Volume I, No. 1, Winter 2001

state of the field

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To use a gas station metaphor, our visitors arrive on empty. We try to fill their tanks. What would happen, if we were to reverse this metaphor to suggest that our visitors also contribute and thereby our museums stood enriched.

 Stephen E Weil, in A Cabinet of Curiosities (1995)

Museums in India were conceived under colonialism. The first museum collection in India was founded in 1796 only forty years after the inception of the British Museum.[1] The collections accumulated after the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal were housed in the Indian Museum in Calcutta, to be followed by the Government Museum in Madras in 1851 and then the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay in 1914. All three of these museums had art, natural history and archaeology sections and, in some ways, these institutions transited from a colonial to a national sense of order with the independence of India. Yet, colonialism has played a significant role in shaping collections and defining a presence which may have been appropriated by its post-colonial trustees.  Historically, museums in India have largely been an urban phenomenon, with a preponderance of urban visitors.  Today, however, this situation has changed, and rural visitors make up an increasingly important sector of museum visitors annually.  This article attempts to trace a trajectory of rural visitors who come to the Prince of Wales Museum and what shapes the attitudes, concepts and perspectives of this audience to read the museum and judge its works.

The Prince of Wales Museum of Western India, a premier museum in India, was founded in 1914. Its genesis began with the appointment by the government in 1904 of a Committee under the Presidency of Mr. G. O. W. Dunn. The committees  recommendation was to immediately house the Sir Jamshedji Jeejibhoy School of Art Collection and to create an  educational  museum which, after 1905, came to be housed in the permanent memorial of the visit of the Prince and the Princess of Wales in that year, taking the form of a public museum. The vicissitudes of the first world war necessitated its later use as a military hospital. An assembled museum was literally dismantled in 12 hours leaving hardly anything that could suggest its heritage value. It was only by the 1920s that the memorial to the visit of the Prince and the Princess of Wales, the site of a military purgatory, reincarnated its avatar as the repository of heritage.

The architecture of the museum building had been conceived under unusual circumstances. The call for Swadeshi had created a resistance to anything that had the hint or statement of a colonial presence. George Wittet, its architect, visualized the building in the Indo-Saracenic style an architectural form that had become fashionable for in some ways it concurred with the mood of the times.[2]  This style combined the features of Hindu, Islamic and British architecture. The Prince of Wales Museum had incorporated within its architectural fa ade a melange of architectural styles which could well be in other words the statement of the empire representing its people. Incorporated within were a multiplicity of features from Mughal domes to minarets, arches, trellised screens and stairways that now bear the chaotic elegance of hybridity which amalgamated Indian and European concepts of environment.

The museum had a total space of 65,000 square feet. The building in question a marker of the colonial presence right from its inception now housed objects, artifacts, projections galleries and displays which offered a rich allegory of history and nationhood and at the same time displayed some of the collections of fine art and other curios of its patrons, the Tata families. The museum movement in India, which was born externally through the patronage of Lord Curzon,[3] had internalized at the same time the germ of nationalism which had become fairly entrenched by the 1920s. New archaeological excavations that highlighted evidence of a rich past in a sense resurrected those lost horizons and gave the embryonic nation an image and identity at that crucial juncture which indirectly gave surge to the spirit of nationalism. To preserve these objects, it was directly interpreted, was to legitimize and substantiate the need for nationhood.

The museum selection and sequencing, then as well as now, followed the historical and the chronological mode of display. A good amount of emphasis is given to collections and donors. But the pattern of display follows the same run of narrative and classification that school and art histories tend to emphasize. The analysis of Tapati Guha Thakurta of the 1948 exhibition in the New National Museum is pertinent here as well, who argued that "The packaging of Indian art as a discrete aesthetic entity with its own uniquely 'Indian' history, had gone hand in hand with its packaging as the embodiment of the nation."[4]

A subtle element of prioritization is revealed through the manner of display. About six galleries on the top floor, vestibule and the main hall on the ground floor house the art section. The vestibule has Kushana, Shunga and Gupta terracottas and the Mirpurkhas collection of the 5^th century CE. On the right side of the vestibule, the Brahmanical gallery appropriates the centralized position but affords a narrow corridor of adjacent space on its left for terracotta panels narrating Buddhist history, as well as stone Buddhas dating back to the 7^th century CE.[5] The open verandahs on the left as well as the right house yakshas, yakshis, hero and sati stones, inscribed slabs, and a few marble statues of Jain jinas, and a very arresting 11^th century sculpture of Sheshashayi Vishnu which is a prime attraction with visitors.

