Opening the Eyes of South Asian Museums: Making Sense of the Visitor Gaze

Since the introduction of museums in South Asia during the colonial period, there has been one troubling factor – the visitors. Colonial museum administrators/curators continuously failed to comprehend local visitor interpretations/interactions. This incomprehension led to visitors being variously classified as uneducated/illiterate; a stereotype that has stuck till today where the majority of visitors to museums are denigrated for their inappropriate behaviour and consumption of exhibits. This paper unpacks the misunderstood visitor experience through local visual practices, in particular the role of vision as embodied and enchanted rather than that pertaining to the modern gaze in the museum, in order to understand the South Asian museum experience. This re-assessment is grounded in a critical re-examination of South Asian vision, which so far has been singularly conceptualised as darshan, proposing instead the need for other scopic regimes to be investigated such as nazar. By applying this expanded view of the South Asian gaze to visitor interactions at the Lahore Museum, this paper aims to overcome the persisting bias against local visitors and suggest that their affective responses are not incongruous to the idea of the museum but relevant to contemporary museology.