Title: Cultures on tour: the roots and routes of a British museum exhibition on Assam

Authors: Georgina Pope

Addresses: King's College, University of London, London

Abstract: The 2016 British Museum 'Krishna in the Garden of Assam' exhibition was built around a nine-metre textile embellished with Hindu iconography known as the Vrindavani Vastra. As part of the exhibition programming, the museum hosted a 90-minute performance by eleven monks and artistes from northeast India, entitled Vrindavani Paal. This article analyses these two cultural productions - the textile and the dance - in relation to narratives of 'home'. Whilst both are represented as being 'from Assam' by museum narratives and in the literature surrounding Indian classical dance respectively, a close look at their histories and forms reveals a far more complex relationship to this northeast Indian state than is usually acknowledged. Bringing together diaspora theory of Paul Gilroy and James Clifford, and post-colonial dance scholarship by Margaret Walker and Davesh Soneji, the article de-constructs the narratives surrounding these 'Assamese' arts and examines the stories of travel and translation which have produced their current forms.¹ It explains how these stories are visibly manifest in the textile and the dance, and questions why such stories are side-lined in favour of originating myths.

Keywords: Vaishnavism; Assam; India; Tibet; classical dance; textile; Vrindavani Vastra; British Museum; Indian Council for Cultural Relations; ICCR; performance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTA.2018.096385

International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, 2018 Vol.6 No.4, pp.375 - 389

Received: 09 Dec 2017
Accepted: 17 May 2018
Published online: 27 Nov 2018 *

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