Mysore's Wembley? The Dasara Exhibition's Imagined Economies

Abstract

AbstractMost scholarly works on exhibitionary practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have focused on the meaning and importance of display, and the cultural bases, and indeed biases, that supported various inclusions and exclusions. The exhibition has usually formed part of a larger narrative of new rituals that were enacted in the modern period to serve, variously, imperial, market or patriotic objectives. Can the persistence with which the Princely Mysore state organized its Dasara Exhibition from 1907 until well after independence be understood solely within these frames? In both its choice of location and its timing, the Dasara Exhibition was organized with dogged insistence, despite its obvious failures. This can only be understood in relation to the larger changes that were envisaged for the economy of the region, as the state attempted to build a supplement, even an alternative, to the princely splendour and pomp that was on conspicuous display. This paper looks at the subtle changes and shifts that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century in exhibitionary practices as they related to both real and envisaged changes within the economy that the Mysore bureaucracy was obliged to bring into being.