Comparing the ‘4 Cs’: Buddhism in three kinds of Museums

The contribution of the early Buddhist material evidence in the reconstruction of Buddhism’s growth and the subsequent historical developments has been so significant that it allowed Gregory Schopen to revolutionize the study of Buddhism, by proposing through his meticulous study of inscriptions that what was prescribed in the texts, was not always in praxis. For instance, he shows that the monks and nuns were actively engaged in making donations. Already for A.K. Coomaraswamy, the material evidence had provided a sturdy foundation to push back against some of the widely popular colonial ideals and perceptions about Indian Art in the early twentieth century. These western ideas propounded by the likes of Alfred Foucher and Albert Grünwedel claimed that Indian Art was not only as derivative and decadent but also that Indian artists were ‘unoriginal’ and ‘dependent’. Busting these claims primarily with evidence from Mathura, Coomaraswamy laid the groundwork for more elaborate and weighty scholarship on Buddhist visual and material culture such as that of Robert DeCaroli, Vidya Dehejia, Vincent Tournier, and others. Today, big repositories of these material sources are housed in various museums around the world, giving these institutions the agency to participate in the narrative construction and ‘reception history’ of Buddhism, primarily in countries that do not have an active and/or continuous living tradition of Buddhism.

This paper argues that museums play a major role in the historical conjecture and ‘reception history’ of Buddhism based on the different combinations of the four factors that I call the ‘4 Cs’- Collection, Capital, Curation and Crowd. I apply this framework to the three different kinds of museums in my study namely, universal survey museums, national museums and site-museums, with the Met, the National Museum in Delhi and the state Museum of Mathura exemplifying each of the three kinds, respectively. The analysis of the varying combinations of the 4 Cs aids the examination of the representation of Buddhism and the narratives these different kinds of the same institution build about this religion and its history.

My first case is that of ‘universal survey museums’ as described by Carol Duncan and A. Wallach, exemplified by the Met Museum in New York. I build on their argument that the museums select and arrange works of art within a sequence of spaces and this totality of art and architectural form organizes the visitor’s experience as a script organizes a performance, almost like a religious ritual in both form and content. Further, individuals respond in different ways according to their education, culture and class. I will show that through the specific combination of the 4 Cs, where ‘capital’ and ‘curation’ take precedence, the Met builds a certain narrative about early Buddhism that works in tandem with Ann Gleig’s hypothesis that the Buddhism that emerged in the USA is a new spirituality that focused more on the individual meditative practice as opposed to seeing Buddhism as a system of rituals, beliefs and religious actors.

My second case narrows in on the National Museum in New Delhi which is to be demolished by the end of this year, and has undergone dynamic changes in the last decade under the new far-right regime. This section will have two points of focus: first, I will undertake a theoretical discussion based on the arguments of Bernard Cohn and Partha Mitter about the ‘core and periphery’ with regard to the colonizer and colony, as well as the analyses of Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Kavita Singh about ‘national museums’. While Guha focuses on the ‘national’ with the regard to the institution to discuss the nationalist agenda it serves, Singh highlights how the institution codifies the India Art history canon, but relapsing to the western categories of what constitutes ‘fine arts’, as instead of viewing the objects in situ, Indian Art History presents the architectural fragment as sculpture, and the detached manuscript folio as painting, in an approximation of a western model of these arts. I will then move on to discuss the developments in the recent past stemming from political changes, to show how narratives are constructed, re-constructed and at times manufactured, based on who controls the ‘capital’ and consequently the ‘story’. The second aspect will focus on the changing structures of the ‘prayer hall’ in the museum that houses the relics of the Buddha discovered from Kapilavastu in North India, in order to accommodate the steady growth of mostly non-Indian worshippers who visit to pay homage to the bodily remains of the Buddha. Focusing on ‘crowd’ as an important factor in this case, I will discuss the participation of the Neo-Buddhists and Ambedkarites who have recently joined the bandwagon of worshippers over the last few years, primarily on the occasion of Buddha Purnima.

My last case is that of site-museums that emerged during the British colonial rule in India under vice-regal Lord Curzon, where objects found at archaeological sites were displayed in the provenance of the find spot and an attempt was made to study these ‘artefacts’ in their respective socio-political contexts. I focus on the state museum of Mathura founded by F.S. Growse in 1874, that has one of the richest collections of Indian Art right from the Harappan period till the post-Gupta period (roughly 9th-10th century) but falls behind with regard to all the other three factors on the ‘4 Cs’ scale, with the lack of a ‘curator’ being the most important aspect of my discussion. The case of the Mathura Museum will serve as a representative of other state museums across India such as those in Nalanda and Lucknow (which is inside the city zoo), that share a similar plight despite the richness of their collections. This case will particularly discuss how Buddhism is made accessible to the native population who has by and large not forgotten, but has never known Buddhism to be distinct from present-day Hinduism.