Bhai Ram Singh was born at Rasulpur near Batala in 1858, a Ramgarhia carpenter's son, and was taken into the Mayo School of Industrial Art at Lahore as a boy by John Lockwood Kipling, its first principal.
He became a designer and then principal of the school himself. He designed Khalsa College at Amritsar, the Lahore Museum, Aitchison College, the Punjab University Senate Hall and much of the public architecture of late nineteenth-century Lahore, in a style that used Punjabi and Mughal elements on European plans.
In 1890 he was sent to England to design and execute the Durbar Room at Osborne House for Queen Victoria, carving much of it himself. It is the most elaborate Indian interior in Britain.
He was given the title Bhai and a CIE. He died at Lahore in 1916.
A village carpenter's son from Batala designed the buildings that a colonial capital used to represent itself, and he is not a name most Punjabis know.
The Mayo School was set up in 1875 to keep Punjabi craft alive against machine production, teaching drawing, carving, metalwork and design to the sons of artisan families. Its premise was that a carpenter's son could be trained as a designer, and in this one case that is exactly what happened.
The manner he worked in has no settled name. It puts jharokhas, brackets, chhajjas and carved wood onto plans that are entirely European, and it was the house style of official Lahore for thirty years. Whether that is a Punjabi architecture or a colonial costume is still argued by people looking at the same buildings.
Almost all of it is in Pakistan. Khalsa College at Amritsar is the major exception on this side of the line, and it is the building most Punjabis have seen a thousand times without ever being told who drew it.
Records of the Mayo School of Industrial Art, Lahore.
Osborne House Durbar Room documentation.