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1 About the volume There is a palpable sense around us these days that our museums in India are going to change, that there is an impending Renaissance. This volume attempts to capture the important moment as we prepare ourselves to make the transition to a different kind of a museum dialogue; one that goes beyond just grand buildings housing precious objects. This collection of essays represents the museum in India in all its exhaustive and expansive potential including tangible objects, intangible cultural heritage, urban spaces, communities, performances, collections, archives and life narratives. The first section on communities brings the focus of the museum back to people’s memories, lived experiences and articulation of identities. Troubling events in contemporary India, like the India-Pakistan partition and the Bhopal gas tragedy, raise questions about the promise and perils of museumising contentious events, as written by Urvashi Butalia, Moulshri Joshi and Amritha Ballal. But this conversation also offers us, in India, an opportunity to dismantle the high-culture-low-culture divide prevalent in our museums and forces the museums to engage with difficult narratives. The traditional notion of a museum has expanded over the decades to include intangible cultural heritage found in oral histories, ethnic identities and urban habitats grappling with change. The demolition and translocation of flower markets of New Delhi marks a loss of cultures built around certain livelihoods, faith and urban lifestyles. This is a culture that is invisibilised by the Indian capital’s frenetic march toward becoming a 21st century super- city. The Dastangoi tradition, the Mughal art of storytelling, which has now found an exciting revival is not only an intangible cultural artefact but can also easily tie into the performative teaching techniques in a museum. As Elizabeth Pickard writes, gallery theatre can also be a rich way of facilitating visitors’ meaning-making processes. Indian museums have paid scant attention to visitors’ comfort and experience. Visitor studies are only now taking off in India, but Andrew Pekarik warns us that visitors cannot be viewed as passive receptacles. Deepti Mulgund writes about how a new contemporary art museum in a mall frames the visitor in the context of conspicuous consumption. Abha Negi presents the glaring and acute apathy toward visitors in denial of universal access to people with physical, cognitive and developmental disabilities, at historic monuments and museums, and highlights initiatives undertaken to close the gap. In the past five years, new kinds of exhibition themes such as archival photographs, corporate memory, urban transport infrastructure, manuscripts and newer audiences have presented unique curatorial challenges. Diverse museum audiences visiting Indian exhibitions in the United States present their own set of questions about curator Vidya Dehejia’s hybrid ethnic identity and perspective. Finally, the planning and maintenance of museums, and turning them into efficient and profitable entities requires a wide range of professional expertise. How we train and produce these skilled professionals needs to be constantly reviewed by scholars to bridge the gap between the academia and the industry. -From the Editorial team Disclaimer: All articles included in this issue express personal view of the author and not of any organisation. All photographs are contributed by the authors unless specified otherwise. Chief Editor Shikha Jain CONTENTS Guest Editor Rama Lakshmi 01 About the Volume Editor Cheena Kanwal 04 Editorial Managing Editor Rama Lakshmi Prabha Prabhakar Bhardwaj Assistant Editor Parul G Munjal Museum and the Community Consulting Editors Ajay Khare, 07 Bhopal Gas Tragedy Kewal Khanna, Dissonant history, difficult heritage Suchandra Bardhan Moulshri Joshi and Amritha Ballal Editorial Advisors 15 Engaging with Public History Adam Hardy, Indira Chowdhury PRASADA, Welsh School of Architecture, Confronting the Past Cardiff, UK 21 Thoughts on a Partition Museum A G K Menon Urvashi Butalia Convener, INTACH Delhi Chapter New Delhi 27 Mapping Social Identities 08 Minja Yang Madhuri Desai Assistant Professor Penn State University, Pennsylvania, USA Rima Hooja Intangible Cultural Heritage MSID India Program, University of Minnesota, USA 31 Dastangoi Revival of the Mughal art of storytelling Shankar Ghose Mahmood Farooqui Charkha, Development Communication Network, 37 Beyond the Object New Delhi Changing museum discourse Monideep Chattopadhyay Marie Eve Celio-Scheurer and Moe Chiba Chief Executive Centre for Habitat, 45 Living Museums Environment and Disaster Management, Understanding our urban spaces Kolkata Himanshu Verma Cover Design & Layout 45 SN Graphix (011) 46142909, 9891299959 Copyright © 2011 Dronah, India Museums and Visitors All rights reserved including the right to reproduce and contents of this publication in 55 Recasting the Visitors 67 whole or in part without prior written permission From passive consumers to active agents of the publishers. Neither this book nor any Andrew J Pekarik part may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilming and 63 Museum Theatre recording or by any information storage and Living connections to exhibits retreival system, without permission in writing Elizabeth Pickard from the publisher. Printed and published by DRONAH 69 Access to History A-258, South City - I, Gurgaon-122 001 Making design universal Tel: 0124-4082081,2381067, Fax: 0124-4269081 Abha Negi Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.dronah.org 77 Museum in the Mall ISSN No : 0973-502X Visitors as art consumers Deepti Mulgund Vol VIII Issue 2 Autumn/Winter 2011 Curatorial Voices: Changes and Challenges 3 85 Projecting India Museum displays in the United States Vidya Dehejia 114 93 An Unclaimed Legacy Examining and exhibiting photographic archives in India Pramod Kumar KG 101 Indian Manuscripts Displaying intellectual history Sudha Gopalakrishnan 107 Delhi Metro Museum The chronicler of a new age revolution Anuj Dayal 113 Archiving Corporate Memory Vrunda Pathare 95 Museum Planning and Maintenance 123 Museum Planning in India Barry Lord 133 Demystifying Documentation Mrinalini Venkateswaran 141 Retailing Cultural Merchandise Maureen Liebl 151 Heritage Orphanages Site museums Amita Baig 155 Managing Museums Sadashiv Gorakshkar 142 159 Teaching Museology in India Manvi Seth Museum Album Book Reviews This section includes visuals of few unique and representative museums across India: Reviewed by Rama Lakshmi Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, 165 The Participatory Museum by Nina Simon Bhopal 176 171 Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Anokhi Museum of Hand Printing, Jaipur 177 166 Museums and Sustainable Values by Selma Holo and Mari-Tere Alvarez 167 Calico Museum of Textiles, Ahmedabad 168 Akshardham, New Delhi Reviews 178 Scheme for Financial Assistance for Setting Up, 170 Kite Museum, Ahmedabad Promotion and Strengthening of Regional and Local Museums 171 Sulabh International Museum of Toilets, New Delhi Reviewed by Shikha Jain 172 Dharohar Haryana Museum, Kurukshetra 180 Status of the Government Museums Excerpts from Parliamentary Committee Reports 173 Museum of Folk Culture, Jodhpur 180 Events and Conferences 174 Culture Conscious Design and Museum Interactions 172 by Ranjit Makkuni Editorial RAMA LAKSHMI or entertainment. In this uncaring universe, some of the most important narratives about who we are, where we have been, are lost. The unspoken rhetorical code of our This volume has been put together at a time of museum landscape is: ‘Collect it. Display it. Forget it.’ tremendous churning in the museum world. There is a severe crisis in museums in the Western nations; an Somehow, having 4000 years of material culture has immediate economic blow that requires urgent attention, created in us a sort of a civilisational arrogance and and a long-term one that threatens to re-order the ennui. We have the objects, so we do not need to do fundamentals of the institution itself. anything else. Artefacts are labelled, but rarely explained. Stories and experiences are not created around these Hit by a massive economic slowdown, museums are objects. Coupled with this is the cult of expertise, facing debilitating cutbacks in state funding like in the a sort of Brahminical monopoly over knowledge, a United States. Others like Rotterdam’s Wereldmuseum, mistaken belief that sharing it or breaking it down for the have even been forced to sell their African and American commoner would diminish its significance and perhaps, collections to stay afloat. even its purity. But beyond the economic woes, the museum institutions To unpack the visual vocabulary of our museums, we are grappling with a more fundamental challenge to their must look into its earliest impulses. During the colonial identity and relevance. Through the 1990s, museums period, our first museum was born from the British have tried to find their niche in an environment where excavators’ and scholars’ decision to store some of the visitors were drawn to other sources of entertainment archaeological artefacts in India, instead of shipping and amusement parks. Now, in recent years, museums them all back to England. After Independence, the Indian are also struggling to find relevance in a society that has government made the museum a handmaiden of its been transformed by the use and access to content and nation-building goal. The museums

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