Narrative of Building the Government Museum, Bengaluru

The institution of museum came to India in the early nineteenth century with the establishment of the Oriental Museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. This museum which started in 1814 in Calcutta was the first time when a collection of objects and artefacts were arranged to present a specific narrative, available for the public to view. This was the first time that a public building with such a specific function was introduced in the Indian subcontinent. The establishment of this, signaled the museum movement in India where several such institutions were built across the subcontinent. These museums became spaces which played a nuanced role in various ways that controlled the narrative that was presented, and how the public was allowed to interact with it. The museum as an institution introduced in the subcontinent was mirroring similar institutions that were already existing in England. Museums built during the period of colonization as debated by various scholars are known to have been highly political spaces. But to understand the nuances that were already a part of the museum as an institution before it was introduced here, we must look at the political concepts that influenced museums in Europe.

Politics of a Museum Space

Tony Bennett argues that the factors that characterized museum spaces during the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe were based on three principles: the first was the relations of the museum to the public that it organized and constituted of, second, its internal organization, and third, its relationship to other similar institutions. By the end of the first half of the century, the museum had placed objects from collections that were previously in-accessible within the public sphere. Collections before this existed as Cabinets of Curiosities by the aristocratic and royal ownership. These collections were only available for private viewing. Bringing these private collections into public access led to the development of subtle politics in the codification of the bourgeois section of the society, with the museum as a display of power. The museum also embodied the new rhetoric of power which enlisted the general public that it addressed as its subject as well as its object. The purpose of the museum was not to know the populace but to allow the people to be addressed as subjects of knowledge rather than objects of administration. This rendered the power visible to the populace but did not serve the purpose of rendering the people visible to the power.

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The transformation of the museum space as a symbol for power takes place due to the increased permeability of the space as it lifts the previous restricted access and brings the exclusive to the public domain. This change is seen prominently within the architecture of the museum at the time as well. A spate of competitions were organized towards the design of space and vision that would allow the museum to function as an instrument of public instruction. As well as taking on the function of displaying power to the populace, the museum also altered the rhetoric of the power significantly. Rather than embodying a coercive principle of power which aimed to cow the people into submission, the museum aimed to inveigle the public into complicity. It placed the people that it addresses as subjects as well as objects, on this side of the power, representing it as their own. This was not, however, merely a matter of the state claiming ownership of cultural property on behalf of the public or of the museum opening its doors. It was an effect of the new organizational principles governing the arrangement of objects within museum displays and of the subject position that produced for that new public of free and formal equals which museums constituted and addressed. By this time, the museum served two purposes, that of the elite temple of arts and that of a utilitarian instrument for education. The message the museum carried was of presenting the past and also glorifying what colonial scholarship has done for the colony.

When the museum went from the collections of private patronage of the royal, aristocrats into the public sphere of institutions for public access and service, the museum went from being a symbol of arbitrary power to an instrument that through the education of the people served for the collective good of the state. According to Bennett, the museum was now serving two purposes, that of the elite temple of the arts, and that of a utilitarian instrument for democratic education. Later a third function was added, that of an instrument of the disciplinarian society though the divide it created between the producer and consumer of knowledge within a museum. Since it started undergoing transformation based on the political messaging based on who was in-charge of the museum, the criticism of the process has been focused on two principles that govern the museum. First the principle of public rights sustaining the demand that museums should be equally open and accessible to all; and second, the principle of representational adequacy sustaining the demand that museums should adequately represent the cultures and values of different sections of the public.

The formative characteristics of the museum were shaped during the first half of the nineteenth century and it was based on three principles. first, its relations to the publics it helped to organize and constitute, second, its internal organization, and, third, its placement in relation both to kindred institutions as well as to those – both ancient and modern - to which it might most usefully be juxtaposed. By the end of the first half of the century, the museum places previously un-accessible objects into the public sphere. This development led to the development of subtle politics in codification of the bourgeois sectioning of the society as a display of power. it also transformed it in embodying a new rhetoric of power which enlisted the general public it addressed as its subject rather than its object. The purpose, here, is not to know the populace but to allow the people, addressed as subjects of knowledge rather than objects of administration, to know; not to render the populace visible to power but to render power visible to the people and, at the same time, to represent to them that power as their own. The transformation that takes place is due to the increased permeability of the museum as restricted access is lifted bringing the exclusive to the public domain. This change is seen in the architecture of the museum at the time as well, as a spate of competitions are organized towards the organization of space and vision that would allow the museum to function as an instrument of public instruction. The museum in taking on the function of displaying power to the populace, the rhetorical economy of the power that was displayed was significantly altered.

