To whomsoever it may belong

To whomsoever it may belong

Speculative Narratives for City Museums in India as a Way to Rethink Decolonial

Museological Processes

Museums across the western world are in a process of transformation of ‘decolonising themselves’. This process is time-consuming, complex and contested, as the very scope, mechanisms, and understanding of “decolonisation” continues to evolve and expand each day. In a post-colonial context like India, this process is still nascent, and finding ways and means to decolonise requires a deeper recognition of the problematics of inherited colonial models and their persistence.

While India does not lack city museums, they are often unpopular, neglected, underfunded, and constrained by outdated practices. Most significantly, they fail to imagine themselves as keepers of stories of the city, as living witnesses to the past, present, future and mythical, relegating themselves to a static time and a unilateral popular/ political narrative.

This gap highlights an opportunity to reimagine city museums as tools for both critiquing colonial legacies and constructing contextually relevant alternatives to institutional museum models.

This illustrated article for CAMOC's special on Decolonisation, thus proposes speculative narratives as a tool to think of city museums while raising critical questions on alienation, ownership, authorship, interpretation, absent narratives, and most of all, belonging.

As a point of reference for this exercise, it will present a case for the Museum of the City of Delhi. Perhaps when we dream of relevant alternatives, we will be able to design museums that resonate with India’s diverse identities, lived experiences, and cultural particularities—those which belong here, rather than to a European past.