“Room of the Nudes”: Indian Museum and the Practice of Anthropology in India

ABSTRACT Scholars of the history of anthropology in Western countries have called the museum “the institutional homeland” of the discipline. They have analyzed the prominent role played by museum collections in the development of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century. Art historians and historians of empire have extensively explored the Victorian preoccupation with collection, classification, conservation, and display in the context of India. But scholars of the history of anthropology have ignored the constitutive role of museum collections in the making of anthropology in India. This article fills that lacuna by scrutinizing the evolving relationship between the anthropological collection of the oldest and largest multidisciplinary encyclopedic museum of India and the science of humankind. It examines how the anthropological collection of the Indian Museum, amassed by colonial administrators over the nineteenth century, came to act as the exhibitionary incarnation of the theory of racial classification of the people of India, and it then unravels how the university‐based Indian anthropologists engaged with the same collection in the mid‐twentieth century. In so doing, it foregrounds how the relationship between the museum and the discipline was intertwined with the ideologies of colonialism and nationalism.