Description
Most European museums have deftly avoided direct allusions to colonialism. The paper focuses on the India collections in two museums in the UK, the British Museum (BM) in London and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge. Both museums had curated exhibitions to commemorate 70 years of Indian independence in 2017-2018, the catalogues for which form the basis of the paper’s analysis. The travelling exhibition, ‘India and the World: A History in Nine Stories’, was a collaborative project between the BM and two museums in India. Using objects from the BM’s collection exhibited in Delhi and Mumbai, it crafted a narrative of India’s ‘shared beginnings’ that situated Indian history within global, cosmopolitan frames. The paper argues that such a feel-good framing, which sidesteps the imperial origins of the objects on display, typifies the invisibility of imperialism in the public domain. A telling contrast is the exhibition ‘Another India: Explorations and Expressions of Indigenous South Asia’ that was sited in, and curated by, the MAA. As against the BM that affixed the objects with a certain timeless quality, the university museum recognised their contested and fluid meanings. Acknowledging that many of its exhibits were once looted and the need to make them accessible to their communities, the MAA examined its own role in the politics of knowledge production. While the former exhibition was accepting of the mainstream discourse of a cohesive and linear history, the latter explored, and revisited, India’s alternative histories. While one cast a sidelong glance at colonialism, the other explicitly engaged with its disruptive impacts. The paper undertakes a contrastive study of the curatorial intent that inform these two narratives. It aims to bring out the varied histories that museums construct around objects and which challenge the static significance attributed to them.
