a Museum of Dubious Splendors

The Museum of Dubious Splendors is half a storybook and half an exploration game. It is a collection of folklore and oral tales, punctuated by peculiar rooms, that you wander through. These tales, have been recreated from a collection of stories by Mir UmarHassan, a Gujarati poet whose works have proven notoriously difficult to translate because of the mellifluous use of Urdu and Hindi in his compositions. The collection, entitled 'in Dubious Splendor', was written (in Gujarati) in nineteen sixty two for the Malwa Chronicle, but the stories therein were mangled and edited without the author's permission prior to their publication in serialized form. This contested collection of stories, became momentarily infamous as the subject of the first court case to arbitrate authorial ownership in Independent India. Even today, despite countless restorative efforts by scholars, it cannot be said with with any certainty that the text that we used for this adaptation was the original as written by UmarHassan.