The goal of this panel is to reignite conversations between museum professionals and scholars of religion, both of whom hold vested interest in religious objects, cultural authority, and the dissemination of public knowledge. We aim to interrogate and challenge value-laden categories such as public knowledge, heritage building, and cultural preservation in museums and other institutions that hold religious objects from South Asia. We ask of our individual collections, in what way is meaning conditioned by material assemblages and social infrastructures, and how both the historical trajectories and contemporary lives of objects become embedded within their custodianship. Finally, we invite our respondent and audience members to join us in reflecting on the sensorial roles of object displays and the complex, multi-layered performances of devotion and expertise that shape South Asian Religions in institutional collections.
Devotional textiles in traditional Indian artisanal forms can be considered as spiritual objects as well as embodiments of human labor and creativity that act as a culture’s heritage. In addition, our understanding of Indian textiles in both South Asian and Western collections can be enhanced by reflecting on the lives of artisans who made such cloths worn for religious rituals. As the weavers who made such cloths are long gone further context on these textiles is only possible by researching today’s practitioners who are inheritors of a craft and knowledge tradition. In light of my recent fieldwork on double and single-ikat Patola weaving in Gujarat, I approach making as arduous and repetitive physical labor. What do we learn about the spiritual attachments of such cloths when they are related to the conditions in which they are made and viewed as forms of work? What does devotional labor look like?
Discussions of South Asian religious objects in museums have often centered on relationships of power grounded in the colonial era. This has led to debates over recontextualizing religious objects, repatriation, and the politics of custodianship. A new development has been the rise of museums affiliated with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, a transnational organization tied to the Nizari Ismaili Muslim community. Over the past two centuries, Ismailis have transformed from a decentralized minority at the margins of Muslim identity to a central player in heritage building discourses in South Asia and beyond. My paper will consider three museums: the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the Aga Khan Centre Gallery in London, and the Humayun’s Tomb Interpretation Centre in Delhi. These spaces straddle secular public museum culture, goals of cultural diplomacy, and the curation of Islam from a particular religious standpoint. My paper will consider how narratives about Muslim heritage—and South Asian heritage—are constructed and contested through these museums and cultural preservation projects.
The Religionskundliche Sammlung (est. 1927) in Marburg, Germany houses the university’s special collection of religious objects that was conceived of and founded by German theologian and author of The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Otto took two trips to India under the auspices of his role as founding-director of the collection during which he acquired books, objects, and ideas for his Hinduism exhibit. In this presentation, I draw on exhibition photographs, a goddess painting, two statues of Hindu deities, and a series of Otto’s reports and receipts to analyze the role that the process of collecting plays in the formation of cultural history and the dissemination of religious education, especially with the aim of representing Indian Religions to European audiences.
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.