In December, India and France quietly reached an agreement for France Muséums Développement (FMD) to assist develop the Yuga Yugeen Bharat Nationwide Museum in Delhi, which might change the present Nationwide Museum of India. The museum will span 1.67 million sq. ft throughout a number of present authorities buildings which shall be redeveloped for the brand new objective.
Introduced in 2023, the YYBNM is the eagerness venture of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been widely criticized for mainstreaming an exclusionary Hindu nationalism. As a part of his Hindutva political venture, Modi’s right-wing BJP authorities has sought to exclude or reduce the nation’s sizable minority communities from textbooks and history books, historical landmarks and tourist attractions, and even the official name of the state. Modi and the BJP usually use Bharat, a Sanskrit and Hindi phrase for India that many have mentioned reinforces Hindu supremacy.
The brand new museum’s identify makes use of Bharat as a substitute of India and interprets to “the museum of timeless and everlasting India.” The intention there was made clearer final month, when Indian information outlet the Wire published an investigation into the museum’s improvement. It uncovered an inside doc detailing plans for the museum that repeatedly refers to India as Bharat and which accommodates numerous historic inaccuracies and seemingly politically-motivated wordings for historic occasions. One historian, Supriya Varma, who has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru College, instructed the Wire that the doc contained “a really outdated framework of archaeology and historical past.” The descriptions of sure occasions, the Wire discovered, replicate Modi’s speeches, most notably referring to Twelfth-century migrations from Central Asia as “invasions.”
To this point FMD’s position in YYBNM’s improvement has been said to incorporate “a complete feasibility examine, encompassing museum case research, interpretive planning, and constructing programming.” The top of FMD, Hervé Barbaret, clarified to Le Monde this week that “the French convey the methodological dimension, feasibility research to the Indians, however we don’t intervene in the subject material and the selection of works.” However Barbaret’s—and by extension FMD’s—distancing from YYBNM’s content material just isn’t as absolving as he thinks. In any case, France has a latest historical past of offering legitimacy to museums in autocratic international locations by lending its international repute and its museums’ manufacturers.
In 2018, the nation signed a 10-year, €30 million ($32.4 million) per 12 months deal to assist Saudi Arabia develop AlUla, a desert area crammed with 30,000 historic websites. That venture, which has seen France aide within the improvement of luxurious lodging, fine-dining, and humanities and cultural exhibitions, is on the middle of Saudi Imaginative and prescient 2030, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al Sud’s mega-plan to modernize the dominion and draw worldwide vacationers. The Centre Pompidou, France’s nationwide museum of recent artwork, signed a separate settlement to develop a recent arts house in AlUla, as Devorah Lauter reported for Artwork in America two years in the past. The AlUla venture has drawn scrutiny for alleged graft and money laundering of concerned Saudi officers, to say nothing of the optics of signing a ten-year-deal with Salman’s repressive authorities the identical 12 months it murdered dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Return additional and there may be, after all, FMD’s landmark $1 billion, 30-year-agreement with the United Arab Emirates to develop and assist the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2007. (The settlement was prolonged in 2021 for a further ten years and $186 million.) Whereas much less instantly contentious, the deal has confronted criticism because of alleged labor abuses throughout development and, extra not too long ago, an investigation into antiquities acquisitions that led to charges in opposition to the Louvre’s former president and a curator for fraud and cash laundering.
The controversy round France’s take care of India might seem extra ambiguous to a Western viewers. Is it France’s concern if the YYBNM decides to painting a skewed historical past of India that privileges Hindu tradition and a Hindutva ideology, even when its position is restricted to “particular areas of technical collaboration,” because the Indian Ministry of Tradition specified by a December press launch?
Barbaret told Le Monde that he doesn’t suppose so. “At present, nothing leads us to suppose that Indians will wish to erase India’s Muslim or Buddhist previous or the British presence,” he mentioned.
However Barbaret’s optimism appears misplaced. The event of YYBNM, given the Wire’s reporting, aligns with Modi’s broader efforts to make use of museums and cultural establishments to recast nationwide id. Since 2016, the Nationwide Museum has been led by Buddha Rashmi Mani, greatest recognized for a 2003 archaeological survey that discovered a Tenth-century temple beneath the location of the Babri Mosque. That mosque was demolished by Hindu extremists in 1992, resulting in riots that killed over 2,000 individuals. The survey findings—disputed by many archaeologists—had been used to justify the development of a brand new Hindu temple. Final 12 months, forward of basic elections, Modi inaugurated the new temple constructed on the location. Assaults by Hindu nationalist mobs on Muslims and other minorities adopted.
The BJP has initiated a number of redevelopment initiatives in Delhi, demolishing the Corridor of Nations in 2017 and, in 2023, rebranding the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Society to the extra generic Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library Society. On the time, Indian opposition politician Jairam Ramesh wrote that the transfer was a part of Modi’s “single-point agenda of denying, distorting, defaming, and destroying” the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Republic of India’s first prime minister.
Whereas France’s position in YYBNM might seem to be the impartial software of technocratic experience, the context calls for scrutiny. Museums are an ideological battleground, as President Donald Trump has made so abundantly clear in latest months by way of government orders and funding cuts seemingly supposed to compel establishments to shut DEI places of work and to drop what he has known as “a divisive race-centered ideology.” Perhaps Trump’s subsequent transfer would be the institution of a model new nationwide community of museums together with his most popular ideology, with the help of France.
In any case, one of many first leaders to make a state visit to the White Home this 12 months was none apart from Modi. A pair weeks later, French President Emanuel Macron made a go to.