The placement of artifacts guides the visitor through an unstated trajectory whose nationalistic lineaments are evident.  So, too, are the Hindu underpinnings. These seem to be situated, as it were, under the hegemonic umbrella of Parsi patronage which the museum enjoys. The miniatures, fine-art galleries, and weapons repositories occupy the first and second floors. For the museums displaying collections, it means many things: to work the displays in such a way that the Indian identity could be clearly delineated from a colonial one. Within this paradigm, several other forces exert themselves. The Orientalist slant of the early patrons and later trustees of the museum had to be corrected so that the overriding framework of the superiority of Greek art could be embattled and the Indian exhibits could find a national space and identity within the hierarchic order mentioned earlier. Sites for such an eclipse are clearly demarcated; the Brahmanical gallery, for instance, centers this identity and contests this confrontation. The very definition of space, location, hierarchic placement, elevation, emphasis and reification of artifacts assembles a body of thought visually. This narrative also explains the positioning of the Buddhist works of art in the adjacent gallery.

This line of thought seems to be somehow diffused in some other galleries and display cabinets, like the southeast Asian porcelains or the display cabinet of snuff bottles where the paradigm shifts from nationalism to display of private collections. The same is true of the collection of European paintings, which in a sense scroll back to colonialism, reconnecting with the ambience of the 19^th century its elites, their axis of power, their appropriated tastes in art and culture and, moreover, their authority, before these works of art came to be viewed within a contemporary gallery and viewing perspective.

The paradigms within which museums in India were perceived historically were understood to be different from the traditional roles of museums as defined in the western context both in terms of relations of power and collections as well the status of the viewers who would use them. As Markham wrote on his report on museums: "Perhaps the greatest problem which confronts the Indian museum curator keenly desirous of popularizing his museum is the question of how to deal with  illiterates  (italics mine)." "The vast majority of the visitors to Indian museums are illiterate and it follows that if the museum is to be used as an educational institution no amount of labeling would reach the majority of visitors."

Do viewers negotiate public spaces?

An estimated 2.5 million visitors see the Prince of Wales Museum annually, a large segment of these are rural and mofussil town visitors.[6]  An average of 5,000 visitors come every day. The number swells on festive occasions, and doubles during vacations. The groups of sequestered rural and mofussil town visitors moving through the galleries in a quiet disciplined trail or a clustered viginette taking note of, in a matter of fact fashion, the national and the historical and its the prescribed inscriptions. My concern is with this group who are the focus of this article. However we must admit that though we have hemmed in on them through observations and case studies, theirs was the group that was most resistant to empirical survey. They shied away and were resistant to parting with information, thinking they might have to pay for it. Many of them took the questionnaires and, without completing them, consigned them to the dust-bin of the museum. Men traveling with families who acquiesced to filling the questionnaires promptly debarred my student field-workers from handing the same to the women traveling in their groups with a retort; " Who kya likhegi mhera hi khafi hai!" ("What will she write?  What I give should suffice!").  This encounter proved beyond doubt that even within the museum space hegemonic gender discourses are at work and men easily appropriate authority to form the dominant narratives of interpretation of displayed objects. Alternatively, one could interpret it by saying that museum viewing is likened to a kin activity and women s role in perception and interpretation is perceived as negligible.

In terms of the class and caste composition of the museum viewers, the scenario has changed negligibly since Markham published his work in 1936 and this current study. It is difficult to draw on the exact number of rural mofussil town visitors but the security and ticketing staff approximate that almost 70 per cent of the visitors on any given day fall into this category.

