The Museum is National

Abstract

The newly-formed museums became sites for the retrieval of their own past: within their halls, the new nations could collect, protect and assign value to their own heritage independent of the scrutiny and judgements of their erstwhile colonial masters. However, while the desire to have a national museum was inspired by examples of museums in the European metropolises, the museums of new states needed to do something markedly different from what had been done in Europe. In formulating a high national culture, one strand or a few interrelated strands are chosen as the dominant, representative or mainstream culture from among the proliferation of local cultures. Arrogating to the modern nation all the cultural productions of the past, these museums turn civilisation into heritage and predecessors into ancestors, binding the populace into a citizenry through their shared pride in 'their' past. The centre of the gallery is given to images from Kushana sculpture workshops in Mathura.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 44 citations exist upstream.