Museums in South Asia - Course Outline

Course title: Museums in South Asia: History and Politics Instructor: Kanika Singh, Ashoka University, Sonepat Course details: HIS-413-1| Spring 2019 | 4 credits Course summary: This course offers a social history of the institution of the museum in South Asia, and critically examines the politics of representation through it. Here, museums are considered as a tool of cultural and political domination through knowledge production and the creation of authoritative pasts. We explore the history of museums in the context of colonial rule, the rise of independent nation-states, and the heritage and identity politics of contemporary South Asia. How did museums emerge in South Asia? What are the different museum forms in the region? Who is making them, why and when? What is their notion of heritage and whose heritage do they represent? A history of museums in South Asia is especially interesting as the region has a history, simultaneously, of a shared culture and of competing interests among its constituting national and social groups. We discuss examples of museums from Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and examine the dynamic ways in which politics, identity, religion, memory, history and heritage interact in the institution of the museum. Course outline: Module A: The Idea of the Museum and Its Origins Theme 1: What is a Museum? In the introductory section to the course, we engage with the idea of the ‘museum’: what do we consider a museum; what would we not consider a museum; why do we create museums; and why do we visit them? • Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 1992. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge. [Ch 1. What is a Museum?. 1–22] 1 • Macdonald, Sharon. 2006. “Collecting Practices.” In A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by S. Macdonald, 81–97. Oxford, Victoria, Malden: Blackwell. Theme 2: The Birth of the Museum in the West A brief overview of museum collections, as they emerged in Europe: cabinets of curiosity, Renaissance collections, princely collections during the age of explorations and through colonial activity, and during the emergence of nation-states. We particularly explore the role of museums in generating knowledge, as a tool of domination of non-western cultures, and a medium of creating a ‘national’ public in western societies. • Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London and New York: Routledge. [Ch 1. The Formation of the Museum. 17–48] • Duncan, Carol. 1995. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. 1995. London and New York: Routledge. [Ch 2. From the Princely Gallery to the Public Art Museum: The Louvre Museum and the National Gallery, London. 21–47] • Impey, O. and A. Macgregor, eds. 2001. The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century Europe. Thirsk: House of Stratus. Module B: Museums in Colonial South Asia Theme 3: Colonial Collecting This section discusses museum activity in South Asia during colonial rule. How were the people and material culture of South Asia collected, classified and exhibited under colonial rule? We critically examine the collections amassed by colonial officers; the earliest museum collections of natural history, religious and archaeological artefacts; the formation of the Indian Museum, Kolkata as a grand project of the colonial government in India; the growth of the institution of the museum in relationship with the practice of archaeology; and the role of the colonial museum, in the political economy of the industrial exhibitions and world fairs in 19th century Europe. The case studies include the Indian Museum, Kolkata, the Lahore Museum, 2 Pakistan, provincial museums in South India, representations of the Andaman Islands, and colonial collecting in Tibet. • Bhatti, Shaila. 2012. Translating Museums: A Counterhistory of South Asian Museology. California: Left Coast Press. [Ch 1. Museums in Translation: The Birth of the Museum in Colonial India. 33–77] • Breckenridge, Carol A. 1989. “The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31(2): 195–216. • Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. 2004. Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India. New Delhi: Permanent Black. [Ch 2: The Museum in the Colony: Collecting, Conserving, Classifying. 43–82] • Harris, Clare E. 2012. The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. [Ch 2. The Younghusband Mission and Tibetan Art. 49–78; Ch 3. Picturing Tibet for the Imperial Archive. 79–116] • Singh, Kavita. 2009. “Material Fantasy: The Museum in Colonial India.” In Art and Visual Culture in India, edited by Gayatri Sinha, 40–57. Mumbai: Marg Publications. Theme 4: Local Efforts in Museum Building Besides the colonial rulers, a number of museums were developed by local scholarly societies (such as, the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad active in the Bengal region), and princely states like Baroda. These collections, on the one hand, made use of western ‘scientific’ practices of scholarship, collection and display, and on the other hand, were used by the local scholars to forge a regional identity and a national heritage, often challenging the colonial notion of the Indian past. • Codell, Julie F. 2003. “Ironies of Mimicry: The Art Collection of Sayaji Rao II Gaekwad, Maharaja of Baroda, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern India.” Journal of the History of Collections, 15(1): 127–146. 