Nationalising heritage: A case study of the acquisition of artefacts for the national museum of India

ABSTRACT The idea of ‘national heritage’ is inseparable from the emergence of the nation-state, democracy, and citizenship. Nationalisation of heritage involved the nation stepping in on behalf of the cultural rights of citizens, and acquiring the ownership of material history from its previous domains of ownership such as monarchy, religion, and colonialism. This paper studies the process of the acquisition of objects for the National Museum of India, New Delhi in the decade that followed India's independence in 1947, in order to trace the varied ways in which a nascent nation-state worked out its equations with pre-existing centres of power. Relying mainly on the archive of the official documents pertaining to the process, this paper tries to understand how the then Government of India negotiated with the erstwhile princely rulers, provincial sentiments, and the British for the ownership of material history. The paper proposes that the project of the National Museum in India was, by extension, a project of nationhood.