ABSTRACT
This chapter explains an inceptionary moment: the making of the institution of the museum in colonial India. It talks about another Ajaib Ghar in Calcutta, the first to be instituted in India in the seat of colonial power, conceived over time as an Imperial Museum that would hold a representative 'Indian' collection. The chapter also talks about the differences in form, functioning and location that separated a body from its metropolitan counterpart—never to be mistaken 'for its metropole, the British Museum', so as to foreground the issue of 'local knowledge'. Both the museum and archaeology arrive in the colony already well-formed as practices and disciplines, their objects and functions clearly set out. By the early 1880s, the museum authorities were pressing hard for making the ethnology and archaeology collections in Calcutta 'worthy of a Museum which claims to be Imperial'.
