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Abstract
This article expands the study of museums and public culture in postcolonial South Asia and the Global South through an exploration of non-state house museums in contemporary Nagaland, a state in north-east India that is Indigenously inhabited, predominantly Christian, and was home to an armed movement for political autonomy over 1953–97. It demonstrates that the political significance of the Naga house museum as a site of history, heritage and identity rendered invisible in state-funded exhibitionary arenas that display an essentialist image of Naga Indigeneity is not only anchored to the labour of non-state actors, but also to the open-ended and oscillating ties between ritual and secular frames of exhibition and reception that animate it within an expanded field of visual and exhibitionary cultures. In doing so, this article challenges the dominant European and North American imaginary of the historic house as the basis for normative understandings of the house museum. If canonical accounts of house museums focus on their ‘museumness’, this study seeks to foreground the ‘houseness’ of the house museum in postcolonial South Asia.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. On the Allied Forces victory over the Japanese forces in the erstwhile Naga Hills District, in what is remembered as the Battle of Kohima, see Fergal Keane, Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima (London: Harper Press, 2011).
2. I use the term Tribal since that is the preferred term of self-identification for Nagas. In doing so, I draw on the work of Naga scholars and scholars of Indigeneity in India who have tracked Adivasi and Tribal struggles for rights and recognition and against marginalisation by the Indian state: see, for instance, Bengt Karlsson and Tanka Subba, ‘Introduction’, in Indigeneity in India, ed. Bengt G. Karlsson and Tanka B. Subba (London: Kegan Paul, 2006): 1–17; Virginius Xaxa, ‘Tribes and Indian National Identity: Location of Exclusion and Marginality’, The Brown Journal of World Affairs 23, no. 1 (2016): 223–37; Daniel J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta, ‘Indigenous Pasts and the Politics of Belonging’, in Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi, ed. Daniel J Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta (London: Routledge, 2011): 1–13.
3. Svetlana Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991): 25–32; 27.
4. Richard Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997): 49.
5. Ibid.
6. Indirā Gāndhī Rāshṭrīya Mānava Saṅgrahālaya, Museums of Bhopal (Bhopal: Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, 2004).
7. For a recent study that makes an intervention in this gap in scholarship, see Alice Tilche, Adivasi Art and Activism: Curation in a Nationalist Age (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022).
8. With regard to my investment in ethnographic art history, I draw inspiration from the work of Nora A. Taylor: see, for instance, Nora A. Taylor, Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004).
9. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 149.
10. In using the term critical materialism, I draw inspiration from the work of Jessica Horton who has used it to engage seriously with the ideas of materiality that have informed the work of Indigenous artists in North America, which have historically been dismissed as the ‘beguiling belief of “others”’: Jessica Horton, ‘Ojibwa Tableaux Vivant: George Catlin, Robert Hule, and Transcultural Materialism’, Art History 39, no. 1 (2016): 124–51; 126.
11. Kajri Jain, ‘Gods in the Time of Automobility’, Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (2017): S13–S26; S13.
12. Elizabeth Harney, ‘The Densities of Modernism’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (2010): 475–504.
13. Anne Higonnet, ‘Introduction to A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift’, accessed February 16, 2024, https://projects.mcah.columbia.edu/hispanic/essays/a-museum-of-ones-own.php.
14. Patricia West, Domesticating History: Political Origins of America’s House-Museums (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999): 1.
15. Linda Young, Historic House Museums in the United States and the United Kingdom: A History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017): 2.
16. Anne Higonnet, ‘Museum Sight’, in Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millenium, ed. Andrew McClellan (Malden, MA, Blackwell Publications, 2003): 133–48.
17. Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, ‘Museums Are Good to Think: Heritage on View in India’, in No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia, ed. Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh (Delhi: Routledge, 2015): 176–79; on India’s economic reforms, see Akhil Gupta and K. Sivaramakrishnan, ed., The State in India after Liberalization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2011).
18. Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh, ‘Reincarnations of the Museum: The Museum in an Age of Religious Revivalism’, in No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia, ed. Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh (Delhi: Routledge, 2015): 203–18; 217.
19. Ibid.
20. Kajri Jain, ‘Gods in the Time of Automobility’, Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (2017): S22.
21. ABCC executive director, Kohima village, personal communication with author, 2014.
22. Ibid. Angami Nagas are one of the 17 officially recognised Tribal communities of Nagaland.
23. Ibid.
24. Arkotong Longkumer, ‘Spirits in a Material World: Mediation and Revitalization of Woodcarvings in a Naga Village’, Numen 65, nos. 5/6 (2018): 1–32; 6.
25. Appadurai and Breckenridge, ‘Museums’, 177.
26. Richard M. Eaton, ‘Comparative History as World History: Religious Conversion in Modern India’, Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 243–71; 246.
