What is a museum, really? A building that houses objects? A temple of knowledge? A vault of the past? Or a theatre of the present? The answers are as complex as the institution’s foundational contradiction. Museums claim to preserve and protect, but they also curate and construct. The question of publicness is key. For most Indians, a visit to the museum is still a rare event — more school trip than weekend ritual.
A museum’s power lies not just in its artefacts, but in its audience. We must ask: what kind of history do we want told? Who gets to do the telling? Can we, as citizens in a democracy, demand more nuance, more truth? Can museums become pedagogical spaces, where history is not just consumed but interrogated. Where young people learn not just what happened, but why it matters, and who it mattered to.
Sarnath Banerjee’s Spectral Times at BDL Museum
The politics of display
India is undergoing a museum-building renaissance. Across the country, state and private actors are investing in ambitious cultural institutions — from the redevelopment of the National Museum in New Delhi to regional centres of memory and art. Yet, beneath the sleek architecture and nation-branding optimism lies an urgent question: what is being built, by whom, and for whom? What is being remembered, and what is being erased?
According to the Ministry of Culture, over 100 new experiential museums are in the pipeline, although details about their themes, timelines, and locations remain largely unspecified. The National Museum is set to be relocated as a part of the Central Vista redevelopment project, but there is no public clarity yet on the fate of its artefacts — one of the largest and most significant collections in the country.
Museums have always shaped public memory. As the state increasingly centralises control over historical narrative, they risk becoming not a space of learning but of persuasion. The challenge, then, is not just to fill galleries with new stories, but to reimagine the very idea of the institution.
From colonial cabinets to national canons
India’s earliest museums were built by colonial powers as instruments of classification and control. They displayed conquest as culture, and placed Indian craft and labour within a framework that rendered it primitive, decorative, or ethnographic.
Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, director of Mumbai’s Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum (BDL), reminds us that these institutions were never neutral. In her essay ‘Decolonising the Museum’, she writes that colonial museums functioned to “present the coloniser as benefactor whose systems of organisation and codification represented a better model for development”. The BDL itself, formerly the Victoria and Albert Museum, Mumbai, was filled with clay figurines, dioramas, and decorative objects intended to showcase India’s “traditional” manual skills — useful to colonial trade, but stripped of intellectual or artistic legitimacy.
Since its restoration and reopening in 2008, BDL has sought to reverse this narrative. Mehta’s curatorial vision actively foregrounds the Indian artist and craftsperson, reinterpreting the museum’s colonial collections through contemporary cultural practice. The museum’s ongoing collaboration with contemporary artists such as Reena Saini Kallat, whose 2025 retrospective Cartographies of the Unseen addressed themes of injustice and human hubris, reflects BDL’s commitment to decolonial and inclusive storytelling.
Beyond preservation
But how do we build new museums — conceptually, not just architecturally — that respond to today’s social and political complexities? At the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru, this question is at the heart of curatorial practice. “We’re at a moment where we need to recognise that museums are not just spaces to preserve heritage, but also spaces that help us understand the present through the lens of the past,” says Arnika Ahldag, director of exhibitions and curation. “At MAP, we see this as a responsibility — to challenge dominant narratives and amplify voices that have historically been marginalised.” In 2023, MAP presented VISIBLE/INVISIBLE, an exhibition that critically examined the portrayal of women in art, highlighting both visibility and erasure in historical narratives.
Shailesh Kulal, inclusion manager, leading the VISIBLE/INVISIBLE guided walk
“It’s about shifting from the museum as gatekeeper to the museum as a collaborative space for dialogue,” she adds. “We often show objects [like kanthas] that people might have in their own homes. That kind of familiarity invites participation, not passivity.” Despite such initiatives, there remains a need to further explore other marginalised perspectives, such as those from Dalit and Adivasi communities, to ensure a more inclusive curatorial approach.
Who gets to curate culture?
This question of relevance is inseparable from power, and participation is not just about display — it’s about voice. Who curates? Who funds? Shaleen Wadhwana, an independent curator, arts educator and former consultant with the India Art Fair, puts it bluntly: “India is very socially stratified, so I’m hesitant to use words like ‘truly public, inclusive and accessible’ because that’s incredibly difficult to achieve. Ideologically, accessibility means that funders only fund, and don’t dictate content. It also means your staff must reflect the diversity of the public. It’s not just the curator — it’s the guard, the educator, the translator, the person in the archive.”
