Why should young people flock to our museums? In an age driven by technology and the internet, what would they seek to find in those big, forbidding spaces where homeless but rehabilitated objects often live out their lives without meaning and without context? On paper, the answer is simple. They may come to the museums to get a sense of history, as conveyed through a meaningful arrangement of a diverse range of objects.

This is the job that good curators get done. The past is not on candid camera but it keeps creating a never-ending assembly line of artefacts through which we try to have a stab at the palpable visuality of history, though at several removes. This is where the tactile, object-centric experience of a real museum comes in handy.

The great, so-called ‘encyclopedic’ or ‘universal’, museums of the world were, of course, products of the European Enlightenment, buttressed by the power of Empire to loot and reassemble (as in the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Hermitage) or the power of money to buy and dazzle (as in the Metropolitan Museum). Museums in India never had these global pretensions, so the leading ones have called themselves the ‘Indian’ Museum or the ‘National’ Museum, with all the complexities about their claims to represent ‘India’ or the ‘nation’ built into those nomenclatures. With unitary, fundamentalist definitions of India being aggressively propagated by the ruling regime, and with the lines between mythology and history getting increasingly blurred, museums in India face a vexing problem today. How do we make our museums inclusive and adequately reflective of our social diversity and historical complexities without being gobbled up by narrowly-defined, unilinear, homogenising, often State-sponsored official narratives of nationalism? What are the best curatorial strategies to deal with this?

At the very outset, it’s necessary to remember that museum collections often grow by means of war, conquest, loot, accident, and unexpected twists and turns of history and, as a result, they are unable to consistently reflect the linear continuity of historical time. The museum space, too, is a finite one, shaping curatorial strategies and the modalities of storytelling. In short, they are complicated spaces in which the visualisation of a textbook narrative of history is impossible. They should, therefore, adopt a different approach to the task of curating artefacts to allow visitors a proper engagement with the subject of history.

I think the best curatorial practice in this regard should focus on the provenance of museum artefacts. Generally, museums in India are woefully short of in-house research skills and experience in curation, an inadequacy especially visible in provenance research. The paucity of information about the chequered journeys of museum artefacts to their present homes is largely a colonial legacy of sketchy information. For instance, the 1925 Illustrated Catalogue of the Exhibits in the Victoria Memorial Hall’s initial collection — the work of Percy Brown, the museum’s first director, and carefully supervised by Lord Curzon — records only the immediate context of acquisitions, through purchase or gift, leaving out any trace of prior provenance. The largest painting in the VMH, a gigantic 24 ft by 17 ft oil on canvas titled The Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward VII) at Jaipur, 4th February 1876, was painted by Vassili Vereshchagin, a Russian war painter who visited India during 1874-76 and 1882-83 and did an exhibition in Vienna in 1881. The catalogue description simply says “presented (1905) by H.H. the Maharaja of Jaipur, who had purchased the picture (through Lord Curzon) from Mr Edward Malley, of New Haven, U.S.A.” The biography of the artefact, the many journeys it had obviously undertaken, and its different touchpoints with multiple themes of global history find no mention.

But a good curatorial strategy might tell a story — with the physical artefact in combination with text captions, images, and hyperlinked data for further exploration on digital devices, maps, timelines, and so on — that could present the visitor with several interconnected themes of global history to reflect on. For instance, a painter in Czarist Russia travelling to different parts of the world in the Age of Empire; European art markets and their connections with exhibitions (like the one in Vienna); Irish immigration to US, and stories like Malley’s (who owned a superstore in New Haven) about business prosperity; cultural capital acquired through acquisition of art and the demand in the Western world for artworks depicting Oriental pageantry; princely allegiance to the British and Curzon’s success in making such donations a test of loyalty to the Empire and so on. For the ordinary visitor, this may be a lot to chew on, but at least this is a way to highlight the multipolar lives of museum artefacts and their connectedness with a myriad streams of porous and permeable civilisations or cultures without privileging any particular historical narrative or any single ‘idea of India’.

Instead of adopting static and inflexible — indeed, often hardline — narratives of Indian history at either end of the ideological spectrum, curators of India’s history museums may find it sensible to research, develop, and disseminate textured stories about their artefacts, stories that follow them through the various touchpoints where they intersect with interconnected streams of human history and, certainly, through their many past lives and meanings before their landing in museums. The story of the famous ‘Didarganj Yakshi’ in the Bihar Museum is not limited to its antiquity and sculptural features and is incomplete without an account of its troubled journeys, from a village shrine to different museums in India and abroad. The story of the magnificent remains of the Bharhut stupa in the Indian Museum is incomplete without a reckoning of how its arrival in the erstwhile Imperial Museum was, in the words of Tapati Guha-Thakurta, the first act of “delegitimizing the claims of metropolitan museums in the West to a superior custody of such relics.” These textured tales, the so-called ‘object biographies’, can open windows for the modern museum visitor for a nuanced engagement with history. Given the research deficiencies across the museum landscape in the country, this is no doubt a tough ask. But one can hope that the gap can be bridged, at least partially, by a greater collaboration between museums and academia in the days to come.

Jayanta Sengupta is Director, Alipore Museum; jsengupt@gmail.com