The princely collections from earlier times were built on the function to recreate the world in miniature for the patron and were organised to demonstrate the ancient hierarchies of the world and the resemblances that drew the things of the world together. By the second half of the nineteenth century the narrative had changed. Governed by the new principles of scientific taxonomy, the stress was placed on the observable differences between things rather than the hidden resemblances; the common or ordinary object, accorded a representative function, was accorded priority over the exotic or unusual; and things were arranged as parts of series rather than as unique items. Things ceased to be arranged as parts of taxonomic tables and came, instead, in being inserted within the flow of time, to be differentiated in terms of the positions accorded them within evolutionary series. These power- knowledge relations were democratic in their structure to the degree that they constituted the public they addressed - the newly formed, undifferentiated public brought into being by the museum 's openness - as both the culmination of the evolutionary series laid out before it. The key issue with this newly emerging dialogues of power is that the public museum was hijacked by all sorts of particular social ideologies and it reinforced the sexist and racist patterns of exclusion within its hierarchy of power. The space of representation associated with the museum rests on a principle of general human universality which renders it inherently volatile, opening it up to a constant discourse of reform as hitherto excluded constituencies seek inclusion on equal terms within that space opening it up to criticism.

According to Bennett, the museum in its new form also provided a mechanism for the transformation of the crowd into an ordered and, ideally, self-regulating public. The museum, explicitly targeted the popular body as an object for reform, doing so through a variety of routine and technologies requiring a shift in the norms of bodily comportment. This was accomplished by the direct proscription of those forms of behaviour associated with places of popular assembly by, for example, rules forbidding eating and drinking, outlawing the touching of exhibits and, quite frequently, stating -or at least advising - what should be worn and what should not. In this way, while formally free and open, the museum effected its own pattern of informal discriminations and exclusions. In this way, through offering a space of ' supervised conformity', the museum offered a context in which new forms of behaviour might, in being internalized, become self-acting imperatives. The new architecture associated with museums, reinforced these subtle practices of regulating the public. This was done through the use of new materials and designs to permit the enclosure and illumination of large spaces. The clearing of exhibits to the sides and centres of display areas, allowed clear passageways for the transit of the public, and breaking that public up from a disaggregated mass into an orderly flow. The provision of elevated vantage points in the form of galleries which, in allowing the public to watch over itself, incorporated a principle of self-surveillance and hence self -regulation into museum architecture.

The above discussion leads to the equation between the museum, the organizer, the objects and the audience. It forces us to focus in addition to what gets shown in museums, attention needs also to be paid to the processes of showing, who takes part in those processes and their consequences for the relations they establish between the museum and the visitor. The division between the hidden space of the museum in which knowledge is produced and organized and the public spaces in which it is offered for passive consumption produces a monologic discourse dominated by the authoritative cultural voice of the museum. (Bennett 1995)

In ‘The Birth of the Museum’ Tony Bennett argues the nuances that influenced the parturition of this institution in the context of what was happening across Europe. What Bennett fails to take into account is the important political role that European Imperialism played and how the museum soon became a public institution across the globe as a part of the process of colonization. These institutions were replicated in the colonized regions and the political nuances that the museum carried with them, through the role they played in England, were transferred to the Indian subcontinent where a clear demarcation already existed between the society – that of the colonized and the colonizer. With the introduction of an institution that was seeped in political tones in how they were designed and the narrative they carried, the socio political hierarchies between the colonized and the colonizer were elevated. Here it went on to become more evident because the objects the museum presented did not belong to a culture they were familiar with. Hence the narratives presented in the museum were organized according to how the British organized and made sense of the material available to them.

