‘Seeing’ in the museums of South Asia: exploring visitors’ gaze

Administrators and museum professionals in South Asia have often viewed visitors as passive, illiterate, or incapable of meaningful engagement, frequently characterising museums as 'Ajaib Ghars' (Houses of Wonder). Drawing on discussions such as Mark Elliott’s notion of 'side-effects' and Shaila Bhatti’s deployment of 'nazar'—an oblique, sensory, and culturally inflected mode of looking—this essay challenges such reductive perceptions by foregrounding vernacular and embedded practices of seeing in museums of South Asia. Further mobilising W. J. T. Mitchell’s conception of 'images as animate entities' and Karen Strassler’s idea of 'demanding images,' the essay proposes images as a method through which public perceptions of museums in South Asia can be both understood and critically examined. It does so by taking the Bihar Museum, one of the most ambitious museum projects of postcolonial India, as its site of analysis. Through this case, the essay develops five interpretive constructs—contemplation, intimacy, playfulness, remoteness, and indifference—which, while neither comprehensive nor fixed, together illuminate the dynamic and contested public character of the museum in the South Asian context.