Museum visitor surveys conducted in Britain can and do show who constitutes the museum audience. They can also answer why people choose to visit museums. Peter Vergo implemented a national survey in Britain in 1985 of attitudes to and uses of heritage. His study provided valuable indices to the cultural context of museum visiting.

According to Vergo's survey, "the most frequent museum visitors tend to be high status, to have received tertiary education, and to be students or in work, while those who rarely or never visit museums tend to be the elderly, those of low status, to have left school at the earliest opportunity, to be looking after the home or in retirement."[7]

However, no significant surveys have been conducted in India, but the viewer composition seems to be different in socio-cultural context. The most important difference is that Western, e.g., British museums, are, to a large extent, are perceived as repositories of colonialism. Museums in India are seen as colonial constructs which eventually became emblems of nationalism in service to the state. Even in terms of viewer profiles the tableau is very different.  Museum viewing occurs in family or community or kin groups. It is also possible to have groups belonging to an ethnic minority or religious minority traveling together to visit the museum.  Markham has some interesting observations even though his views on museums and museum visitors are sometimes tainted by the vision to promote the colonial project. He surveys museums, therefore, from the standpoint of Western prototypes. In his anxiety to replicate these models, he suggests that museums have perhaps a greater possibility of educating the masses than any other media of communication, including the cinema. Time has proved otherwise. While museums still continue to draw hordes of rural visitors, cinema has come to occupy center stage as the opiate of mass consumption for entertainment and emulation if not for education.

On December 6 and 7, around the annual celebration of Ambedkar Jayanti, the museum sees a heavy influx of visitors. In 1998, the gate collection peaked at Rs. 28,000 on one day which itself approximates 10,000 visitors. On this day, the Dalits from all over India visit Ambedkar s Samadhi at Dadar Sea-face and hold up Bombay s traffic. The day after Bhasi Id, large numbers of Muslims tend to visit the museum dressed in festive finery.[8]

What role do museums play? Are museum meanings diversely determined in relation to caste and communal categories of subjects? Are museums mediators between state and national identity? Why do they draw such large hordes on important days like Ambedkar Jayanti and traditional festivals like Bhasi Id? Do visitors conceptualise identity through the visual vocabulary of museums? Do they appropriate museum exhibits within the range of their own vision and reconceptualise them according to their cultural experiences, exposure and desires?

But even in the early days of the museum movement in India a large number of  lower class people [9] thronged to the museum for reasons other than education.  As Markham explains, "we made it our business, therefore, to accompany some of these parties round museums; such parties were usually the average family group of five or six, the father walking ahead followed by the women and children. Occasionally he would stop and say 'There is a baboon', or 'a sword', and the family would all cluster around, the children sometimes asking questions, but generally using their eyes much more than their tongues. It reminded me of the old fashioned fairs in England, with people walking round every one of the sideshows and being rather amused by what they saw. They were particularly interested in exhibits which fell within their comprehension."[10]

Truly, then as well as now, the typical Indian museum does not have the same capacity as Western museums in providing an adjunct to education. Even though its Indian counterpart came to exist following the discoveries, museums lay stress on their collections as glorifying national heritage, in art, science and history. This situation is particularly the case with national and large, endowed museums such as the Prince of Wales. It is difficult to imagine a congruent picture. Elite collections through which a national heritage is stressed.  And where do the visitors from lower economic backgrounds fit in? Yet one cannot deny that the largest number of visitors are from this category. Museums and communities are historically dependent on one another. Both influence interests and form a symbiotic relationship.  Museums are important social institutions and can thus be seen as sites of symbolic power.

