symbols of national identity. Delhi's rapidly expanding institutions therefore became both objects of pedagogy and pedagogical environments themselves.

This relationship also complicates the idea of the art school as an enclosed studio. Roads, neighbourhoods, markets, government buildings, refugee settlements and new cultural complexes became sites through which students encountered the social realities that art was expected to represent or transform. The history of the artists’ collective set up right after the Partition, Delhi Silpi Chakra, and its operations around the Gole Market, attest to these processes. The city functioned simultaneously as classroom, laboratory and political subject: artistic education trained students not only to make images, but to see, organise and intervene in the emerging infrastructures of postcolonial urban life.

The Hauz Khas madrasa, established in the fourteenth century under Firuz Shah Tughlaq, offers an early model of how education was embedded in Delhi's urban and architectural fabric. Built around a large reservoir and integrated with a mosque, tombs and other structures, the madrasa was not an isolated educational institution but part of a larger civic and intellectual landscape. Its architecture brought together learning, worship, water infrastructure and public space, making the built environment itself part of the pedagogical experience. Contemporary accounts, whether by local residents or raiding army-chiefs like Timur, have remarked on this magnificent structure that they encountered. A fourteenth-century poet, Mutahhar of Kara, described it in near-paradisiacal terms, ‘The moment I entered this blessed building through the gate. I saw a level space as wide as the plain of the world. The courtyard was soul-animating, and its expanse was life giving. Its dust was musk-scented, and its fragrance possessed the odour of amber. There was verdure everywhere, and hyacinths, basils, roses, and tulips were blooming and were beautifully arranged so far as the human eye could reach. It seemed as if the last year's produce had in advance the current year's fruits, such as pomegranates, oranges, guavas, quinces, apples, and grapes. Nightingales, so to say, were singing their melodious songs everywhere. It appeared as if they had guitars in their talons and flutes in their beaks.’

Kanwal Krishna, House Khas (Hauz Khas), Watercolour and ink on paper, 11.5 x 15.5 in. Collection: DAG

Its significance extends beyond medieval education. Hauz Khas demonstrates a longstanding Delhi tradition in which institutions of learning were spatially embedded in the city rather than separated from it. Students encountered scholarship within a landscape of monuments, gardens, waterworks and everyday urban activity. The madrasa therefore offers a useful historical precedent for thinking about education as an infrastructural and spatial practice—a model that resonates, albeit in very different ideological circumstances, with the postcolonial art schools, museums and cultural institutions that later sought to make Delhi itself a site of learning.

Thomas and William Daniell, The Observatory at Delhi, 1808, Engraving and aquatint, tinted with watercolour on paper, 18.2 x 24.0 in. Collection: DAG

Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, built in 1724 by Maharaja Jai Singh II, can also be understood as an educational site where architecture became an instrument for learning about the universe. Its monumental masonry observatories translated complex astronomical calculations into spatial forms, enabling the observation of celestial movements, time and planetary positions. The site brought together mathematical knowledge, astronomy, architecture and imperial patronage, demonstrating how scientific learning could be embedded within the city itself. Its remarkable form has continued to inspire modern artists from across the world, such as the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who thought it could provide inspiration for modern sculptural thinking. He took photographs of the structures and wrote, ‘Whether of not they were intended so, Jai Singh’s works have turned out to be an expression of wanting to be one with the universe. They contain an appreciation of measured time and the shortness of life and the vastness of the universe.’ In Devika Singh’s International Departures: Art in India After Independence he is quoted as having described the Jantar Mantars’ instruments as: ‘mystic sculptures that define space… You might call them useless architecture or useful sculpture. They imply a use–much sculpture does that.’

Today, Jantar Mantar also has another pedagogical significance: as a prominent site of public assembly and protest, it continues to function as a space where citizens collectively learn, debate and articulate claims about democracy and social justice.

Ananda Moy Banerji, LANDSCAPE `A', 1981, 12.7 x 19.2 in. Collection: DAG

In the postcolonial period at the College of Art, Delhi (the Department of Art at Delhi Polytechnic became an independent institution known as the College of Art around 1964–1965), pedagogy increasingly shifted from the transmission of artistic styles to the cultivation of processes: the printmaking plate, the sculptural material, the press and the workshop became instruments of practice. Teachers such as Somnath Hore, Jagmohan Chopra and Dhanraj Bhagat turned technical education into a form of artistic research, asking students not simply to learn how to reproduce an image or form, but to discover what a material could make possible. When Hore joined the Delhi Polytechnic in 1958, he became head/supervisor of its newly established printmaking section; Chopra, who had trained there, joined him in developing the department. Chopra is remembered as having helped initiate an entire generation of Indian artists into printmaking, especially through collectives like Group 8, which included Anupam Sud. Their pedagogy was unusually process-oriented. Rather than treating printmaking as simply a reproductive technique for making multiples of an image, they encouraged students to understand the matrix itself as a site of artistic invention. Hore reportedly asked students to make numerous permutations and combinations on a single plate, sometimes working on it for an entire year. The aim was to learn the ‘vocabulary’ of printmaking through sustained experimentation with the plate, rather than rushing towards a finished image.