27. V.K. Nuh, personal communication with author, 2014.
28. For an overview of the history of the Naga nationalist movement, see Vibha Joshi, ‘The Micropolitics of a Borderland’, in Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia, ed. David E. Gellner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013): 163–93.
29. Examples include V.K. Nuh, Nagaland Church and Politics (Kohima: V. Nuh & Bro., 1986); V.K. Nuh, Struggle for Identity in North-East India: A Theological Response (Guwahati: Spectrum Publications, 2001); V.K. Nuh et al., The Naga Chronicle (New Delhi: Regency Publications, 2002).
30. V.K. Nuh, personal communication with author, 2014.
31. Esha Roy, ‘Explained: History of the Naga Flag and How Significant It Has Been Earlier and Now’, The Indian Express, November 2, 2019, accessed March 12, 2023,
32. Young, Historic House Museums, 10.
33. Ibid.
34. While the idea of a ‘rich man’s house’ bears an elitist and masculine connotation, its practice is also characterised by a qualified egalitarianism since it is conventionally meant to be built by any male member of the community who may have had a good agricultural harvest and has shared their good fortune by throwing a feast for the village. I want to thank Veswuzo Phesao, an artist, and Chakhesang Naga, for this information.
35. Anthea Butler, ‘Broken Faith’, Faith & Leadership, November 1, 2022, accessed February 16, 2023, https://faithandleadership.com/broken-faith.
36. V.K. Nuh, Nagaland Church; see also V.K. Nuh, In Search of Praxis Theology for the Nagas (New Delhi: Regency Publications, 2003).
37. On the Christian imperative to separate human subjects from material things, see Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
38. Nuh, Nagaland Church, 49.
39. Abraham Lotha, personal communication with author, 2014.
40. Lotha Nagas are one of Nagaland’s 17 officially recognised Tribal communities.
41. Young, Historic House Museums, 10.
42. Konyak Nagas are one of the 17 officially recognised Tribal communities of Nagaland.
43. Abraham Lotha, History of Naga Anthropology (1832–1947) (Dimapur: Chumpo Museum, 2007); Abraham Lotha, The Hornbill Spirit: Nagas Living Their Nationalism (Dimapur: Heritage Publishing House, 2016).
44. He published aspects of his doctoral research in Lotha, Hornbill Spirit.
45. Abraham Lotha, personal communication with author, 2014.
46. Ibid.
47. Longkumer, ‘Spirits’, 22–23.
48. Ibid.
49. In the research project from which this article is drawn, I explore artworks made by contemporary Naga artists that have raised regional anxieties amongst Baptist Christian audiences regarding the iconicity of the spirits they visualise.
50. Abraham Lotha, personal communication with author, 2014.
51. On the impact of the Second Vatican Council on other sites of cultural practice, see David Lehmann, Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1996).
52. Lotha, ‘In Search of the God of the Nagas’, in The Raging Mithun: Challenges of Naga Nationalism (Kohima: Barkweaver Publications, 2013): 75–80; 76.
53. Ibid.
54. Arkotong Longkumer and Dolly Kikon, ‘The Unfinished Business of Colonialism: Naga Ancestral Remains and the Healing of the Land’, Morung Express, July 1, 2022, accessed January 20, 2023, https://www.morungexpress.com/2nd-world-war-museum-kisama-preserving-treasures.
55. Mathur and Singh, ‘Reincarnations’, 204.
56. Prathama Banerjee, ‘Writing the Adivasi: Some Historiographical Notes’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 53, no. 1 (2016): 131–153; 146–47.
57. Julie Codell, ‘Ironies of Mimicry: The Art Collection of Sayaji Rao III Gaekwad, Maharaja of Baroda, and The Cultural Politics of Early Modern India’, Journal of the History of Collections 15, no. 1 (2003): 127–46.
58. For example, Sahapedia.org, ‘The City Palace Museum, Udaipur’, Museums of India, https://www.museumsofindia.org/museum/1812/the-city-palace-museum-udaipur, accessed February 2024.
59. Kajri Jain, ‘Gods’, S22.
60. Press Trust of India, ‘Kolkata House of Veteran Artist Jamini Roy to be Turned into Museum: DAG’, The Indian Express, March 30, 2023, accessed April 2, 2023, https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/art-and-culture/jamini-roy-kolkata-house-museum-dag-8528474/.
61. Kajri Jain, ‘Archive, Repertoire or Warehouse? Producers of Indian Popular Images as Stakeholders in a Virtual Database’, South Asian Visual Culture Series, no. 3 (Heidelberg: Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture, 2009): 7.
62. Ibid.