ABSTRACT
Eminent Indian museologist, cultural historian and writer Jyotindra Jain has written:
The museum was kind of still-born in colonial India-it never took roots in the country as other colonial institutions did-the game of cricket and the railways they grew, they adapted, they touched the masses. Here, the institution of museum has remained more closed to its negative overtones of the German word “museal”—moribund, dead, and therefore museumlike. Instead, and enigmatically the space of museum has become a hallowed space like that of a temple where notions of communal religious and national identities began to determine their roles and functions. In this context I am reminded of a point made by Duncan Cameron (1972, pp. 197, 201) that there are two distinct museum-related stances: the traditional one of the Museum as temple, and a newer one of the Museum as forum. To India, a country of temples, converting the institution of museum into a temple came naturally … Of late, the museum in India is increasingly becoming a layered space with resurgent political, social, and religious interventions.
