Opinion Express View on Parliament Museum row: It’s time to reimagine the Indian museum

The Parliament Museum upgrade could serve as a textbook case of all that is wrong with the building and upkeep of museums in India. The project was meant to modernise the museum and turn it into a showcase of India’s rich and rambunctious democratic experience. However, the private agency entrusted with the task has found the material provided by the “content creator”, National Museum Institute (NMI), under the Union Ministry of Culture, to be substandard. The history expert with the agency has alleged that Parliament Museum is being curated on the “basis of Wikipedia and questionable sources from the net rather than published sources in the libraries”. The NMI has rejected the charges, of course. But the content debate is only a subset in a dismal bigger picture — the unimaginative and unambitious manner in which a premier museum of “the mother of democracy”, to borrow PM Narendra Modi’s phrase, is being refurbished. The Parliament Museum should have been reimagined by the finest curators in India, and the world, and not be reduced to a site for ego battles and turf wars.

Unfortunately, most Indian museums are caught in a time warp and administered as government departments rather than sites of aesthetic or cultural experience. They are viewed mostly as spaces to store inert objects/artefacts than as learning centres where visitors can engage with art and history. The rare exceptions struggle to stay afloat amid the flotsam of mediocrity. Successive governments have to be blamed for this sorry state of affairs. Governments have been quick to own up, and even celebrate, the country’s cultural heritage, but they are often stingy in providing funds to institutions mandated with its upkeep. No effort has been made to nurture a cadre of officials literate in cultural matters or provide agency and autonomy to those with the skill sets to build and manage museums. This would, of course, require investment in education and training of personnel — from supervisory staff to institutional heads — if museums are to be revived.

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A museum is not merely an inventory, it’s the curator who breathes life into it. If curatorial vision is central to making the museum more than the building and contents, the institution will connect with its potential audience. The Parliament Museum calls for a curatorial imagination that can capture the vibrant spirit of Indian democracy and transmit it to its visitors. The current row over the upgrade is an opportunity to rescue it from being turned into a morgue of banal claims and context-free information.