History of Art

Dr Natasha Eaton has recently been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize, 2009 - 2011.  This prestigious prize will make possible research for a series of articles and a book provisionally entitled Laboratories of Belonging:  Museums, locality, memory in South Asia, 1840 to the present.  This project examines the contested cultural, political and affective status of museums as jadhu ghur - (wonder house), educational sites, as virtual assemblages and as spaces for insurgency during states of emergency (Indian Uprising 1858, nationalist movement, 1905 -1947; Partition, 1947 - 1948; Indira Gandhi's declaration of emergency early 1970s; communalism 1990s to the present).  Critical issues to be addressed include the mimetic rivalry between India and Pakistan surrounding processes of memorialization, forgetting and becoming in relation to their struggle over select artifacts; colonial and Indian nationalist 'museums without walls' initiatives in West Bengal and the Andaman islands; the transference of governmental concepts of the museum to the cultural agenda of NGOs in contemporary Kiolkata and Mumbai.