Clearly because of the patronage and the endowments that go into the making of a museum, we can define them as elite institutions which not only define elite tastes in culture but also in terms of curatorial arrangement that follows the gaze of display and definition. This notion is of great importance in conditioning the experience of the visitor. These elite definitions have little to do with the expectations, cultural appetites and experiences of those who visit them. Legitimization comes by way of displaying a certain discourse, whose defined spaces guide the visitor through the museum. Several museum studies have highlighted that "museums are being perceived  as places for defining who people are and how they should act and as places for challenging these definitions."[11]

Elite notions of art, collections and display, and the ability of the rural people to locate them in their own contexts appear totally divergent. For example, a terracotta figure is imbued with magical qualities which get activated through touch, worship, propitiation and address, whereas for the collector/curator, the same piece gets subsumed under a display parameter, which actually reduces the accessibility of the object for the above mentioned purposes, but increases its value while it reduces its touch. Hence the rural viewer is conditioned, controlled, and subsumed under the politico-social and economic power of the elite minority. This conception also successfully projects those who are within this inner circle, yet even those who are subordinated by it tend to treat this phenomenon naturally.

Over the years, the Mumbai's trajectory from an island archipelago to a city of British design and to the commercial pulse center of India has initiated a series of power relationships within which a core/periphery relationship defines the way those who visit the city find a space within its institutions. Cultural meanings elicited from museum collections get translated by rural viewers, not necessarily serving the traditional functions of  educating  and  informing .  In fact, the translation often creates new meanings.  Rural visitors position themselves within these paradigms accommodating thereby the shifts that modernity has brought about and these determine where they locate themselves. They do not recreate the past as much as they legitimize the present. The writer spent time with several groups over the last two years. The way they perceived the museum collections, connecting various exhibits as if forming within the precincts of the museum their own curatorial perspective, were often beyond the margins of the given trajectory. Some of the visiting groups spoken to had been politicized by non-governmental organisations working towards secularism.[12]  When discussing the exhibits, the first remark was that all gods were represented within the museum, implying that the museum was secular. They referred to sculptures of Hindu gods, Buddha, Islam and even drew my attention to Mughal miniatures on the nativity of Christ which had somehow not caught my attention before. Earlier I had noted the repulsion of some Andhra visitors to the juxtapositioning of the Hindu and Buddhist gods in adjacent spaces. Recently, one of the respondents of our survey was a small time tradeswoman who came to the museum in between workshifts.[13]  When asked what were the exhibits that she liked most, she promptly referred to the Chinese porcelains and began to describe them vividly. The most ardent Prince of Wales visitor I have met is a middle-aged Uttar Pradesh carpenter residing in suburban Mumbai. He has visited the museum about eight times and loves to contemplate the carved boxes located in the cabinets on the first floor. He feels very empowered by seeing specimens of his trade displayed in such a central locality.

The positions taken are based on observation of visitors, open ended interviews of both group and single visitors, observation of visitor movements, through the exhibition and understanding of certain uses of space and types of display or through casual conversations with visitors outside after they visited. According to social psychologist Robert Kelly who has been examining the status role of museums, a growing number of people who visit such institutions do so "to attain a state of having been there".[14]  My observations at the Prince of Wales Museum also highlight this aspect for to a large number of rural visitors information about the museum is established on the village/town travel grapevine and hence it becomes imperative to visit. Reactions to the exhibits are often very generally positive. Since the very idea of a museum has a class context attached to it, rural visitors dare not exclaim anything otherwise and prefix and suffix their visit/experience with very positive exclamations. Additional explorations of the museum space, however, provide other kinds of narratives which are discussed later in this article.

One of the galleries that elicited a very interested audience was the arms and armour gallery. This section exhibits various arms in their functional aspects as defensive and offensive weapons. Portraying Mughal weaponry, this section drew a large number of excited young and elderly male visitors who would spend a long time in static positions gazing at the exhibits in this gallery quite in contrast to the nearly continuous flow of movement in the Brahmanical gallery. There were life size casts of Akbar and Humayun which were easily appropriated and subsumed within the Maratha pantheon of heroes and were being interpreted to be Shivaji and Sambhaji. On several occasions even the security staff seemed to concur with this popular belief.  Visitors would excitedly nudge each other trying to glimpse the Maratha heroes inside the case and young boys made it a fetish to click photographs next to the armoured cast.

