Partition, Museums, and Identity
How critical is it to unpack the history of heritage institutions for our own practice? We will discuss examples from Indian Punjab, to explore a few different responses to the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, grounded in the institutional space of the museum. I will do this by examining what was collected, by whom, and why, and what interpretations and constructions of regional and national identity they enabled or made less possible.
Chair: Anu Shree Murali
Speaker: Mrinalini Venkateswaran, Deputy Director and Head of Collections, City Palace Museum Jaipur and Jaigarh; Honorary Research Associate, Royal Holloway, University of London
Mrinalini Venkateswaran was educated at M.S. University, Baroda (BA), and the Universities of Durham (MA) and Cambridge (PhD). She is a historian of modern South Asia with extensive experience in the Indian museum sector since 2006. Her research connects museums and modern South Asian history. Her most recent publication is Compelled to Collect: Museums and the Race for India's National Past, Permanent Black, 2025.