Museums engage in curatorial practices that generate social narratives of the past and the present. For the past decade, I have been studying Gandhi museums and the use of objects to produce public knowledge about Gandhi. This object-based telling of Gandhi's biography is an entangled with stories of the objects and the givers of those objects. How do such biographical museums expand and recreate our understanding and uses of the archive? This question is pertinent when the archive is open to public, avalable for interpretation and engagement. What are the stories people produce from this archive? As a cultural anthropologist and historian I bring a dual lens to the study of the museum as a public archive, and more specifically to Gandhi museums.