Her critique cuts deep. Many new museums may be visually dazzling — such as the upcoming Yuge Yugeen Bharat National Museum — but their internal cultures often remain opaque, with little public clarity on curatorial direction, institutional staffing, or how narratives are being shaped. Publicness isn’t just about ticket prices or weekend programming. It’s about who is allowed to participate in narrative-making at every level.
Listening, not lecturing
Both MAP and BDL embody a shift from presenting knowledge to listening; treating audiences as cultural co-authors. “In the past, museums told audiences what they thought they needed to know,” says Kamini Sawhney, former director of MAP. The programming tended to be didactic, formal, and largely in English. The obscureness was echoed in the tone of the labels, too: verbose, and in hard-to-read tiny font. For many visitors, the experience was alienating — not only because of the language, but because few knew how to look at a museum object. What do you ask of a 200-year-old textile? Without interpretation that is accessible, multilingual, and context-rich, viewers are left to either quietly admire or silently withdraw.
Kamini Sawhney
| Photo Credit:
Prarthana Shetty
And without meaningful relationships with the public, museums risk becoming irrelevant. “Public institutions need to reflect on issues that matter to the community. Otherwise, you end up talking to yourself,” Sawhney adds. This means building trust, and trust is slow work. It’s built through transparency (about funding, process, and narrative decisions), multilingual materials, responsive education programmes, and a willingness to sit with discomfort.
India has over 1,000 museums — most of them public, and many still operating within rigid, object-led frameworks. But a few are reimagining what they can be. Mumbai’s year-old Museum of Solutions centres children as co-creators — designing exhibits that encourage play, empathy, and problem-solving.
In Amritsar, the Partition Museum foregrounds lived memory and oral histories to narrate a traumatic past with empathy and nuance. And while not a museum in the traditional sense, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has transformed how Indian publics encounter contemporary art — embedding it in urban space, community life, and critical discourse. These remain rare efforts. But taken together, they offer a glimpse of what responsive, plural, and public-facing museums could look like.
The Partition Museum
| Photo Credit:
Shiv Kumar Pushpakar
A space for multiplicity
No museum is neutral. Every exhibition is a series of choices: what to show, what to omit, and how to frame it. Ahldag is forthright about this curatorial labour. “We wish more people understood how much museum-making is about negotiation and care,” she says. “It’s never neutral. Every decision involves navigating histories, ethics, and our own positions of power.”
This is particularly urgent in India today, where state-endorsed narratives increasingly flatten complexity into celebration. In such a context, simply holding space for multiplicity becomes a radical act. “Curating is not just selection; it’s an ongoing conversation with artists, collaborators, and audiences,” she says. “We have to remain open to feedback, even when it challenges us.”
Reena Kallat’s Cartographies of the Unseen at BDL
| Photo Credit:
Looking to the future
So what should the Indian museum become? It must be more than a building, it must be a method of learning, unlearning, coexisting with discomfort. It must be a space of friction, where past and present wrestle in full view of the public. As Wadhwana puts it: “Regardless of what the Centre is doing, independent curators and cultural producers will always have the responsibility to create space for artistic thought, debate, critique — and yes, dissent.” That responsibility only grows heavier when the state seeks to flatten historical narrative into celebratory consensus.
A visitor interacting with the tactile display at MAP’s Ticket Tika Chaap
The Indian museum today is not an answer, it is a proposition. A site of possibility, contention, pedagogy, and repair. “Ultimately, the museum has to be a site of possibility, not of perfected narratives,” Wadhwana says. “The moment we treat it as finished, as fixed, we’ve failed its public function.”
The public has a role to play here, too. We must demand transparency, challenge silence, and see ourselves not as visitors, but as participants. We have the right — and the responsibility — to ask: whose history is this? And what are we being asked to forget? The museum must help us remember. Not just what was, but what could still be.
The essayist and educator writes on design and culture.
Published – April 17, 2025 11:07 pm IST