Somnath Hore, Untitled, 1964, Etching on paper 8.2 x 9.7 in. Collection: DAG

There is also an important political dimension. Hore came from a tradition in which printmaking had been a medium of mass communication and political witnessing—his famine and Tebhaga work had emerged from the Communist movement in the 1940s. But his Delhi pedagogy seems to have shifted the emphasis from communicating a predetermined political message towards discovering what the medium itself could do. For Dhanraj Bhagat, who headed the College’s Sculpture department from 1947 to his retirement in 1977, rather than making anatomical accuracy the ultimate measure of sculptural skill, he encouraged explorations of volume, geometry, material and structure. His own work drew on Indian and vernacular forms alongside modernist abstraction, and he worked across wood, metal, terracotta, plaster, papier-mâché, stone and other materials.

The proliferation of museums as spaces of learning forms another important strand within this landscape. Beyond their early postcolonial role in consolidating projects of nation-building and institutionalising popular memory, museums today increasingly participate in the production of identity, foregrounding particular histories within the nation's diverse and often contested pasts. This is especially evident in institutions attached to older religious and community sites, such as the Baba Baghel Singh Sikh Heritage Multimedia Museum at Gurdwara Bangla Sahib. What kinds of heritage do such museums seek to teach their publics, and how do their spatial locations—and the communities within which they are embedded—shape the histories they tell? We will explore these questions through a visit to the museum with historian Kanika Singh and artist Arpana Caur, whose works are part of its collection, considering how museum space, pedagogy, artistic styles and community intersect in the making of historical memory.

Jamia Millia Islamia offers another model of how pedagogy could move between institution, city and public life. Its 1951 Art Institute sought to bring art and craft education into conversation with teacher training, extending Jamia's longer commitment to an education grounded in creative activity. Some major Indian modernists, such as A. Ramachandran and Paramjit Singh, taught there as well. This philosophy was also carried beyond the classroom through publications such as Payām-e taʿlīm. The children's journal used drawing, colouring, handicrafts, experiments, riddles and observation to encourage children not simply to receive knowledge but to participate in producing it. As historian Margrit Pernau has shown, this reflected Jamia's commitment to a ‘new education’ centred on learning how to learn. The pedagogical environment therefore extended into print, domestic space and everyday activity.

A. Ramachandran, Untitled, 1968, Etching on paper, 5.7 x 8.2 in. Collection: DAG

The Ghalib Academy offers perhaps one of Delhi's most compelling examples of the museum operating as a potential ‘third space’: a literary institution, community space and repository of modern art where the categories of Urdu culture, Muslim identity, Indian modernism and South Asian belonging could coexist. Its modern art collection, begun around 1969 through commissions by founder Hakeem Abdul Hameed, brought together major Indian and Pakistani modernists, including M.F. Husain, Nirode Mazumdar, Paritosh Sen, G.R. Santosh, K.S. Kulkarni, Biren De and, later, Sadequain. Its collection of Indian and Pakistani modernists effectively unsettles the territorial categories imposed by Partition, even as its location in Nizamuddin places modern art within a historically Muslim urban landscape. The Academy thus turns heritage into a form of cultural pedagogy—not simply teaching the history of Ghalib, but asking what it might mean for a postcolonial Indian Muslim institution to claim modernity, national belonging and a shared subcontinental past simultaneously.

These questions also bring us back to the city itself. Education and urban planning are not separate domains: schools and universities anchor neighbourhoods, shape patterns of movement and settlement, and distribute access to cultural and civic resources. Conversely, the city can itself become a curriculum. Paulo Freire's idea of conscientização, or critical consciousness, offers one way of understanding how navigating unequal urban environments can become a form of learning. Henri Lefebvre's ‘right to the city’ extends this into a question of spatial justice: who has the right not only to inhabit and use urban space, but to participate in determining what the city means and how it is produced? Contemporary practices such as community workshops, design charrettes and youth mapping projects make this relationship explicit, positioning residents as producers of knowledge about their own environments.

Seen from this perspective, Delhi's pedagogical history is not a sequence of institutions but a history of spaces becoming instruments of learning. The madrasa, art school, workshop, children's journal, printmaking press, museum, media laboratory, neighbourhood library and public street each constitute different kinds of classrooms. Together they suggest that pedagogy is not simply about transmitting knowledge within a city; it is one of the ways in which the city itself is imagined, inhabited and continually remade.

P. N. Mago, The Three Sisters, 1948, Oil on canvas, 30.2 x 35.0 in. Collection: DAG