Colonial Frames, “Native” Claims: The Jaipur Economic and Industrial Museum

Abstract

From its establishment in 1887, the Jaipur Museum was a locus of contestation between its principal patron, the Indian state of Jaipur, and the British government. The examination of narratives of contestation alongside the museum's architecture and display reveals a localized nineteenth-century museological practice that strategically operated from within the bureaucracies of colonial governance, yet destabilized the imperial aspirations of colonial museology. While museums as instruments of modern knowledge making have been seen by scholars as a failure, “native” participation in the nineteenth-century exhibitionary order can also be read as an indigenous reframing of modern museology in the colony.