RAI Lecture
Monday 27 March 2026, 5.00pm (BST)
Location: King’s College London, Bush House, Room South 4.04
Please register here to attend in Person
From magic to monumentality:
the ‘museum’ in today’s India
Speaker: Professor Deborah Swallow, CBE, former President RAI, former Director Courtauld Institute
In the later 20th century, some commentators talking about museums in India as inappropriate and irrelevant relics of the colonial past seemed to anticipate their further decline or possibly their disappearance from public view, like statues of British imperial leaders. Over the past couple of decades, Indian public perception of the museum has changed, particularly in the eyes of middle-class audiences. A wide-ranging research project led by Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh (no touching, no praying: the museum in south Asia, Routledge 2015) supported by a cohort of student researchers who carried out fieldwork across the country, drew attention to a fascinating and diverse pattern of responses to the past and innovative museum-like developments. Over the past decade, the pace of development has sped up with significant public and private funding. This lecture will explore these more recent developments, some of which were anticipated by Mathur and Singh, some not.