The Madhya Pradesh Tribal Museum in Bhopal, India

This article is about a pioneering institution in the Indian public museum landscape. The Madhya Pradesh (MP) Tribal Museum Bhopal, opened in 2013, is a success story situated in the middle of the country, far from metropolitan cities like New Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata and tourist destinations like Rajasthan or Agra, site of the Taj Mahal. The author presents an institutional profile of the museum based on its history, organizational and curatorial praxis, special characteristics and visitor statistics. The institution's pioneering character is seen not only at the curatorial level but also in its relationship with its visitors. The museum dispenses with the common practice of presenting original exhibits. Reproductions and recreations (replicas) are arranged through techniques of composition, disposition, enlargement and multiplication to form extensive installations that can be touched, operated or entered by visitors. Thus, the MP Tribal Museum presents a local alternative to the colonial idea of the museum, imported from Europe, which focuses on collection and originality. The empirical material shows that this approach creates a new, dynamic relationship between the museum and its visitors that is rarely found in public cultural institutions in India. The article uses the example of a special manifestation of visitor behaviour (selfies) to point out a valuable potential resource for the museum's marketing efforts in the form of its visitors, and draws attention to the possibility of an expansion of these approaches.