No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying The Museum in South Asia

This volume brings together a range of essays that offer a new perspective on the dynamic history of the museum as a cultural institution in South Asia. It traces the museum from its origin as a tool of colonialism and adoption as a vehicle of sovereignty in the nationalist period, till its role in the present, as it reflects the fissured identities of the post-colonial period.

Introduction Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh. Part I: Inaugural Formations 1. The Transformation of Objects into Artifacts, Antiquities and Art in Nineteenth-century India Bernard Cohn 2. The Museum in the Colony: Collecting, Conserving, Classifying Tapati Guha-Thakurta 3. Staging Science Gyan Prakash Part II: National Re-orientations 4. The Museum is National Kavita Singh 5. Grace McCann Morley and the Display of Indian Modernity Kristy Phillips 6. Museumising Modern Art: National Gallery of Modern Art, the Indian Case-Study Vidya Shivadas Part III: Contemporary Engagements 7. Museums are good to Think: Heritage on View in India Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge 8. Recollecting the Rural in Suburban Chennai Mary Hancock 9. Reincarnations of the Museum: The Museum in an Age of Religious Revivalism Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh 10. Museum Watching (13 ethnographic portraits from the field). About the Editors. Notes on Contributors. Bibliography. Index

Saloni Mathur is Associate Professor at the Department of Art History at UCLA. Kavita Singh is Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University.