Jesse Ransley (University of Southampton)

The identity politics of India are complex, multi-faceted and manifested in diverse ways. India’s museums are uniquely situated within this mass of cultural discourse as deliberate sites of cultural production where collective identities, (most often authorised, national versions), are articulated and maintained. In post-colonial India, they are also somewhat problematic institutions. Certainly, Ouzmann’s assertion that ‘archaeology and museology constantly balance their emancipatory potential against their legacies as colonial controlling processes’ (2006:269), has particular resonance at the Southern Naval Command Maritime Museum in Kerala (south-west India), where both the colonial legacies and, arguably, the emancipatory potential of the museum are bound up with a contemporary, nationalist, naval discourse.

Here representations of a pan-Indian maritime past embody the tensions and dichotomies of post-colonial, national identity. The Western Indian Ocean, maritime communication, trade and immigration, shipbuilding, naval warfare and European maritime colonisation are all drawn into an establishment meta-narrative, and representations of the recent and distant maritime past are used to both construct and bind the concepts of ‘Navy’ and ‘Nation’.

On the surface, this externalised, preserved ‘memory’ of an Indian maritime (and naval) past is singular and direct. However, it both utilises and plays against the local, geographically-particular sense of Keralan maritime identity, which has a more resilient and less contradictory, post-colonial narrative. So conversely, and despite being transparently-situated within a nationalist agenda, the museum also reflects, albeit disjointedly, the individuality and dynamism of local Keralan narratives. Thus, the museum is a site of interaction between collective and personal identities, where imagined national maritimity and modern politics meet, and fragmented, local maritime traditions become part of a cohesive, nation-building maritime past.

This paper will explore these interactions by highlighting the unresolved contradictions of the explicit ‘Navy and Nation’ discourse, its varied public and personal uses, and its relationship with the scattered Keralan narratives – arguing that, far from simply being a story of contemporary nationalist narratives appropriating local maritimity, these entangled maritime identities and uses of maritime heritage reflect the multivalent realities and tensions of modern Indian identity politics.