South Asian religious objects and images, from deity representations to sacred manuscripts, ritual paraphernalia, and domestic shrines, undergo complex transformations when displayed in museums and temples. This paper explores how these objects, once embedded in ritualistic and devotional contexts, are repositioned within secular museum display frameworks, creating new layers of meaning that oscillate between their religious, aesthetic and historical significances. Engaging with theories of materiality, affect, and visual culture, this research interrogates the entanglements of institutional authority, embodied practices, and object agency in shaping contemporary engagements with South Asian material culture.
This research builds upon a growing body of scholarship that critically examines the representation and agency of religious material culture. The study engages with key contributions in material religion, including Birgit Meyer’s (2010) work on the sensory and affective dimensions of religious objects and David Morgan’s (2012) analysis of visual piety and material devotion. The study also foregrounds Crispin Paine’s (2013) examination of religious objects in museums, which critiques the decontextualizing tendencies of the musuem display. In the field of South Asian studies, Richard Davis (1997) explores the mutability of Hindu images, emphasizing their transition between sacred, political, and economic roles, while Saloni Mathur (2007) interrogates the postcolonial legacies of South Asian art in Western museums. Building upon these insights, this study investigates how South Asian objects navigate multiple epistemological frameworks as they move between museum and temple contexts. Additionally, recent debates in postcolonial museology and restitution, particularly those advanced by Bénédicte Savoy (2018) and Dan Hicks (2020), provide critical contexts for understanding the politics of acquisition and curatorial authority in shaping contemporary museum practices.
One key dimension of this study is the way in which South Asian objects are curated and framed in museum spaces. In British institutions such as the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Asian objects are positioned within art-historical and ethnographic discourses that often foreground their craftsmanship and cultural provenance while rendering their ritual efficacy latent or absent. This art historical and historicized framing contrasts with the active devotional engagement these objects invite in their originating religious spaces. Conversely, diasporic temple reliquaries and curated sacred spaces selectively deploy museum display techniques, negotiating curatorial imperatives while maintaining the ritual agency of these objects.
The concept of decontextualization is pivotal to understanding the transformations that South Asian objects undergo in museum settings. Stripped of their embedded ritual and performative contexts, these objects are reclassified within secular taxonomies of heritage and art. In doing so, they shift from being active participants in religious praxis to passive artifacts of cultural memory. However, visitor interactions with these objects often subvert institutional frameworks. Acts of veneration, such as darśana (visual communion with the divine) and ritualized gestures, take place even in museum settings, where visitors respond to deity images with reverence that defies the secular intent of the display.
On the other hand, religious institutions and community spaces within the South Asian diaspora strategically appropriate curatorial methodologies to construct visually coherent and pedagogically oriented sacred displays. Swaminarayan temples, Sikh gurdwaras, and Buddhist viharas in the UK integrate conservationist and didactic strategies to enhance the accessibility of their ritual objects while preserving their sacrality. These displays create a blurred mode of representation, blending curatorial technique with religious reverence, challenging distinctions between the exhibition and the devotional. Such an approach raises fundamental questions about the liminality of these objects and their ability to traverse and redefine spatial and epistemic categories.
Institutional authority plays a critical role in shaping the narratives of South Asian objects. Museums, as custodians of material culture, deploy systems of classification that privilege art-historical and ethnographic understanding over theological interpretation. The politics of acquisition, the colonial histories of South Asian material culture, and the ongoing debates around restitution all play into how these objects are perceived and engaged with in the present. At the same time, religious institutions exercise their own modes of authority, often emphasizing authenticity grounded in lineage, textual tradition, and ritual practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in UK-based South Asian religious sites and museum collections, this research examines how diverse audiences interact with these objects. By documenting affective and embodied engagements, such as prostration before images of deities in museums or tactile devotion in temple reliquaries, this study foregrounds the ways in which objects resist their museological containment and retain their capacity to elicit devotional subjectivities. Such moments of encounter highlight the porous boundaries between the secular and the sacred, complicating rigid museological distinctions between viewing and worshipping.
Ultimately, this paper argues that South Asian objects are not passive entities conforming to their institutional placements but are dynamic actors that shape and disrupt their spatial and epistemological environments. By unsettling binary distinctions between sacred and secular, religious and artistic, devotional and curatorial, these objects challenge dominant paradigms of representation.
This research interrogates the shifting semiotics of South Asian religious objects and images as they traverse museum and temple spaces in the UK. It critically examines the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization that shape the reception and interpretation of these objects. While museums position South Asian material culture within taxonomies of art and heritage, temple reliquaries and community spaces engage in their own acts of curatorial framing, embedding objects within devotional and ritualistic contexts. The paper explores how South Asian visuality is negotiated in these spaces, how institutional practices mediate religious materiality, and how objects maintain their agency despite secularized modes of representation. By foregrounding visitor engagement and institutional responses, this research reveals the contested nature of South Asian objects in contemporary diasporic settings, where the tensions between veneration, preservation, and public display continue to challenge rigid binaries of the sacred and the secular.