FROM the beginning of their establishment in Europe, museums such as the Louvre or the British Museum (BM) have always been instruments and projections of the power of the state. Objects in their collections – whether the Mona Lisa and other Italian portraits in the Louvre or the Elgin marbles and Egyptian antiquities in the BM – first and foremost reflected the glory of the expanded empires and presented the treasure troves collected from subjugated territories.

By the time museums of South Asia were established and developed in the newly independent countries, the earlier colonial projects were now subsumed under the nationalist rhetoric of creating pride in the historical heritage. Combined with the 20th century American ideas about museums as temples of precious objects and civilizational aspirations, the museums of South Asia in the early decades of their independence retained the primacy of preservation of objects with added elements of traditional education. It was okay for children from government schools and some private schools to go to a dusty museum on a school trip but, as pointed by many, they were nothing more than a ‘cabinet of curiosity’ or ‘Ajaib Ghar’, a place of wonder, irrelevant and unimportant for countries keen on catching up with the rest of the modern world.

With a few notable exceptions, most museums in South Asia continue to languish in the category of ‘unimportant and irrelevant’. Many of them, such as the Indian Museum in Kolkata or the Lahore Museum in Pakistan have a distinguished pedigree and impressive collections that include rare remnants of the Bharhut Stupa (in the Indian Museum) and the precious sculptures of the Buddha, including the World famous Fasting Buddha (in the Lahore Museum). But in both countries, the lessons to be learned from the past or the relevance of our millennial heritage for the 21st century seems far away from the mind of the educators, students and parents. In a desperate hunger to get on with the mindless march toward modernization, we de-privilege our unique features that can serve as guide posts for the future, not for ideological or nostalgic reasons, but out of the need to recognize the limitations of the technologically, materially driven world that we obsess over.

Should we then give up all hope for our historically oriented museums? Can they actually play a more instrumental role in changing the social attitude towards our past? How can they become agents of attitudinal change within South Asia, the region that is characterized more by its connectivity over millennia than by its divisions of the recent past? All one has to do is to visit the museums in Colombo, Chennai, Dhaka, Karachi, Kathmandu, or Kabul. It is not just the shared heritage of Buddhist, Hindu, Jain or Islamic art, but also the active interaction of stylistic trends from one place to another, giving voice to easy flow of people, ideas, and objects, that tell the powerful story of South Asia as a millennial civilizational force.

 

The political constraints of the last century or so have meant that we have not effectively used the cultural strength of the region to create an alternative narrative, one that can be induced to give birth to a more cohesive vision, neither uniform nor subordinate to the descriptions of the major player such as India, but one that can promote both unique qualities of each area while strengthening our understanding of shared ideas and beliefs.

The challenges are both operational and conceptual. Let’s start with the most obvious ones. All the excavated materials from the Indus Valley civilization from more than five thousand years ago, remain divided between India and Pakistan. Much of the recent archeological discoveries – from Dholavira in Gujarat to Mehrgarh in northern Pakistan – also remain isolated except for the efforts of a small number of western scholars. The great miniature paintings from the small court of Basohli in Punjab Hills are divided between Lahore and Delhi and the only way we can see them together is either in the form of catalogues or in exhibitions outside of the region. Lack of encouragement, support and opportunities for scholarly exchange or exhibitions limits the possibility for doing any joint research or develop new narratives.

Deliberating on such cultural developments in South Asia in today’s context, one cannot ignore the role the increasingly powerful international organisations have to play. From the perspective of a museum professional working in the U.S. for the past four decades, I have elaborated more on this elsewhere.

 

At a deeper level, the problem also lies in the fact that there is an urgent need for a reconceptualization of museums in South Asia. In the US today, there is a strong recognition that museums are no longer just repositories of great objects or even temples of high learning that visitors go to for some kind of enlightenment or a proof of being cultured in the higher realm of civilization. Today, museums are seen as social places, places that compete with other gathering places for personal encounters, building on their virtual capacities to entice and prepare their visitors to make the museum their own, to make their visits personally gratifying. Museums recognize that even in the age of virtual connection, people have the need to gather in a casual, comfortable setting, where they can talk, eat, shop and, yes, also look at art.

For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has figured out that more than 60% of their visitors connect with the museum online before a physical visit. Interestingly, their online audience is far larger than those who visit the museum personally. It thus behoves them to create a seamless connection between the online and the physical experience of their visitors. But it is equally important to recognize that not all of their virtual stakeholders are likely to visit them in person. The Brooklyn Museum has taken this to another level of engagement.

 

Why not put the entire Indian painting collection online and then ask the viewers to organize their own virtual exhibition and then use the best of the lot as a basis for the museum exhibition? In India, the land of software-savvy engineers, it could be amazing if IT techies could get together with scholars and curators to create special games, apps and other devices to make the objects come alive, and in turn, attract all the users to get to the museum to check out the objects in person, with their friends. The recent Wikipedia-thons at the Smithsonian and at the British Museum suggest exciting new possibilities for the museums in South Asia.

A more significant potential for the museums in the region, in partnership with other global institutions and/or scholars, is to develop joint projects with an express need to promote cultural harmony and interdependence that has been so sorely lacking in the region for almost a century. For example, one could think about an exhibition of the Art of Sufism with objects from different part of India and Pakistan to explore the deep interaction between Hindus and Muslims over the past five hundred years and its manifestation in art. If such ideas are jointly developed with an express purpose of developing a strong public awareness and engagement throughout the region, museums stand a fighting chance to become a catalytic force for the promotion of peace in the region, and help create a more thoughtfully nuanced way for the war-torn world.