Museum as metaphor — A way of seeing the nation

When the National Museum with a small collection of a 1,000 exhibits was shifted from Rashtrapati Bhavan to Delhi’s Janpath (road of the people) in 1960, the idea was to make it more accessible to ordinary Indians so that they could take pride and pleasure in these objects and, more importantly, consider them their own. Unfortunately, in these 37 years the road of the people never reached the National Museum in any real sense of the term.

To look at history and construct it through material evidence at hand is necessarily a modern phenomenon. Such a gaze needs a level of self-consciousness, a sense of community and nationhood, that societies of the past lacked. Seeing is knowing. As British aesthetician John Berger once argued, seeing comes before words in human development. “A child looks and recognises before it speaks”. He goes on to argue that the act of seeing is a political act in that it is a way of understanding past times through a present reality. Something else also happens when people in an urban context view the art and artefacts of the past. From isolated individuals, they become a community of viewers relating to collective symbols, myths and memories, which a national museum at its best is a repository of.

Of course, the relationship between people and their museums is not an unproblematic one. An interesting piece of research conducted by Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, L’Amor de l’Art, in the France of the late 1960s, revealed that the working classes among the French viewed art galleries as houses of holy relics that belonged to other people, people who were famous, richer and more powerful than them. The same study also showed that the proportion of visitors to an art museum rose according to their educational levels. Only a negligible number of the uneducated considered it worth their while to visit galleries.

Such studies have not been conducted for Delhi’s National Museum, but chances of sighting a Haryana farm worker or a wage earner from Kanpur in its precincts are obviously remote. As a security guard at the Museum, when questioned about the number of visitors who came there put it: “Most Indians don’t have the time, they are more bothered about their rozi roti to come to places like this.” According to his perception, museums are good and useful institutions — to attract foreigners and help the country’s beleaguered Tourist Board.

We need the tourists, but getting them to see the wonder that was India is surely not the primary objective of a national museum. Even given the constraints that Bourdieu and Darbal spoke about, surely there should have been more than that miserable dribble of visitors that wound its way through the museum’s galleries last year? Can’t there be new ways of reading old objects and relating them to ordinary people’s lives? A dull school teacher can destroy the love of history in any student. In the same way, an uninformed and unimaginative administration can all but kill a museum.One just has to compare the funerary air encapsulating our National Museum with the scene outside New York’s Metropolitan or London’s British Museum on a typical day. Banners announcing new exhibitions flutter in the breeze, people flock around these imposing buildings as if to a fair. There’s an involvement here, a constant attempt to animate history and present a moveable feast of ideas the whole year round.

In contrast, the last time a mouse stirred in Delhi’s National Museum was in February, when the British Queen deigned to share with us her personal collection of the imperial record of Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan — the Padshahnama. It was part of Britain’s tribute to 50 years of Indian independence. The Padshahnama came, drew a fair degree of public attention, and went. But the tribute the nation owed to itself is still to come. In mid-August, when the whole world will be looking at India as it completes half a century, the National Museum will be staging an exhibition from Greece. Yet, with its estimated 75,000 of outstanding specimens of Indian art — Mauryan, Mughal, Pahari, Malwa, Bundi, Kota — it could have, with some informed curating, staged several shows of the Padshahnama kind.

Something is dreadfully wrong somewhere when a museum that carries the pre-fix of “national” to its name, does not have an up-to-date catalogue; has a director-general on an extension posting; curators who are for the most part idle and a bureaucracy that just does not want to relegate control over it for the pickings, like foreign trips, that it yields. Only around a quarter of the museum’s objects are photo-documented, which means that if anything is found missing there’s precious little that can be done about it. The state of this institution is an accurate comment on our cavalier approach to art and culture.

“Burn the museums!” In 1909, Italian futurists, anxious to start art on a clean slate, made this declaration in their manifesto. Perhaps we should adopt it as our 50th anniversary message. Burn the museums, or make it relevant to our lives.