Sita Reddy

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will re-examine Hyderabad’s public museums and archives as social institutions at a time of the bifurcation of the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh into two states, with Hyderabad as the capital of both for the decade 2014-2024. Sita Reddy is the Coordinator for this project. 

Sita Reddy is a writer, researcher, and curator based in Hyderabad. Her background informs her writing as both an academic and a museologist. She holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania as well as a master’s in museum studies. Her work spans a range of topics at the intersections of art, science and museums, from the visual histories of yoga and Ayurveda, to the decolonisation of museums and archival justice. Her project on decolonising India’s botanical art archives is a case in point; supported by IFA under the Arts Research programme in 2014-2015. It grew into MARG magazine’s first special issues on botanical art: The Weight of a Petal: Arts Botanica (2019). This in turn has had continuing afterlives both literally and curatorial. Sita is currently experimenting with historical fictions through indigenous retellings of botanical texts. Sita’s expertise and interest in history and museology make her a suitable Coordinator for this project.  

Titled Ajeebghars for Ajeeb Times: Refiguring a City’s Museums in the shadow of a Pandemic (A Proposal and a Manifesto for the Future!), the conceptual goal of this project will be to refigure and re-examine Hyderabad’s public museums and archives as social institutions at a particular historical moment - the bifurcation of the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh into two new states, with Hyderabad as the capital of both for the decade 2014-2024. Examining this moment of bifurcation as a historical catalyst that divides collections, the project will attempt a new collective biography of Hyderabad’s public museums that will address their institutional origins, collection histories and provenance dilemmas over conflicting histories, contested objects, and artefacts. This will be the first history of bifurcating public ajeebghars that focuses on division, dissent, and contestation as much as it does on the wonder evoked by their objects, holdings, and artworks. 

Why Hyderabad? The ‘bifurcation process’ in Hyderabad’s museum and archival institutions – a single city’s museological network – makes for a unique case study, what historians call a prosopography (collective biography). This gives the opportunity to delve into a deep history that stretches from the early 20th century to the current times; as well as a recent history of the 10-year bifurcation process. Museums, archives and monuments are sites of a city’s diverse and layered heritage. Taken together, they map a network of multi-sited ajeebghars tethered historically to the city but spread across it geographically in terms of sites of operation and practice. And yet, conventional accounts of Hyderabad’s museum history typically begin and end with examples drawing on the old definition of a 19th-century ajeebghar: Salar Jung Museum or the Nizam’s palace museums and princely collections of objects. Left out of this picture are state archives, print and manuscript collections, which are equally important repositories of Hyderabad’s heritage as well as memory of the ancient, recent, and now dividing past. Left out also is the fact that state bifurcation is an active agent in the creation of new museums, archives and collections; new centres of art and science; and new publics who will consume, support or challenge these institutions. 

The core focus of this project will be Hyderabad’s three key state museums – Telangana State Archives, State Archaeological Museum, and Oriental Manuscript Library. Also included will be two forgotten Hyderabad museums the first that highlights the city’s pioneering role in science and medicine - the only Health Museum in the country; and the ethnographic museum of tribal populations, the Tribal Museum. Both these were established shortly after Independence and seem to be on their last institutional legs. Sita will also include in her research, the four historical gardens/parks of the city which should be considered equally crucial as archival and museological institutions. Typically, natural history museums are categorised separately from art or history museums. In this case, the project will consider these public gardens as key botanical archives, which sit on a continuum between Hyderabad’s science museum and its open-air natural ‘maidans’ or ‘maidanams’. This is a time when all the city’s institutions are undergoing ‘bifurcation’ in some form, and this divided heritage is layering onto earlier archives of state formation. For instance, the formerly classified files at the National Archives on the violent ‘police action’ of 1948 which claimed a large number of Muslim victims, becomes critically important to examine Hyderabad’s bifurcation itself as a ‘museological event’. 

The outcomes of this project will be a symposium and a series of museum podcasts. The Project Coordinators’ deliverables to IFA with the final report will be audiovisual documentation of the symposium proceedings and copies of the podcasts. 

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Research programme in the manner in which it attempts to re-examine Hyderabad’s public museums and archives as social institutions at a critical historical moment in order to illuminate the not so visible histories. 

IFA will ensure that the project is implemented on time and the funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is complete and deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with the Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from BNP Paribas India.