A Tibet Museum and a Himalayan Museum: comparing the politics of curation and museumisation

This essay explores the politics of curation and museumisation across two museum sites in India – the new Tibet Museum in Gangchen Kyishong, Dharamsala, and the Himalayan Tibet Museum in Darjeeling. It investigates the formative imperatives and epistemological assumptions that determine the 'types' of these two museums – the former as a site functioning as an extension of the TGiE, and the latter as a specifically Himalayan museum that remains mediated through its locus of production. I explore the processes through which the Dharamsala museum produces the idea of Tibetan identity and of an ideal exile subject, and the different axes along which such identity production hinges and unfurls. By comparison, the Darjeeling museum, I argue, does not serve any specific political function, and instead, draws upon and reinvents earlier British colonial anthropological models. It also seeks legitimacy from pre-colonial trans-Himalayan encounters and a set of living Buddhist practices across the Himalayas.