How the Museum Came to be in India

Romila Thapar says in ‘Museums in India: past and future’, “In India, the institution of a museum was initially a colonial imposition. Its establishment lay in colonial views of knowledge about India with a recognizable ideological purpose of giving an identity to the Indian past. The museum did not grow from the individual collector’s activities. The major museums were from the start state institutions. What the British collected in India to begin with came largely from their own explorations and excavations and from donations. The need to house these objects began with placing them in the Asiatic Society premises in Calcutta, conjoining them to Indology.” (Thapar 2014)

Tapati Guha Thakurta, in her exploration of ‘the colonial past’ explains the defining activities of the British that explored the cultural landscapes of India and eventually influenced the institution of museum in colonial India. Both the museum and archaeology arrived in the colony, well formed as practices and disciplines with their objective and function defined. Their foundation in India is clearly defined in institutional dates with the establishment of the first museum within the premises of Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1814. The 1861 memorandum placed by Alexander Cunningham before the Government of India where he proposes a systematic survey of the Indian subcontinent for its historical materials and structures. It will be interesting to examine how the exotic and unfamiliar corpus of material that India offered would be viewed in the disciplines implemented for study of culture. Both the museums and the archaeological explorations sought to name, describe and document the object using terminology that suited their sensibilities.

When museums first began to be established in the colony during the mid-nineteenth century, a European model for such state institutions was already well established. The British museum founded in 1752 had emerged by the early-nineteenth century as an exemplary repository of antiques of all civilizations of the ancient world. It was the earliest of the knowledge producing apparatus which through a richly reverberating world of visual representations made meaning of the past with a novel sense of history and antiquity. The museums assumed their premier role in generating hierarchies of genres and representations of the world while replicating the past. By mid-nineteenth century, the composite collections gave rise to separate disciplinary museums of art, antiquities, ethnography and natural history which opened up to further divisions and sub-divisions.

In stark contrast to this scenario, the first museum in India was conceived in the earlier seventeenth and eighteenth century sense of assembling a unified corpus of knowledge under one roof to cater to the individual explorations of separate interests within the spectrum of material and natural culture offered by the Indian subcontinent. Thus India’s exotic universe in its entirety, in its past and present, in its natural and human wealth, scientific and civilizational resources, offered itself to the institution of scholarly studies and the museum.

Though the earliest history of museums in India traces back to colonial establishments, the earlier princely and later private colonial collections, soon filtered into the museum once they appeared. The beginning of the museum is founded in western orientalist scholarship. The first museum that was to be “collected” was to consist of “all articles that may tend to illustrate Oriental manners and history of to elucidate the peculiarities of art and nature in the east”. The main impetus was to collect and not to display. The collection was intended only for the small initiated circle that perceived its need and appreciated its value and a display for the larger public was yet to feature on the agenda. Through its early history, the museum was to function locked within the gaze of the scholar never opening itself to the perspective of the lay spectator. Though the field of archaeology, ethnography and natural history were already forming themselves within these collections, but there was no separation of distinct fields. The defining paradigm for the entire collection was objects that were unique and peculiar to India.

With natural history and studies of the biology and zoology of India being more easily comprehensible than the material and cultural history of India, early British collections were established around the natural studies with the local artisans employed to document. This gave rise to the new category of company paintings. Well before archaeology marked out its sprawling field in India, India’s natural history had begun to emerge as a prime subject of scientific knowledge within the institutional sites of museums. The museums set up after Asiatic, Madras in 1851 and Mumbai in 1855, both focused on specimens of natural history to form the first collections and classifications of the collections and display.

In addition to the exploration of natural history, there was a growing interest in the products of the empire thus creating another major category of objects absorbed into museum displays termed the “industrial” or “decorative” arts of India. The fine craftsmanship of the artisan in India found pride of place in the circuit of world fairs and international exhibitions. The objects of craft in India were now subjected to the orders of identification, organization and classification according to a variety of schemes: period, place of origin, nature of raw material, production process, style of design, and more. Though the museum collections were occasionally tapped for international exhibition, but it was more often the case that the items were searched out and gathered for an exhibition found a permanent place in the museums. With the growth of the field of decorative arts, the museum first evolved its dual identity, as a storehouse of tradition and as a forum of visual instruction. Thus the museum in India moved from being repositories of history and science and repositories of the nation’s art. The museum in its organization and gradation of its collection, fostered a particular definition of art in the Indian context. Over the mid-nineteenth century, the materials collected under the field of decorative arts, soon began to be further sifted into the separate discipline of archaeology which emerged as another major constituent field of knowledge within the museum. (Thakurta 2004)

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