In my grandmother’s drawing room, there was a curio cabinet with fragile glass doors that were always kept locked. Gazing into it was my favourite form of juvenile inaction. In it was a Naga doll in costume, its face frozen in a wizened grin. Somewhere between mirth and desperation, it was an expression I saw again, years later, on the face of a man being dragged into hell in a medieval frieze, reproduced on the cover of my student edition of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Next to the Naga doll in my grandma’s cabinet were two Cossack dancers with the wide-eyed look of fairytale simpletons. They seemed to have flopped in exhaustion after a vigorous bout of folk-dancing. To the Naga’s right was the Taj Mahal in a glass box and to the left of the Cossacks, an intricate ship in a tiny bottle.

I remember that cabinet, and the feeling of idiotizing wonder it would arouse in me, every time I find myself in a colonial museum in India — like the one on Chowringhee in Calcutta — with its stuffed animals, mummies, models, unnatural foetuses and dioramas of tribal life. In these great old houses of extinction, ‘life’ is precisely what such a medley of natural history, archaeology, ethnology and taxidermy is the opposite of. Once you have confronted the stare of a tribal elder, or of a ‘traditional’ weaver or potter, from your side of the glass, or contemplated an unborn hare-lip with the whiff of formaldehyde in your nose, then the surrounding din of visiting schoolchildren, or rural party cadre seeing the sights after a rally, feels oddly reassuring. The nation begins to live again.

Too small to be real and too large to be dolls, the men, women and children inside their glass-and-wood diorama boxes remain frozen in an atmosphere of pre-industrial and pre- consumerist purity. Their dusky worlds are punctuated, as we look, by the sarkari neons reflected on the glass, like meteors in a timeless sky. Nobody in that perfectly still world will ever wear a watch, hold a gun, look at a billboard or watch TV; no aircraft will streak across that trompe l’œil sky.

In India, there are dolls’ museums that tell stories from the epics, or panoramas that turn a city’s culture into a chamber of comical horrors (think of the singing, nodding Rabindranath in Calcutta’s Town Hall museum). There are tableaux depicting martyrs of the freedom movement in metro stations, or unity-in-diversity pageants in Republic Day parades on Rajpath. But these various kinds of display go back, almost seamlessly, to colonial pageantry or museums with their spectacles of native life and, through them, to the first imperial artists and photographers who tried to make sense of the new worlds, brave and not so brave, unfolding before their eyes and instruments. The zeal to document and preserve, and to ‘keep’ the nation’s archives, thus unites imperialist as well as welfarist, the 19th-century missionary and the modern policymaker, and becomes an essential part of what it means to have to improve, develop and, most crucially, govern.

Archives emerge out of our troubled relationships with knowledge, with power and with time, and there is no reason to assume that they are only made of old books and papers, potsherds and dinosaur bones. There is a newish word for the process by which lives lived in the present are turned into the stuff of the archive: ‘museumization’. It does to the English language what museums do to real people by putting them behind glass — turn what is alive and changing into the preserve of knowledge.