Abstract
The National Museum of the Indian republic, in Delhi, is slated to overtake the Louvre, Paris as the largest museum in the world, as per its expansion plans. Elsewhere in the country, too, a growing interest in seen in displaying, showcasing and deploying culture in the form of mega museums, many backed by private funding. The interest and investment in museum-making, only seems to be growing. Since at least the late-18th century, the art museum in modern polities has been tasked with the project of schooling peoples into citizens. Evaluating the premise that museums produce citizens, this article reflects on the templates of citizenship that India’s contemporary museums offer its citizens. Taking a schematic view of art and culture museums established in independent India—dedicated to pre-modern, modern, and contemporary art, and folk and tribal art—it annotates the shifts in the museum-scape, particularly in the post-liberalization era, when the state has receded from the provisioning of social goods. It maps how, newly-independent India turned to its premodern art and the idea of collective patrimony to offer a didactic model of citizenship. Skipping forward to the post-liberalisation period—marked by market freedom and extensive private investment in art and cultural institutions—the article reflects on how national institutions dedicated to modern and contemporary art have struggled to intervene in narrowed interpretations of art and culture. Through a discussion on the emergence of folk and tribal art, the article lays out the terms on which inclusion into the category of art are effected—this is often at the cost of erasure and effacement of the struggle for rights. The article concludes by calling for a closer look at the diversification of the museum-scape which while welcome, and desirable, needs to hold space for difficult conversations, and critical questions around collective living, rather than being reduced to range of anodyne entertainments.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.55496/WYEJ6281