3 • Dutta, Sanjukta. 2009. “Artefacts and Antiquities in Bengal: Some Perspectives within an Emerging Non-official Archaeological Sphere.” In Ancient India, edited by U. Singh and N. Lahiri, 11–38. Delhi: OUP. Module C: Museums in Postcolonial South Asia Theme 5: National heritage, identity and social memory This section explores the history of museums in context of transition of South Asia, from a region under colonial rule, to a number of independent nation states. How did the South Asian countries envision their respective ‘national’ museums? How were museums used to forge new and distinct national identities and heritages? What aspects of a nation’s history were glorified and which memories suppressed? This is especially discussed in relation to varying representations (or the lack thereof) of the region’s common past, such as the Buddhist heritage in Pakistan and India, the Islamic past shared by Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, and the Partition in 1947. We also study museums in context of contemporary identity politics within the South Asian countries. Which museums in contemporary South Asia which challenge the national narrative of their respective nation-states? Who is building these and why? How do the marginalised and displaced communities use museums to preserve social memory and represent their heritage? This section discusses case studies from Pakistan (Lahore Museum), India (National Museum, New Delhi; Sikh museums), Sri Lanka (assassination museums), Nepal (Republic Memorial; Narayanhiti Palace Museum, Kathmandu), Bangladesh (Bangladesh Liberation War Museum), the exiled Tibetan community in Dharamsala, and their politics of representation. • Andrew Amstutz. 2019. “A Pakistani Homeland for Buddhism: Displaying a National History of Pakistan Beyond Islam, 1950–1969”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 42: 2, 237–55. 4 • Bhatti, Shaila. 2012. Translating Museums: A Counterhistory of South Asian Museology. California: Left Coast Press. [Ch 2. Colonial Mementoes to Postcolonial Imaginings: The Transformation of the Lahore Museum. 83–112] • Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, 2004. Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India. New Delhi: Permanent Black. [Ch 6. The Demands of Independence, from a National Exhibition to a National Museum. 175–204] • Harris, Clare E. 2012. The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. [Ch 5. The Tibet Museum in Exile.153–176] • Singh, Kanika. 2018. “The Story of a Sikh Museum”, Seminar, 701: January, 95–99. • Singh, Kavita. 2015. “Ghosts of Future Nations, or the Uses of the Holocaust Museum Paradigm in India.” In The International Handbook of Museum Studies: Museum Transformations, edited by Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips, 29–60. WileyBlackwell. • Singh, Kavita. 2003. “The Museum is National.” India International Centre Quarterly 29 (3/4): 176–196. • Mathur, Saloni, and Kavita Singh. (2015) 2017. “Reincarnations of the Museum: The Museum in an Age of Religious Revivalism.” In No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia, edited by Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh, 203–18. New Delhi: Routledge. • Mookherjee, Nayanika. 2011. “‘Never Again’: Aesthetics of ‘Genocidal’ Cosmopolitanism and the Bangladesh Liberation War Museum.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17: S71–S91 • Whitmarsh, Bryony. 2017. “Staging Memories at the Narayanhiti Palace Museum, Kathmandu.” Himalaya: The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 37 (1), Article 13. 5 • Wolf, Arun, and Gita Wolf. 2015. Between Memory & Museums: A dialogue with Folk and Tribal Artists. Chennai: Tara Books. Theme 6: Religion in Museums Many collections in museums both in South Asia and the West consist of items which have religious value for the communities to which they belong. This section examines the interaction between religious practices of South Asian communities and the institution of the museum. How do religious objects get transformed into ‘secular’ artefacts in a museum? How do audiences respond to religious objects in museum displays? Are museums on religious history possible? Can museums also be sacred shrines? How do religion and history interact in an ‘objective’ and ‘secular’ museum space? We discuss these questions through an examination of Sikh museums, Buddhist relics and Hindu deities in museum collections. • Brosius, Christiane. 2011. “The Cultural Politics of Transnational Heritage Rituals: Akshardham Cultural Complex in New Delhi.” In Ritual, Heritage and Identity: The Politics of Culture and Performance in a Globalised World, edited by Christiane Brosius and Karin M. Polit, 97–125. New Delhi: Routledge. • Davis, Richard. 1997. Lives of Indian Images. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Ch 5. Indian Images Collected. 143–185] • Mathur, Saloni, and Kavita Singh. (2015) 2017. “Reincarnations of the Museum: The Museum in an Age of Religious Revivalism.” In No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia, edited by Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh, 203–18. New Delhi: Routledge. • Paine, Crispin. 2013. Religious Objects in Museums: Private Lives and Public Duties, London: Bloomsbury. * 6