I had an interesting encounter on one of my museum visits. A group of Dalits had traveled ticketless from Dhulia on Ambedkar Jayanti and was found sitting crestfallen outside the museum gate huddled in a corner. They were grimy, with drawn faces and browned pyjama kurtas. There were also a handful of women in the motley group and the ages must have ranged from 25 to 50. They came up to me and upturned their kurta pockets, showed me the tear and told that they had been pick-pocketed enroute to Bombay. It seemed too preposterous to be true, but quite a number of them had slit pockets and the same story. They expressed a great amount of disgust for the city and its brutishness. It was a common refrain with the group. I asked them whether they would be visiting the museum. "Na," said one of them, "humne suna hai ki abhi museum mhe dhakne liak kuch bhi nahi raha hai!" ("No, we have heard on the grapevine that now the museum does not have any collections worth seeing.")  Strangely, visitors who have been within never had a coinciding opinion.

One of the primary reasons why rural visitors throng to an urban museum is that it provides them an entry into urban space which also has a urban elite context to it, but at the same time provides them entry without barriers. In visiting the exhibits there is no class or caste taboo, something which is not really the case with rural places of visit like the temple or the mela where entry does not in any way mean erasure of a caste and class identity. S. K. Thorat s paper provides the necessary explanation:

An untouchable child particularly in a village is subjected to a stigmatized identity from the time he can begin to walk and to touch the things and people. When he innocently enters the village temple or a caste Hindu household, or touches someone, he is reprimanded either by his parents or by caste Hindus. Although he would have been identified even earlier as a child of an untouchable father, this would not have affected his thinking process directly. It is when he begins to walk independently, and when the play of his own will takes him to other people and things, that he experiences a stigmatized identity personally; and this makes an impression subtle and indirect, upon his thinking process. This is also the period when his caste-mates and family members or the caste Hindus begin to make him aware of the particular limits to the range of his social contacts.[16]

In a sense, entry into the museum which an elite construct helps non-elites escape the defining order of Indian caste society. Groups that came on Ambedkar Jayanti, including  many of the all male groups between the ages of 22- 30 years, made it a ritual to have their photographs taken with any international visitor of the museum.[17]  Despite language barriers, it was amazing how they communicated. The photograph would be taken singly but posed for in very 'hail-fellow-well-met' terms, arms entwined around the international visitors. Many of these young men who were in groups came from Dhulia, Nanded, Nagpur, hailing from Mahar, Chamar and the Mang backgrounds, but were now in bottom-level urban employments as rickshaw-drivers, ticket-sellers in the black-market, soda fountain and ice-golla cart-stall owners.

It is important to mention here that ticketless rail travel from rural point to Mumbai is almost a precondition on Ambedkar Jayanti for the Ambedkerites and usually the compartments in which they travel become a scene of boisterous militancy. None of those traits are displayed at the museum, even though almost every one of them visits the museum. These reactions posed a series of  interesting questions: Were museums perceived as class constructs?  Did rural visitors then find themselves impinging on space whose sanctity had to be safeguarded?  Did this impinge on their own identity as visitors? Was the museum treated as sacred space?  Did this feeling of sanctity arise from fear or from the consciousness of their own identity?[18]

The responses of viewers were very much determined by the background of the visitors. On an average each exhibit did not receive an average viewing time of more than four seconds. The Dalit visitors concentrated on viewing the gods in the Buddhist gallery, but would hurriedly run through the adjacent Brahmanical gallery. Visiting the museum in families, many of the northern women did not even raise the pallav of their saris to glance beyond their sequestered bodies. Obediently they followed their husbands. Some women would touch the exhibits of popular gods like Ganesha, Shiva or Vishnu or even Nandi and perform the regular obeisance providing a very good example of the fact that not everybody responds to museum objects as is commonly understood. And as Stephen Weil has pointed out: among those who do, not everybody understands the objects as saying the same thing.[19]

Notes