An Institutional History

Madhuparna Roychowdhury’s work is a significant addition to the historiography on museums and art history in India. In recent years, one of the major as well as the deeply thought-provoking interventions in this field has been Tapati GuhaThakurta’s Monuments, Objects, Histories. Guha-Thakurta has convincingly argued how the history of museums, monuments and art objects need to be situated in the realm of the history of Indian nationalism. Madhuparna Roychowdhury’s Displaying India’s Heritage takes this history further. Her intention is to treat museummaking in India as an aspect of a wider culture of history. This practice of history was torn between colonial institutional backing for a so-called rational and scientific history and a historical consciousness that drew upon memories as well as imaginative ideas. Puranic history was labelled an outcaste by the colonial forms of rational-positivist history writing since it could not be empirically proved. However, indigenous elites, often trained in the new mode of education, often combined these two types of history-writing.