ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes the space of the restored museum at Sanskar Kendra as a point of departure to understand the various narratives that feed into the contemporary representation of the city. The city museum is a powerful medium of civic aspiration and identity because Sanskar Kendra draws on some powerful tropes of identity and authority in popular nostalgia. The fragility of Sanskar Kendra's utopic production of itself as Ahmedabad is an interesting parallel to the tenuous representation of Ahmedabad as an important node in the network of global capital. The chapter attempts to use the museum's design choices to understand a particular kind of re-membering of Ahmedabad, one that draws on mythic fragments of the past, appeals to collective memory and props itself up on the idea of history as authenticity, an idea that stems from the contradictions of colonial modernity.
