This article expands the study of museums and public culture in postcolonial South Asia and the Global South through an exploration of non-state house museums in contemporary Nagaland, a state in north-east India that is Indigenously inhabited, predominantly Christian, and was home to an armed movement for political autonomy over 1953–97. It demonstrates that the political significance of the Naga house museum as a site of history, heritage and identity rendered invisible in state-funded exhibitionary arenas that display an essentialist image of Naga Indigeneity is not only anchored to the labour of non-state actors, but also to the open-ended and oscillating ties between ritual and secular frames of exhibition and reception that animate it within an expanded field of visual and exhibitionary cultures. In doing so, this article challenges the dominant European and North American imaginary of the historic house as the basis for normative understandings of the house museum. If canonical accounts of house museums focus on their ‘museumness’, this study seeks to foreground the ‘houseness’ of the house museum in postcolonial South Asia.