ABSTRACT
One of the striking facts about complex societies such as India is that they have not surrendered learning principally to the formal institutions of schooling. As far as India is concerned, museums seem less a product of philanthropy and more a product of the conscious agenda of India’s British rulers, which led them to excavate, classify, catalogue, and display India’s artifactual past to itself. Museums are also a very complex part of the story of Western expansion since the sixteenth century, although they are now part of the cultural apparatus of most emergent nations. In the public cultures of nations such as India, both museums and tourism have an important domestic dimension, since they provide ways in which national populations can conceptualize their own diversity and reflect on their diverse cultural practices and histories. Both museums and travel in India today would be hard to imagine apart from a fairly elaborate media infrastructure.
