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Paper short abstract:

Alternative forms of curating Indian heritage material scrutinizes established institutions. Community-based online archives and collections are forms of heritage making from beyond the centre, which require Indian national institutions to reassess access policies and European ones to rethink their understanding of ethnographic collections.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to provide insight into alternative forms of heritage creation and curation that scrutinize established institutions. It argues on the basis of Indian community-based archives and collections, that the online dissemination of digital/digitized ones allows for alter-heritages: curated and circulating assemblies of meaningful references to the past, relevant for the present and shaping the future. These forms of archives and collections – not only preserved and decided upon by professional curators, but by active lay-persons and engaged citizens – are not only more successful in active memory making (through creating empathy at a distance). They also challenge established institutions within the country to follow suit with providing online access to cultural heritage. Furthermore, these online voices from non-professionals show a strong focus on heritage material and audiences from within the country and the subcontinent. This indicates that European museums and archives, housing large collections from South Asia and all over the world, might have to rethink their agenda of what ethnographic collections entail and what a decolonial agenda might mean. They might become less of a centre after all, while voices from the margins resituate themselves and (co-)constitute alternative heritage collections.