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Introduction
The State industries are all displayed as in a shop front on the occasion of the exhibition that is held in Mysore City every Dasara.1
To the holiday seekers [the Dasara Exhibition] is a sight, but to thousands of workers who gather from all parts of the state, from surrounding areas, it is a kind of university. It has come to be looked on by all India as its Wembley.2
As a triumphant metaphor of industrial strength and imperial power, the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 exerted extraordinary influence on the minds of the bureaucrats of Princely Mysore, who were obsessed with the idea of bringing a 'national' economy into being. The Mysore Dasara Exhibition, first held in 1888, then revived in the early twentieth century as an annual affair, with only a brief break, was envisaged, quite rightly, as a spectacle and an education, for what may have been amusement for the elite Indian or British visitor, but was indeed intended as an instruction for the masses. Organized in Mysore, a 'capital' city that had been turned into a museumized royal landscape, the two week annual exhibition showcased a shining economic future.3Appended to the annual Dasara festivities in Mysore city that ritually staged the splendours of a reconstituted 'sovereign', the exhibition held out the promise of another Mysore state that was being imagined in the administrative capital, Bangalore.4
A large and critical body of work on the cultural history and anthropology of exhibitions, both in imperialist and in colonized countries, has drawn attention to styles and practices that were derived from imperial/metropolitan locations, though with distinctly different effects. The Dasara Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition which began in 1907 was organized as part of the annual Dasara celebrations at Mysore palace, to which hundreds of visitors flocked, from within and outside the state. It would be easy to read the form and content of these exhibitions as simply another creative adaptation of emerging collection and pedagogic practices. Instead, this paper takes as a starting point the persistence with which these exhibitions were organized despite indications that they were neither meeting their economic goals nor reaching their intended audiences. Rather than...