From Private to Public: The Movement of Pahari Paintings from Royal Collections to the Chandigarh Museum in Post-Independence India

The Government Museum and Art Gallery of Chandigarh was established to fill a cultural vacuum in post-partition Punjab. It received the seed of its collection from Lahore and the rest was amassed by M. S. Randhawa (1909–1986), an Indian Civil Service officer with a love for painting that at the time was identified as “Kangra” for its style and association with the eponymous region and kingdom. In the 1950s, he spent considerable time traveling in the western Himalayas, tracking down paintings and acquiring them for the museum. The many volumes of correspondence that he later bequeathed to the museum reveal how collections of early modern Pahari paintings were rapidly dispersing to form new collections elsewhere. Through the lens of the bureaucrat-collector Randhawa, this article sheds light on the complex history of collecting in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. In tracing the movement of paintings from private royal collections to a public government museum, the article approaches provenance as biography with the goal to contribute to collective efforts of mapping networks that connect collections and collectors.