The Tale of Two Museums: Styles of Hindutva in New India

This paper focuses on the emergent aesthetic and political formation of the “caste-Hindu Museum” in the current moment of authoritarian capitalism in India. I examine two sites which have imagined themselves as museums: a) the Gobardhan Museum in the largest cow-shelter in Delhi, run by Hindutva activists and b) the museum of the Akhil Bharatiya Agarwal Sammelan (a nationwide association of baniyas) within a temple compound in the “holy” site of Agroha in Haryana. The Gobardhan Museum contains cow-dung artefacts made by a young “entrepreneur and cow-dung artist” while the Agarwal Museum memorializes “notable baniya men” in Indian history and politics. Through an ethnographic inquiry and visual analysis, I explore what Kajri Jain calls the “sensible infrastructure” of a “Hindu India” and  the meanings and motivations behind the museumization of the “sacred cow” and baniya caste pride, and the stakes of naming and creating them as museums.