Reframing Museology in India: Ethnographic Museums and Plural Histories

ABSTRACT

This article examines how ethnographic museums in India are rethinking inherited museological frameworks shaped by colonial knowledge production and post‐independence nation‐building. Focusing on two self‐grown, non‐state institutions, the Arna–Jharna Museum in Rajasthan and the Amrapali Museum in Jaipur, it argues that ethnographic museology in India is increasingly emerging through practices that lie outside formal state mandates. Arna–Jharna articulates an ecological, community‐centered approach in which ordinary objects like brooms become entry points into lived social worlds and vernacular epistemologies, while Amrapali demonstrates how jewelry can be read ethnographically through documentation of craft genealogies, regional variation, and ritual use, even as objects circulate within commercial contexts. Read together, these case studies challenge rigid binaries between state and private museums, preservation and circulation, and scholarship and entrepreneurship. The article proposes that such museums constitute ethnographic interventions, generating context‐specific forms of knowledge production and rethinking representation and authority in postcolonial museum practice.