Thirteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Museums around the world are increasingly being innovatively designed and encouraging inclusivity. But in India, museums follow an age-old stamp model, choosing to primarily represent history and heritage of personalities and communities who have represented national interest at large. The vast, varied and rich heritage that the country offers is not often taken into consideration. Indian museums have failed to understand that they have the power to define and simulate diverse cultural aspects. By choosing to stick to a primordial formula, they do not address the aspects of ‘holistic representation’ and ‘inclusivity’. This results in creating an unintentional but clear divide, a divide that reflects the prevailing social stratification in the country. This further spills over to certain communities, regions and ethnicities being ignored as their path has been quite different from what a powerful few agree as the country’s path. Such selective curation in museums leaves the visitors with a narrow and unhealthy understanding of what is ‘worthy’ of representation and what is not. History and heritage deserves fair and equal representation, regardless of linguistic and geographical affiliations. Multicultural and multilingual being popular terms used to describe the country, the paper aims to understand why these aspects do not find a place in museums and analyse the reasoning behind this imbalance in representation. Additionally, it intends to research models that will encourage museums to be more inclusive in their exhibits and focus on how curation and curators can be better sensitised to ensure egalitarian representation in future museum designs.