National Museum needs a change of scene

When tourists—international and local—make bucket lists for Paris, London and New York, the Louvre, the V&A and ‘The Met’, respectively, usually find a place. The only museums that regularly figure in tourists’ itinerary for Indian cities are probably the Calico Museum in Ahmedabad and Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad. However, the refurbished, reimagined and revitalised Bhau Daji Lad Museum has become a renewed attraction in Mumbai. Yet on International Museum Day, the focus was on the fate of the National Museum in New Delhi, whose building is slated to be demolished as part of the new Central Vista plan. The artefacts—only 4 percent of which are currently displayed (rather unimaginatively) in the gloomy galleries of the current building—will apparently be finally housed in the North and South Blocks on Raisina Hill once the ministries there move to new buildings on Rajpath. Not many know that the original plan by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker for New Delhi envisaged four institutions at the junction of Kingsway and Queensway—today Rajpath and Janpath. The Imperial Records Office (now National Archives), the Imperial Museum, the Imperial Library, and the Oriental Institute were to be the repository of British information on India. Only the first two materialised before the world wars and Independence. Though the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts is being posited as the third such institution, the land allotted was far more than the space earmarked for a museum by Lutyens and Baker: from Janpath to Mansingh Road. And the IGNCA building, always woefully underutilised and under-visited did not even come up on Janpath; it faces Mansingh Road. IGNCA is now slated to be relocated to another plot and the existing building demolished. The fourth corner was occupied by war-era ‘temporary’ barracks that became the ‘Maulana Azad Officers Mess till chunks of masonry began to fall. But instead of a museum, it was handed over to the Ministry of External Affairs. A Rs 220 crore new building, Jawaharlal Nehru Bhavan, came up there in 2012 but a year later the MEA declared it was too small for all its officers. Now it will make way for a building that will be able to house the entire ministry. When the National Museum was conceptualised, the collection was small, primarily the constituents of the first exhibition of Indian art at the Royal Academy in London in 1947-48. They could be housed at Rashtrapati Bhavan till the building on Janpath came up. As the collection is huge now, there are valid concerns about how artefacts will be stored in the period between the demolition of the existing museum building and its relocation to Raisina Hill. That the collection has not yet been catalogued is also being cited as one of the dangers of an interim storage move. Why that task has not been completed in 60 years should surely be probed too then, given that pilferage—being feared during the coming move—could well have already happened. The artefacts’ imminent shift to storage could be just what is needed to figure out what has already disappeared or been damaged—if not by whom. The shortcomings of the building are apparent: the halls are pokey and very dimly lit. It is not clear whether the architect, the CPWD’s GB Deolalikar (who also designed the Supreme Court and Udyog and Krishi Bhavans) was given a proper brief about what a museum building needs. Worse still, only part of his original design was built, although the museum had a grand opening in 1960. It has still not been completed although a second part was added in 1989. While it may be ironical that the first director of India’s National Museum’s was a foreigner, the acclaimed American museologist Dr Grace Morley, her undeniably sensible mantra that a museum must attract visitors has clearly not been followed by her successors. The National Museum lived up to its ‘national’ status, in terms of exciting, definitive exhibitions on a regular basis, spearheading advances in preserving and archiving and supporting research. Well researched, curated and mounted shows—even featuring parts of the National Museum’s own 200,000-strong collection—are few and far between; collectible publications are also negligible. Indeed major exhibitions there have been known to run out of even brochures, as happened when Pablo Picasso’s works were shown there in 2002, Russia’s Faberge eggs in 2008 and the Nizam of Hyderabad’s jewels in 2001, 2007 and 2019. It is also a sad but undeniable fact that the average Indian is not too interested in conventional museums either, with even the famed Madame Tussaud’s wax museum branch shutting shop in New Delhi 2021 only three years after its launch. Mother’s Wax Museum (named after St Teresa of Kolkata) in Rajarhat is still open, however, but just over 8 lakh people visited since it opened in November 2014 which is not exactly an impressive footfall statistic. The Louvre, as a benchmark, gets over 7 million visitors a year. In comparison, the National Museum in New Delhi and the Indian Museum in Kolkata (the largest and oldest in the India having been established in 1814) get roughly one-tenth of that figure. And a lot of those visitors are probably pressganged school students and underwhelmed foreign tourists who perhaps expected a Louvre-like experience. Our museums really have no pull-factor. General disinterest in museums must be why when five years ago the National Museum of Natural History in New Delhi was burnt to cinders along with its collection of antiquities including a 160 million-year-old dinosaur there was hardly a murmur. That it was housed in rented premises since 1972 and that the burnt out building is still being dismantled, much less rebuilt shows that lack of interest is not restricted to the public but the government too. Last year, before the pandemic changed life as we know it, the Prime Minister had named four heritage buildings in Kolkata—the Old Belvedere House, Currency Building, Metcalfe House and Victoria Memorial Hall—as the stars of a nationwide campaign to conserve art, culture and heritage. He also announced that India will soon have five ‘iconic’, international standard museums. It hardly caused any ripples of interest even in rarefied circles. In her 2020 Budget speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said five new museums would be set up at archaeological sites— Adichanallur in Tamil Nadu, Rakhigarhi in Haryana, Sibsagar in Assam, Dholavira in Gujarat, and Hastinapur in Uttar Pradesh—besides a tribal museum in Jharkhand, and an Indian Institute of Heritage and Conservation. She also mentioned that a Numismatics and Trade Museum would be located at the Old Mint building in Kolkata. Neither the prime minister’s museum promises nor the finance minister’s have exactly got Indians slavering in anticipation. And it is not difficult to understand why. Because by and large, the format of state-owned museums in India does not change, whether located in retrofitted old buildings or new ones. While some newer ones are ‘different’ like those in the British era barracks inside Red Fort, they are still a long way from becoming as popular as malls and multiplexes. A word now about the new Bihar Museum, a definite step up from the Patna Museum established in 1917. Given Bihar’s rich ancient heritage, the avant garde building designed by the Japanese firm Maki & Associates (that has designed a dozen museums worldwide) and a Mumbai-based firm has been a game-changing contrast. Moreover, this museum is hyper-interactive, and is currently hosting the first-ever Museum Biennale, as a physical-digital hybrid. That is surely the way ahead for museums in India as everywhere else in the world —providing a stimulating atmosphere to excite interest among the public about the contents and exhibitions of the institution. Whether the building’s style is modern or ‘heritage’, a museum’s permanent and special displays as well as its engagement with the public have to be dynamic, and its research, storage and archiving facilities have to be state-of-the-art. North and South Blocks and the Parliament building becoming part of a museum precinct is not a bad idea. The central secretariat buildings have the grand internal proportions that museum displays need, not unlike St Petersburg’s magnificent Winter Palace which is now the amazing Hermitage Museum or the Louvre which was a royal residence for centuries. They just need to be divested of the partitions and other accoutrements of sarkari office detritus. Artefacts, had they been sentient, would surely want a chance to be better displayed and appreciated—that is simply not happening in the current building. Thousands of Indians and foreigners already flock to Vijay Chowk for selfies with the central secretariat as a backdrop; getting them to spend time inside when the buildings become the National Museum is a pleasant challenge. The bottomline, of course, is that it must be well run and maintained this time. The author is a freelance writer