A Directory of Museums of Kerala | Book Publisher International

 As an international student in Kerala, India, one of the projects I worked on as part of my research mandate was to begin an exhaustive survey of Kerala museums. This project was inspired by a noticeable gap in the documentation of Kerala's museums. A survey study project that took place between 2015 and 2020 was an important aspect of my PhD research. This book's major substance, a Directory, is the result of that survey. When I first started my pilot research project, I rapidly realised that, while most publications about Kerala museums were useful, they fell short of my research needs, ostensibly because they had not been updated in a long time. Publications like Smt. Usha Agrawal's renowned guidebook "Museums of India" (2013) were among the few credible publications available when I began my studies in India. The definitive Handbook on the Museums of Kerala by Dr. S.B. Darsana (2009), which lists over 50 museums from all throughout Kerala, is one of the additional reference books on Kerala museums that I found useful to include. The far older publications released during India's early post-independence period are likewise noteworthy in this category. These include the Hudson and Nicholls (2014) directory, which features a few entries on Kerala museums, and the museologist Sri. Sivaramamurti's 1959 Directory of Indian Museums (1959). Markham and Hargreaves' study on Indian museums, published in 1936, is even older. Government papers and tourist guidebooks are some of the more recent works featuring coverage on Kerala museums. Miller's The Blue Book falls into this category (2012). This publication, a tour handbook, offers a non-academic perspective on what museums have to offer in Kerala's well-known tourist circuit. This directory is a valuable addition to the extensive literature on Kerala museums. In terms of scope and purpose, my work tries to fill in some of the gaps left by previous publications. At the time of my research, the publication included a count of the number of museums in various districts of Kerala. At the time of my Kerala museum mapping survey, the publication listed 183 museums in functioning. Two of the museums featured here are in Tamil Nadu, a neighbouring state. Despite being physically outside Kerala State, both museums, both located in the Padmanabhapuram Palace complex in Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, are considered Kerala museums, at least in this book. The logic behind this is that their historical roots and current administrative status bind them to Kerala. Of course, this isn't the end of the storey. Rather, it is, in my opinion, a little addition to the burgeoning corpus of writing on Kerala State museums.

Author(s) Details

Kioko Nzuki Mwania
Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT), India.

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